America celebrates band’s 50th anniversary on tour in Australia
It’s been a wild ride for the band best known for A Horse With No Name which is celebrating half a century of making music.
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America, the band, started not in the desert or even on the Ventura Highway, but rather in the rainy gloom of London.
Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell and Dan Peek were air force brats – sons of US servicemen posted in the UK – who all attended the same London high school and bonded over a mutual love of rock music.
Speaking from the Sydney home where he lives for part of the year with his Australian wife, 66-year-old singer-songwriter Beckley says the three of them were listening to music from both sides of the Atlantic.
“That whole British invasion thing, with a new band every week, that was still going on to some extent but it had arced into something far more progressive in London,” he says.
“And being Americans, we got both sides of things. We had all that American music coming into the base – The James Gang, Three Dog Night, Steppenwolf, all these things that might not have shown up on the BBC.”
After cutting their chops as a Top 40 cover band, the three young musicians began “rearranging and reshaping” the era’s popular tracks – the first steps towards songwriting and forging their own sound that would see them land hit after hit with songs like A Horse With No Name, Ventura Highway and Sister Golden Hair.
They soon became the go-to warm up act for some of the biggest bands of the era, landing opening gigs for The Who, Elton John, The Faces and even Pink Floyd.
“We were just 17 or 18 years old, playing acoustic guitars, then Pink Floyd came out with a 90-piece orchestra and choir,” Beckley laughs. “It was pretty cool.”
It was never going to be long before the trio’s breezy, West Coast sound and ear for a catchy hook saw them graduate from an opening act to a headliner in their own right.
The group’s 1972 self-titled debut, which went to No.1 in the States and No.3 in Australia, was a well-crafted and confident piece of folk-pop that spawned a hit song in I Need You andwas littered with excellent deep cuts. What it didn’t contain, however, was A Horse With No Name – the band’s signature tune.
“The album came out in the UK without it,” Beckley says.
“We went back into the studio and cut it and released it and it was a hit in England so our US label thought, ‘maybe we should put this out’.
“Thank God they did, because it was pretty much a rocket ship for the next 10 years with a string of hits.”
A Horse With No Name was banned by some US radio stations who thought the song was about drugs, due to “horse” being slang for heroin (a connection Beckley flatly denies).
It’s also believed to have made Neil Young very angry as he thought it stole from his sound. “There was even a rumour that it might have been Neil Young doing something under a different name!” Beckley says.
“We were huge Neil fans, and Heart of Gold had finally gone to number one only for us to knock it off a week later – these kids that sounded just like him. In Neil’s book he wrote that his dad called him and said, ‘I heard your new song’. It all fell under the ‘no press is bad press’ banner for us at that point. It just got people talking about it.”
The song was given a new lease on life in 2005 when it appeared on the soundtrack to the smash-hit video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, introducing the band to a whole new generation of fans.
Beckley says that he and Bunnell were initially reluctant for the track to appear on such a violent game.
“It was my youngest son who said, ‘Are you kidding me? This is going to be the biggest game of the year!’,” Beckley says.
“So we let those youngsters have the song and now people come up to us and tell us that was the first place they heard our music.”
Beckley also credits a wave of “beard bands” from a few years back – Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear and their ilk – for reigniting interest in the folk-rock of the early ’70s.
America now is a duo, and has been for decades after Peek left in the late seventies, turning his back on the rock and roll lifestyle that he initially indulged in but later found was at odds with his beliefs.
He went on to become a very successful Christian rock artist before dying in 2011.
“It was a sad time, obviously, because he was an integral part to the strength of the whole thing,” Beckley says of Peek leaving.
“But those who knew the story from the inside know that it was the only way forward. He was going through a lot of emotional, personal challenges in his life. He made a number of course corrections that literally saved his life.”
The upcoming Australian tour, to celebrate the group’s 50th anniversary, will feature video montages looking back over America’s career and, of course, those songs.
Beckley admits that life on the road never gets any easier, but performing for the band’s fans makes it all worthwhile.
“It wears me down weekly, and the travel can be seriously fatiguing,” he says.
“Fortunately the shows just get more and more rewarding as the years go on.”
SEE: America, December 7, Adelaide Entertainment Centre Theatre
TICKETS:premier.ticketek.com.au
Originally published as America celebrates band’s 50th anniversary on tour in Australia