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Music History<\/a><\/p>\n \n A series where artists share their musical firsts and lasts.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI began to grow my mustache the moment I graduated from school. It didn\u2019t take that long since I was a young, virile, and growing teenager.\u201d Over the course of his career, John Oates has released 18 studio albums as one half of the soulful pop-rock titans Hall & Oates, and today he\u2019ll bring his seventh solo album, Oates, into the universe. He has so many No. 1 songs with Daryl Hall<\/a>, in fact, that it takes him a few moments to remember them all. (Surprisingly, \u201cYou Make My Dreams<\/a>\u201d never ascended to the top.) And don\u2019t even get us started on his Hall of Fame\u2013worthy mustache. So what were some of the milestones that Oates experienced along the way? Let\u2019s find out \u2014 we can definitely go for that, especially since there\u2019s no more lawsuit<\/a>. <\/p>\n It was Ray Charles\u2019s Greatest Hits. It was probably the early \u201960s. I started buying singles way before I bought an album. I lived in a small town in Pennsylvania. There was only one record store in the adjacent town. In fact, it might have not even been a record store, it might\u2019ve been part of a Woolworths.<\/p>\n The first live music I ever heard was Bill Haley and the Comets in 1955 at Willow Grove Amusement Park, outside Philadelphia. My family had just moved us from New York, where I was born. As a little kid, we went to this amusement park and there was a band shell and they were playing. I had never heard live music before. I remember running down to the stage. It was life changing. The musician who was playing the big, upright bass rode it like a horse. He put it on the ground and it was like a rockabilly thing. I\u2019ll never forget that.<\/p>\n A guitar made by the company Sears Roebuck, which doesn\u2019t exist anymore. I still have it. It was an acoustic guitar. It wasn\u2019t very expensive. I only used it for a little while because I was really serious about music. My folks took me up to New York City and we went to 48th Street where all the music stores were back in the day, and we ended up buying another guitar.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n That\u2019s hard to remember because I was a little high. If I wasn\u2019t so high, I probably could remember. It might\u2019ve been Cream\u2019s \u201cSunshine of Your Love,\u201d because I had a black light in my room and the album cover actually glowed in the black light.<\/p>\n Oh, you mean the one I didn\u2019t read? Only the first of many. The first contract I signed was with my high-school band in 1967. We had saved up our money to make a record. We went to a little studio on North Broad Street in Philadelphia. We paid a hundred bucks or something like that to make a record. They cut it on a lathe in those days. It was a little plastic record. Then I went to a store on Chestnut Street called the Record Museum, which had a lot of old 45s and things like that. I literally walked in with this little record in my hand and said to the guy behind the counter, \u201cHey, we made a record. You want to hear it?\u201d The guy said, \u201cYeah, sure.\u201d I put it on the turntable and he said, \u201cHey, that\u2019s good. Come on back here.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos Getty Images\n <\/p>\n