Hall and Oates meets King Crimson? Well, yeah: Daryl Hall has said he and Robert Fripp were trying to “take two soulful sounds from two different cultures, and put them together, and form a third kind of music.” And they did, as Daryl Hall’s initial solo album — released 35 years ago this month — began building a bridge between the long-established sound of progressive rock and the looming era of prog pop.
At the time, though, Sacred Songs seemed to many a confusing and fascinating mess – sometimes, as in this brilliantly offbeat Daryl Hall song, all at once.
“Babs and Babs” starts innocuously enough, with an urbane groove (provided in overdubs by the regular Hall and Oates touring band) and a knowing, street-wise lyric that recalls any number of the Daryl Hall’s other contemporary R&B updates. But then producer/guitarist Fripp begins pasting on a series of wow-man elements never dreamt of on a Hall and Oates-related release. (Well, with the possible exception of the unjustly overlooked Todd Rundgren-produced 1974 oddity War Babies.)
First, a jagged Fripp solo sparks this soaring, metronomic crescendo, which is then in turn subsumed by a turbulent ambience over the song’s middle. Hall returns with a more aggressive approach to the lyric, singing outside of his comfort zone, really letting himself go. At the dawn of a decade that will find him inhabiting a series of sleek MTV productions, Daryl Hall is pushed into a new, very real vulnerability.
Meanwhile, Hall’s song, now in a gorgeous, unflinching freefall, is surrounded by this sizzling swirl of reverb as “Babs and Babs” morphs into “Urban Landscape.” The resulting extended instrumental passage, as beautiful as it is surprising, finds Robert Fripp for the first time employing tape-loop technology that he dubbed Frippertronics.
“People have often asked me what that song is about, because it was called ‘Babs and Babs.’ It’s about the right and the left side of the brain. Babs and Babs are the two parts of the brain,” Daryl Hall remembers in the above video. “It was a very creative situation. Robert Fripp and I were really close friends at the time, and we got together and made an album very quickly.”
Along the way, Robert Fripp shoots Sacred Songs a couple of worlds away from familiar Hall and Oates favorites of the era like “Rich Girl.” “Oh,” Fripp once said, “what a sweet tension that was, over a sixteen-bar drum break on ‘Babs And Babs,’ a song of schizophrenia.”
Daryl Hall’s record company, of course, had no idea what to do with this — and sat on these recordings for three long years. Even by 1980, however, few had caught up to the inventive prog-pop pastiche found on Sacred Songs. But they would. Ask Trevor Horn.
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