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Get Some Oats

Mike Greenblatt, at Goldmine [Pg. 36 Vol. 40 No. 7 ] talks to John Oats about Hall of Fame and career and of course Todd gets a mention

GM: Then you go and turn around and work some hard rock with Todd Rundgren on your very next album, "War Babies" [1974].


JO: Here again, that's another trademark of our careers: We weren't afraid to experiment. If you take it in the context of the times, "Abandoned Luncheonette" wasn't really that successful. The hit on that album, "She's Gone," only went into the Top 20 or 30, I think. That album didn't really reinforce to either us or the record company that, "Hey, you guys should make 'Abandoned Luncheonette 2.'" There was no thinking on those terms. So, because of that fact, we had no reason to think that was our style or what we should be doing for the rest of our lives. So we said, "OK, we made a good record. A lot of people liked it. Let's do something different." I think if you take "Abandoned Luncheonette" and you take "War Babies" and you put them together, you'll see that it opened up a door for us to be able to do all sorts of things going forward. The music we made in the '80s was some combination of our experimental rock credibility, plus our R&B and folkie credibility that we could draw upon.
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