Indeed it was.

Fever that wouldn't leave

On June 18, Daryl Hall gave a smooth solo performance for a benefit in upstate New York. All went well, he said.

However--the next morning, he woke up feeling anything but fine.

"I [felt] as though I had been beaten with a baseball bat," he recalls. "My bones ached, I had a headache ... my skin and hair hurt."

By the following day, Hall had a temperature of 103 degrees. He was supposed to fly to San Diego for another solo show but decided to stay in bed and fly out the next morning instead, in hopes that it was just a temporary flu.

It wasn't.

The next morning his temperature was still in the 100s, but he flew to San Diego anyway and played the show, which he says took every ounce of strength in him.

"After the show, I literally thought I was going to drop dead," he says. "I was supposed to do another show the next day, but I told everyone to cancel. There was just no way I could do it."

Hall had two days off to recover. The next day he saw a doctor in Los Angeles who gave him vitamin B12 and cortisone. The following day, Hall's fever was still there, but he flew to Phoenix for his next show anyway.

"It was 108 degrees in Phoenix, but it felt like 180 with my fever," Hall says.

At 8 p.m. he hit the stage. "After about four or five songs, a wave of fainting and nausea hit me and I knew I had to stop immediately," Hall says. He apologized to the audience, and John Oates, who was backstage, came out and took over. By the end of the show, Hall felt well enough to come back out and join him on the last couple of tunes, but after the show he knew the best thing to do was to rest, rather than complete his tour.

Hall returned to his home in upstate New York, where he laid in bed for days--the fever stayed with him. He was starting to realize it was unlikely this was simply the flu.

He saw a doctor, who sent him to a hospital to get a test for Lyme disease, a common illness in the area where he had been when he started to feel sick. Hall says he had an agonizing wait for his test results over the Fourth of July weekend. When they finally came in, he was told he had tested positive for erlichia, a tick-born disease, but that it was too early to know if it was Lyme disease--that is, until Hall showed the doctor a three-inch, red ring with a bite-like center that had appeared on his body the night before.

"Voila--Lyme disease," Hall says.

The road to recovery

"I have since been on an antibiotic--doxycycline--for a month. If all goes well--and that is by no means assured--I will be cured," Hall wrote in a letter to his fans on Hall and Oates' official website on July 15. "I hope this is the way it works out, because I miss you guys and I want to get back on the road. Let's hope for the best."

As of today, Hall has only a few weeks of his antibiotic treatment left.

"Daryl Hall is expected to fully recover," says Jonathan Wolfson, Hall and Oates' public relations manager.

Therefore, the 15 dates they were forced to cancel in July for their summer tour have been rescheduled, including their date at the Mountain Winery, which is on for Sept. 20.

"The shows, since we started back up, are going great, so I say, so far, so good," Oates confirms.

Getting back to their roots

Hall and Oates' latest album, Our Kind of Soul, which their tour is supporting, is truly a labor of love. It features a collection of 14 familiar soul classics that the duo has made their own, as well as three new original songs in the same vein.

"This is an album that reflects our past, but it's very much about the present," Hall says. "This isn't about nostalgia--we're singing these songs here and now, and doing them our way."

Oates says the album reaches back into the past, to the soul music that inspired the duo the most when they were first getting started in the late '60s to early '70s, but that they have brought the music into the present and put their own flavor to it.

"These songs were not just in our past, but at the beginning of our careers. In some ways, they were songs we were competing with when our first records came out," he explains. "We're revisiting [that] period of time."

Oates says the three original songs on the album were written in the middle of the process of selecting and recording the 14 cover songs.

"As songwriters--which is what we pride ourselves for being--we felt we could put our songs alongside them. We felt we were up to the task," he says. "We wanted to show that what we write today is in the tradition of these great songs of the past. In a way, it's kind of redefining yourself."

Back to Mountain Winery

Oates says the group has many fond memories of performing at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, which is why they were happy to be able to reschedule their previously canceled date for Sept. 20. In addition to performing there for many of their own tours, the duo has also joined many other artists for performances there, such as Michael McDonald.

"We've played there many times; it's a regular stop on our California schedule," he says. "I like playing there--it's a great place."

Who knows, maybe some of Saratoga's fresh mountain air will do the soul stars some good.

Visit www.hallandoates.com. Call the Mountain Winery at 408.741.2822 or visit www.mountainwinery.com. For more information on Lyme disease, visit www.LymeDiseaseAssociation.org.