Over the course of recording John Oates’ new live project Another Good Road, each of his collaborators eventually departed — leaving him to finish with an old favorite, the old folk song “Stack O’ Lee.” Instead of providing Oates a treasured opportunity to reanimate one of his favorite blues songs, it turned into the most challenging element of the whole evening.
Oates, after putting everything he had into the performances, was simply exhausted.
“This was about 11:30 at night, and we had started at 10 in the morning,” Oates tells Chris Eppting on Stitcher. “My hands were shaking; they literally were shaking. I tried to play ‘Stack O’ Lee,’ which is a song that I can play in my sleep without even thinking about it, and I literally couldn’t play it. It was awful, and I got scared.”
Everything had led to this moment, a quiet reminder of John Oates’ roots. With the proper ending of Another Good Road hanging in the balance, he didn’t know how to go forward. “I kept trying, and I kept trying,” he says. “There’s nobody in the studio, except me and the engineer. I kept trying, and it wasn’t working. After this entire day, we’re going to get to the point where I’m playing the song by myself, and I can’t do it.”
The engineer (noting he’d been recording for some 11 hours) suggested a break, maybe an expresso. John Oates mulled that for a moment, and agreed — though he decided he’d need something a bit stronger, too. After 20 minutes or so, John Oates was ready to proceed with “Stack O’ Lee,” probably best known from the charttopping 1959 version by Lloyd Price. The song actually dates back to the early 1900s, however, and was memorably covered beginning in the 1920s by Mississippi John Hurt. That’s clearly Oates’ point of reference here.
“Seriously, we took a break. I had a double expresso, and I had a big shot of vodka,” Oates adds. “Then I went in there, and played the song straight through. I was on expresso and vodka. [Laughs.] That was the only way I could get through it!”
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