Daryl Hall's Robert Fripp collaboration finally sees the light of day

Daryl Hall : Babs And Bads

[Purchase]

In March of 1980 RCA Records finally released Sacred Songs, the album Daryl Hall (of Hall and Oates fame) recorded with King Crimson's Robert Fripp three years earlier. The album is considered part of a loose trilogy of Fripp productions, along with Fripp's 1979 album Exposure ( on which Hall sang) and Peter Gabriel's second album, Scratch. Why did it sit in the RCA vaults for so long? You can blame the record company which didn't believe the album --full of Frippertronics and other art rock explorations--was commercial enough.

Though after one listen to "Babs and Bads"  I'm convinced a cut down version would have received plenty of airplay.

Frustrated by record label politics, both Hall and Fripp made their displeasure known in interviews.

"Daryl is a remarkable singer," Fripp told  Best magazine's Jean-Gilles Blum in 1979. "It is too bad RCA is limiting the scope of his career. As for Hall and Oates, they are a very profitable group. They limit their format and possibilities on purpose as part of a commercial compromise they accept."

That's one of those statements that begins with a complement and ends with a knife stab. By '79 Fripp was also angry with Hall.

"When you get into a relationship or a collaboration with a musician, it's almost like a romantic relationship – and that's the best way I could put it. You get into somebody's heart. And Robert, I think, had visions that he was going to steal me away from John (Oates)," Hall told Pitchfork in 2007. "And I think that he thought that we were going to work together. That was never my intention, and because of all the difficulties we had, that was his response to all that. I understand where he's coming from. That was his way of spraying out his frustration."

Hall would say the Sacred Songs experience is why he fell out of love with the music business. But Hall and Oates were just getting ready to own the first half of the 1980's. With Voices, released that Summer, they would score four hits including the US#1 "Kiss On My List" and  the US#5 "You Make My Dreams". That album would spend 100 weeks in the Billboard 200, briefly lifting Sacred Songs up to #58.