John Oates, the mustachioed half of the iconic pop-rock duo Hall & Oates, isn’t sure just how many women he slept with during the 70s.
“I’m sure it was thousands, I’ve lost track,” the 71-year-old rocker told Page Six.
As for how he did it, he explained, “If you didn’t live through the 70s and 80s, if you weren’t a rockstar during that time, there’s no way you can comprehend what it was like. There were no cell phones and people taking pictures of everything you did. There was no social media.”
He continued, “It was much more innocent. I used to meet girls in various towns and sort of have a relationship. I might see them and then see them six months later.”
Despite those decades being infamous for cocaine and drug abuse in the music world, Oates maintains he never had a drug problem.
“Coke was ubiquitous,” he notes. “Daryl [Hall] and I never had our issues with it because we never did it. I tried it back in the Studio 54 days and it made me feel so uncomfortable that I couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t my thing.
“Both Daryl and I knew that we were going to be musicians for the rest of our lives and the only way for us to be musicians for the rest of our lives was to keep our s–t together.”
But the band suffered their own issues in the form of money mismanagement. At one point Oates discovered that although he had residences in New York, Connecticut and Aspen, an airplane and a garage full of vintage cars, he was cash poor.
“It’s embarrassing to me to realize now that I should have been more aware and knowledgable of what was going on but I was swept up in being a pop star,” he confessed. “It was too easy to party, to play my music.”
Oates eventually sold everything but kept his condo in Aspen, where he moved to start fresh. He remarried, had a son and now views his financial hardship in a positive light.
“It changed everything. If I had stayed with all the accouterments and just continued to live that lifestyle, who knows where I would be. So, in the end, it was a blessing in disguise,” he said.
Part of his fresh start was shaving off his iconic mustache, which felt like “shedding my skin metaphorically,” he told us. “I wanted to be a different person. I didn’t want to be that 80s guy with the giant mustache and it was more of a ceremonial shaving. I shaved it off, it was gone. I became someone else.”
Currently, Oates maintains a neatly trimmed goatee and mustache and laughingly refers to himself as “the patron saint of facial hair” for the millennial generation.
Earlier this month the duo dropped the first vinyl release of their beloved 2004 album “Our Kind of Soul.” Hall & Oates play Madison Square Garden on February 28.