I can’t owe for that! Oates’ cash shock
JOHN OATES, half of the superstar musical duo Hall & Oates, says that in 1987 he received a call from an accountant at their management office.
Oates (photo), now 70, went for a meeting and was bluntly told that he was broke — even after selling 80 million records and touring the world for two decades.
He says that although he owned two New York City apartments, a house in Connecticut, a condo in Aspen, a plane and a fleet of antique cars, all he could claim title to was the $50 in his wallet.
In his upcoming memoir “Change of Seasons,” the once-mustachioed musician blames ex-manager Tommy
Mottola. He’s not accusing the music industry honcho of cheating him and musical partner Daryl Hall; he just wishes that Mottola had told them that the increasingly lavish gifts and huge checks would come at a steep price.
“I just wish they’d warned us that the high life we were living would have financial consequences,” he writes. “We weren’t cheated; we were seduced.”
Mottola did not return a request for comment.
Eventually, the Philadelphia duo was able to recoup millions of dollars in royalties they had never received.
The “Private Eyes” singer also writes about shaving off his trademark ’stache while on tour in Tokyo in 1990.
Oates says he had a sudden epiphany to make a personal change to help usher in a new stage of his life. “No one will ever understand how much that mustache affected my life,” he writes. “It was so much a part of who I had become.”
After living for many years in the Village, Oates says his first marriage to a Ford model failed due to his roving eye.
“I should never have been married in the ’80s,” he writes. “She was a successful model and I was running around the world like I was single.”
He eventually moved to Aspen, where he became friendly with legendary journalist Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide in 2005.