History of America

Chicken and Egg...

America’s eponymous debut album seemed curious in being launched on the back of their seminal hit single A Horse With No Name and yet this track didn’t appear on it. The reality is this isn’t the exact chronology of that release: it came out initially in 1971 to apparently only moderate success, but after recording some additional material, including the then Desert Song – latter renamed AHWNN after going down well in live performance – it was re-released in 1972 with the song included and going to number 1 in the United States.

That didn’t make any difference to me. I already had the first release as I bought it soon after radio play of A Horse... here in England, where the three main band members lived, but obviously before the re-release. It became an instant favourite and a song filling then and full now of poignant memories encompassing falling in love – I probably should just leave it there as a finite romantic observation – but also all of the other paraphernalia attached to growing up in the early 70s.

The three core members of Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell and Dan Peek were living at an American Air Force base in West Ruislip, London – attending London Central High School – and I felt I had an affinity with them, also an American living in England, and the comparisons stretch even further from there: I listened to great music; America made it.

Their musical map was plotted on the geography of west coast harmony a la Crosby, Stills and Nash, but it is a definable enough terrain. Beckley and Bunnell have distinctive vocals, and indeed continued as the band after Dan Peek left in 1977 (he passed away in 2011), and their songwriting and acoustic guitar playing are idiosyncratic within this expansive genre.

A Horse With No Name is the fifth track on the re-release and it is the simplest of acoustic strumming with a melody line that is almost monosyllabic over a driving beat up to the memorable chorus. What carries it there, of course, are the obtuse but mesmerising lyrics, the la la, la la la la harmonising providing a hiatus for reflection on what has been intoned by the ungrammatical storytelling of there ain’t no one for to give you no pain: screw double negatives if it scans. The transformation of the desert to sea, the significance of nine days, the release of the horse, the exhausted naming that ends up observing things, and humans, that are loveless – it is a wondrous landscape of meaningless words creating meaning if we just listen and absorb.

The album ends on the Pigeon Song which I have always liked and sung aloud for the sinister nonsense of its hillbilly nihilism: Well I had me a pigeon / By the name of Fred / But I done shot him / In the head // Had me a railroad / Down on the ridge / But I done blowed up / The bridge // Had me a dog / He was my best friend / But to him / I done put an end // Had me a farm / Sittin’ pretty on the hill / But if you look / It ain’t there still // I don’t know why I done it / Honest it ain’t like me / But I ain’t sad now I done it /‘Cause a baby boy has got to be free.

(chapter from my memoir Holding On to Me in Lockdown)