Hall & Oates Explain Their 1973 Out-There Pop Video For She’s Gone

IN 1973, John Hall and Daryl Oates performed She’s Gone in a promotional video for their second album Abandoned Luncheonette.

The video is a little odd.

In 2009 Oates explained it:

Well, I’ll give you a little background about what happened with that “She’s Gone” thing. First of all, it was 1973. There was no MTV, there was no outlet for anything like this. You know, it might be one of the first music videos ever made. I really couldn’t say, honestly, but it definitely would be a contender. What happened was, we were asked to lip sync “She’s Gone” for a teenage TV dance show broadcast out of Atlantic City, New Jersey. And we really didn’t want to do that; we didn’t want to pretend to sing the song. It was supposed to be shot in a television studio in Philadelphia. So we thought, with the mindset that we were in at the time – and I won’t say more on that, either –

We showed up at the television studio with a chair from our living room. The woman who’s walking through the picture – that’s Sarah…
Oh, wow.

And the devil who comes through was our road manager at the time. And we brought Monopoly money, and those weird instruments, and they thought we were nuts. They really thought that. My sister directed that video.

They thought we were completely insane. They actually didn’t air it; they wouldn’t air it. But we had it this whole time, and eventually I leaked it out to the internet, ’cause I just thought the world should see it.