Years before MTV started doing their thing, Daryl Hall & John Oats met up in a TV studio.  What happened next?  Well, John Oats recently told this story, for the first time, to Yahoo! Entertainment.  All credit to them (and John) for sharing it with us.

"It was pre-punk rock, actually, but yeah. I mean, we just thought it was the most hysterical thing we'd ever done. You have to put yourself in the context of the time. It was 1973. There was no MTV. There were really no music videos being played,” he begins. When Hall & Oates bristled at the notion of lip-synching one of their earliest hit singles, “She’s Gone,” for a local teen dance show in Atlantic City, they came up with another plan, enlisting the help of Oates’s sister. “One night I'm sitting in our apartment that we were sharing in New York City, with Daryl. And I said, ‘Let's just do something crazy. Let's take our furniture from our apartment.’ My sister was a film student at Temple University. The girl you see walking across the video is Sara [Allen, Hall’s girlfriend at the time] from ‘Sara Smile.’ And the guy in the devil suit is our tour manager, Randy Hoffman, who is now John Mellencamp’s tour manager.”

When the band and their misfit crew showed up to the TV set with their props and Halloween costumes, “They didn't know what to make of us,” Oates recalls. “Here's this 20-year-old girl who's a film student with a script that we had all written together. … She walks into the control room and they're like, ‘Oh, what is happening here?’ And she starts telling these guys what we're doing. ... I was wearing a rented penguin suit that had flippers instead of hands, and Daryl was wearing a black bathrobe. And we did the video and they hit the ceiling. They thought we were mocking them. They thought, who were these stupid young hippies who are doing this thing? And they refused to play [the video]. They did not play it on the show. And they called our record company and they said they were going to ban us from Philadelphia radio, they would never play us again: ‘Your careers are over!’ Oh, it was a big deal. Our record company was like, ‘What did you guys do here?’ And we were laughing all the way.”

John and Daryl managed to shoot the video in just one take before the plug was pulled — “They literally kicked us out of the television studio; they hated us!” — and the footage remained in a vault for years, even after Hall & Oates became MTV darlings with other videos that now seem quaint and lo-fi, like “Private Eyes,” but were slick for the time. “No one ever saw [the “She’s Gone” video] for the entire decade of the ‘70s. It wasn't until YouTube began that we actually said, ‘You know, we've got to post this thing.’ I always had a copy of it. So once there was a platform for us to put things up, the first thing I said was, ‘We've got to get the “She's Gone” video out into the world,’” Oates confesses.

Well, now that you know the backstory, especially if you've never actually seen the video, here it is!