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Hall & Oates – I Can’t Go For That 
Nashville
(Rune Lindbaek Edit)

One of the greatest changes in music production during the 1970s was the availability and – to a lesser extent – the affordability of electronic technology.

While leftfield artists like Cabaret Voltaire or Human League were wholly devoted to tape loops and electronic instrumentation, some of these methods were increasingly seeping into pop music as the decade progressed. One of the first was Timmy Thomas’ ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’ which featured a bossa nova groove courtesy of the Lowrey organ. 

One of the earliest to receive widespread use was Roland’s CompuRhythm CR-78, which launched in 1978, the same year in which it appeared as the opening salvo to Blondie’s ‘Heart Of Glass’ while at the turn of the following decade it anchored the rhythm on ‘Enola Gay’, OMD’s first UK top ten hit. Arguably its greatest use, however, appears on ‘I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)’, which appeared on the Hall & Oates album, Private Eyes, their second self-produced record.

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What’s remarkable about the sound they achieved was how fat that rhythm sounded, in comparison to its relatively weedy core sound on the CR-78 (check it out: it’s the Rock 1 preset on the CompuRhythm). Somehow moulding an almost Teutonic feel to the rhythm to their dreamy vocals, aided by Hall’s Prophet 5, lent the song an almost ethereal air while rhythmically kicking like a mule. As one Creem magazine staffer put it at the time: “Why do I like the song ‘No Can Do’? Because it’s like…Kraftwerk.”

What was also remarkable about the song: it was also a huge R&B hit, too, unusual for a white act in a musical landscape that was (and still is deeply segregated). It made no one in both R&B and Hot 100. “It has more to do with people not really understanding where it’s coming from,” Hall told a magazine in 1981. “White people playing soul music is nothing new. There were just as many whites as blacks in the Philadelphia studios in the Gamble and Huff days, when we started working there.” In fact, Daryl Hall’s first session experience was playing for Kenny Gamble & The Romeos in 1970. Prior to this, the only R&B number one he’d experienced was Tavares’ reading of ‘She’s Gone’.

One of the earliest to receive widespread use was Roland’s CompuRhythm CR-78, which launched in 1978, the same year in which it appeared as the opening salvo to Blondie’s ‘Heart Of Glass’ while at the turn of the following decade it anchored the rhythm on ‘Enola Gay’, OMD’s first UK top ten hit. Arguably its greatest use, however, appears on ‘I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)’, which appeared on the Hall & Oates album, Private Eyes, their second self-produced record.

The song is credited to three writers, Hall, Oates and also Sara Allen, who collaborated on many of their songs (she was also the subject of their first big hit ‘Sara Smile’). “I wrote most of the lyrics,” said Hall. “And on this particular song used Sara and John as sounding boards. But they were there and throwing ideas out.” 

Over the years it’s been sampled heavily and covered numerous times, in various languages, though none of them come anywhere near to matching the simplicity, the beauty and the languorous rhythm of the original. 

Bill Brewster

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