John Oates of the rock and roll duo Hall & Oates brought his Kankakee wife, Aimee Pommier-Oates, and their son Tanner, 6, home to visit Aimee's parents this week.

Hall & Oates performed a concert Tuesday night at the Chicago Theatre with fellow veteran rocker Todd Rundgren.

And since Oates says that he and his family travel together "as much as we can," it made a trip "home" to Kankakee just a short car ride from Chicago this week.

Oates said he took his son out to do some crawdad "fishing" with nets. That was east of Kankakee on Baker Creek, which would be near the home of Aimee's parents, Gary and Sharon.

Tanner and his dad don't have any recipe for crawdads. Tanner just likes to "dig in the mud" like most boys his age, Oates explained.

The Oates family left Kankakee Thursday as that was to be the first day of school for Tanner. "Summer's winding down" for him, Oates said.

However, the Hall & Oates tour continued on to Saginaw, Mich., and St. Louis. Then, Oates will be leaving the country for Japan, where he will promote his first solo album.

While Hall & Oates haven't had hit songs lately to compare with their '80s run of popular tunes like "Private Eyes," "Maneater," "Your Kiss Is on My Lips" and "Maniac," Oates said that the duo performs regularly -- at least once a month. Those performances are both in the states and "all over the world."

Tanner Oates is already a veteran of "the road." He has accompanied his parents on tour "since he was an infant," Oates said.

John, Aimee and Tanner live in Woody Creek, Colo., a small town near Aspen where they married on Nov. 27, 1994.

Aimee, who was a college student at the time at Regis University in Denver, is a 1989 Kankakee HIgh School graduate.

They met in 1991 through a mutual friend. She told The Daily Journal back in 1995 that "I was doing work for a magazine and we met in Aspen during a dinner-benefit at a club. I stepped over to get a bite to eat and that was it. We had been friends for a couple of months before." She said at the time that they loved the outdoors and enjoyed to horseback ride, ski, and take snow shoe trips.

Oates, 53, told the Associated Press that his first solo album, "Phunk Shui," "is a chance for me to step out" from behind the more well-known voice of Daryl Hall.

The album, a mix of funk and rock, is something of a departure from the pop sound that made Hall and Oates so commercially successful. And the optimistic lyrics suggest that Oates has found contentment -- in both his personal life and his music.

The album's title refers to the Chinese art of designing a house in accordance with nature's forces; its tone is one "of balance, of self discovery, of doing things the right way," Oates says.

He met Hall when both were students at Temple University in the late 1960s and after they teamed up, the two spent the 1970s releasing a series of albums working on a sound that blended folk, soul and other influences.

"The well we all drew from was the tradition of doo-wop music, jazz and church music, the background of Philadelphia music," says Hall, 52. "What we wanted to add was the singer-songwriter American thing."

Their "blue-eyed soul" songs, drawing from their R&B and Philly Sound roots, were what made them successful, fans say.

"The term blue-eyed soul wasn't in popular use, but Hall and Oates conveyed what that was supposed to mean," said Rundgren, who produced their 1974 album "War Babies."

"For the time they were successful they managed to not sound like anyone else," Rundgren added. "When disco came along they didn't start doing disco."

But as they grew more successful, Daryl became the main attraction.

"When we first started out we were two singer-songwriters sharing a stage," said Oates. "As the years went on Daryl began singing the hits. The hits became the songs of Hall and Oates, the sound of Hall and Oates."

The twosome faded toward the end of the '80s and into the '90s, as their brand of pop was replaced by grunge and then teen acts. They kept performing, but slowed the pace and recorded less.

Recently, they've enjoyed a bit of a renaissance. They've been featured on VH1's "Behind the Music" and Bravo's "Musicians," and the duo's "Do It For Love" is in the adult-contemporary top 10. They also finished recording a new album, the first in several years, and will be touring throughout the summer and fall.

"After all the work in the '70s and '80s and the constant touring, I needed time to regroup and start a family," Oates says. "Basically I redid my whole life." Only after he married and settled down did he feel ready to do the solo project.

"I worked so hard with Daryl that when I had time off, I wanted to be home," he says. "Finally I said, 'If I don't do this, I'll regret it.' "

He compares it to the 1973 Hall and Oates album "Abandoned Luncheonette," which featured mellow ballads, some R&B edge and a little-produced acoustic feel.