The horse still has no name, but does it matter?
One song became an inescapable theme tune for the band that flew the 70s softrock flag the highest. Grant Smithies finds that song was part milestone, part millstone.
Iwas 12, probably. Maybe 13. I was pretty small, the guitar was pretty big and I was hopeless, really, my chubby wee fingers refusing to find the right frets. Chang-changa chang-changa changa changchang. I couldn’t get that strum right, either.
The first song I ever tried to learn on the guitar was Horse With No Name by America.
I loved that song. There was something slow and parched and pretty about it.
It was mysterious, too. I mean, if you were out there in the desert with no human company, that horse would be your only friend, right?
Why not give that four-legged friend the simple dignity of a name? How about Hamish? Prancer? Tamsin? Neddy?
On his way down here for a 50th Anniversary Tour later this month, the guy who wrote that song is on the line from his home in California.
‘‘Well, the horse was more or less a vehicle to get you away from humanity in that song,’’ says Dewey Bunnell, now a jovial 67-year-old.
‘‘But we still get people all the time saying, ‘Why didn’t you name that poor thing?’ OK, sure, it’s called Charley!’’
If you were, like me, a child of the 1960s who hit adolescence in the early-70s, America was a band that made immediate and perfect sense.
Their music was soft-focus and sentimental, with catchy pop hooks and the kind of drippy, semi-cosmic lyrics that suggested the three members had done their time honking on big joints.
America songs were flimsy feats of melodic engineering, sure, but they only had to support their own weight long enough to get stuck in your head, where they would remain for decades.
When you were a freshly-minted teenager, this was music you could picture yourself listening to with actual real live girls, if they were ever to invite you into their rooms. Sigh.
‘‘Well, I was a teenager, too, when I wrote Horse With No Name,’’ says Bunnell.
‘‘Most of the songs on our first two albums were written when we were 17, 18, 19, as three American kids living in England. We all travelled a lot cos we were from Air Force families.’’
America formed in London in 1970, with all three original members – Bunnell, Gerry Beckley and Dan Peek – sons of American servicemen stationed there. They met while attending a school set up for expat military brats by the US Defence Department and called themselves America so no-one mistook them for sneaky Brits trying to sound American.
Bunnell wrote A Horse With No Name in Dorset when he was just 19. America’s 1971 self-titled debut album had sold OK, but they needed a hit. Young Dewey thought a ballad about hot, dry, lonely times in a desert might work well in both the US and Europe.
He wove in memories of his family’s early travels through Arizona and New Mexico. The ‘‘mystery horse’’ reared up out of a woodcut he liked by M C Escher.
The recording initially went by the resoundingly lame title of Desert Song and the band were hesitant to play it live because they thought it was too corny.
Newsflash: the public loves corn. The debut album was reissued with added Horse and America was on its way.
‘‘A lot of our early career was really just us reminiscing about places in the US. For Horse With
No Name, I thought about the great expanse and silence of the south-west of the US – and people somehow related to that.’’
The song was banned on some US radio stations because ‘‘horse’’ was common street slang for heroin at the time, but A Horse With No Name nonetheless topped the charts in numerous countries, becoming an inescapable theme tune for the band forever after, part milestone, part millstone.
It was derided by some critics for being precisely what it was: a bare-faced Neil Young ripoff. Others had the audacity to sneer at lyrics such as ‘‘the heat was hot’’ and ‘‘there were plants and birds and rocks and things’’ which are, in fact, some of approximately a hundred things that make this song so ace.
In contrast with the dusty clip-clop of Horse,
most of the band’s other songs tumble forth on a tide of glistening acoustic guitars, heavy on the 12-string, tight three-part harmonies sealing the deal.
Consequently, they got tagged as ‘‘a poor man’s Crosby, Stills and Nash’’, but America’s best songs have their own deft touches, too.
There’s a bit in the middle of Tin Man, another Bunnell song, where the whole shebang starts to speed up and spin, and trippy lyrics rush out about ‘‘smoke glass stained bright colours’’ and ‘‘soapsud green bubbles’’ and such, like someone had just dipped the song in LSD.
It’s a song America fans endlessly dissect in chat-rooms, churning out hilarious dissertations on possible hidden meanings to every freakin’ line.
Bunnell himself long ago admitted Tin Man was just a clump of tangled mind-fluff he hoovered up and splurged onto the page after pondering his favourite childhood movie The Wizard of Oz.
‘‘I just put words together and in a lot of cases it’s just word association,’’ he told one early interviewer: ‘‘There’s no message as such in Tin Man, no. It’s just flighty, colourful words.’’
It must be acknowledged though that not everyone falls hard for the gentle delights of this band.
‘‘Is that song about bestiality?’’ harrumphed my lovely missus when I sang her a few lines of Muskrat Love.
No! It’s about two humans called Suzie and Sam as they ‘‘whirl and they twirl and they tango, floating like the heavens above’’ in a regular human bedroom.
By the end of the song, admittedly, they’re ‘‘muzzle to muzzle, now anything goes . . .’’ They are emulating furry critters in a burrow, OK? It’s a metaphor!
That was a hit, too, written by a mate, and there were heaps more.
Once their career took off, America waved ta-ta to grey old Blighty and relocated to their spiritual home in Southern California. Over the decades since then, they have put out swags of records with everdecreasing sales and ever-increasing gaps between, but truth be told, the only America record you really need is the 1975 greatest hits package History, which cherry-picks the best bits from their first five albums. Half the tracks receive subtle remixes from Beatles’ producer George Martin, who double-tracks the vocals, adds more reverb and strings, nudges the bass further into the background.
It’s a sonic epitaph to an original trio that didn’t last long. Co-founder Dan Peek left way back in 1977 and wrote a book called An American Band in 2004, crammed with candid tales of hanging out with The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Stones, his rocky road with drink and drugs, his born-againChristian solo years.
Peek died in 2011, and Beckley and Bunnell continue on without him to this day, flying that 70s soft-rock flag.
‘‘Soft rock isn’t the most commanding label to have, right? People also called what we did country-rock, California rock, folk-rock, but I think we were really a pop band who used acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies.
‘‘I think of what we did as mellow music. We tried to put a lot of air in there so the songs floated a little bit.’’
Now both in their late-60s, what will the two survivors sound like these days? Can they still cut the musical mustard?
‘‘Well, this is our 50th year, our golden anniversary, and a huge chunk of our audiences are really coming along to relive their youth.
‘‘The bulk of our show is our 1970s and early-80s music and that nostalgia is a comfort, I think. The world’s so much faster and more stressful now, so mellow songs that can spark fond memories are more important than ever.
‘‘People want to disappear into a more golden time for an hour-and-a-half – and we’re happy to help them with that.’’
‘‘People want to disappear into a more golden time for an hourand-a-half – and we’re happy to help them with that.’’
Dewey Bunnell
America’s 50th Anniversary Tour hits New Zealand this month, with Harry Lyon (Hello Sailor/ Coup D’Etat) playing support. They will visit the Christchurch Town Hall (November 22), the Wellington Opera House (November 23) and Hamilton’s Claudelands Arena (November 24).