I used to feel sorry for Daryl Hall and John Oates.

I don’t anymore.

After all. they got Linda Blair — a girl as equally adept at handling a broom stick as turning her head around 360 degrees—to accept their Don Kirshner Rock Award for best “new” group of the year in their stead.

A status gambit as sophisticated as this is obviously not the work of a duo toward whom sorrow is an appropriate attitude. Getting the depraved-inverse Tatum O’Neal of the pre-pube starlet set to take your trophy home for you is a move signifying arrival. If Daryl and John were English, they could be Elton John or at least Led Zeppelin in a couple of weeks.

My, how things change. Remember when they were just a couple of poor Philly geeks with a bad case of racial hermaphroditism that was their greatest asset, as well as their greatest problem?

"People thought that because we were pretty on that album that we were gay."