Few sixties groups left a bigger impact on popular music than Crosby, Stills and Nash. With their acoustically based musical arrangements, their precise harmonies, and their low-key vibe, the troubadour trio inspired numerous acts that followed their example and produced the LA folk-pop sound of the 1970s. Alas, CSN were bit players in the seventies West Coast music scene, because they could not and would not stop arguing with each other long enough to produce a formidable discography. This only presented the opportunity for a derivative sound-alike group to come along and rip them off to satisfy public demand for three-part harmonic folk rock. And the group that came along and did so created music more derivative and more of a ripoff than anyone could have imagined.
America was a trio of singer-songwriters who latched on to the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sound almost as soon as they formed. Their numerous seventies hits became legendary not for the musicianship or the lyrics but for the ridicule they inspired. Their precise copies of the vocal styles of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - Dewey Bunnell, the group's principal member, managed to sound like Stephen Stills and Neil Young, while Gerry Beckley aped Graham Nash and Dan Peek channeled David Crosby - were offensive enough, but their songs were meaningless drivel. History, their greatest-hits record (History of America - get it? Oh, how clever!), contains all the songs that summed up the stupidity and banality of their music.
America's music was a homogenized blend of folk, rock and country that was mellow bordering on soporific, and the group's best moments, such as brittle guitar notes or a bubbling bass line, were nothing other West Coast performers of the time hadn't already done better. The lyrics were the worst of it; America's songs generally had verses that didn't say anything or didn't make sense at all. The 1972 song "A Horse With No Name," which leads off History, was their first hit, and it pretty much has all those elements down pat. Bunnell's description of a trip through the desert on horseback doesn't offer a vivid landscape, just the observance that there were "plants and birds and rocks and things." Uh, can you be a little more specific, Dewey? He also tells us that "the heat was hot." Wow, what a revelation. Of course it was hot, it wouldn't be heat otherwise, would it? The shimmering acoustic guitar solo and master percussionist Ray Cooper's backbeat spark some interest in this Neil Young impersonation, but then Bunnell returns and tells us he let his horse go because "the desert had turned to sea." Unless it was a seahorse he was riding, it likely wasn't going to get very far.
At least the premise of "A Horse With No Name" - that the ocean floor is merely a desert landscape disguised by the water - makes some kind of sense; other America songs were less meaningful. "Ventura Highway," carried on a stolen Stephen Stills riff, is concerned with walking down the road and looking at clouds shaped like alligator lizards, with the observation that "this town don't look good in snow." I don't care, you know. "Sandman" is another Neil Young ripoff, and its intriguing depiction of a foreboding encounter with the title character is ruined by both its wimpish rhythms and the observation that "Funny, I've been there / And you've been here / And we ain't had no time to drink that beer." Attempts to rock out like on the power ballad "Only In Your Heart" fall flat, though Dan Peek did manage to come up with a pleasant, plausible pop-rock song in "Don't Cross The Water." Though "Don't Cross The Water" doesn't have any dumb lyrics, I don't remember the words all that well. America's dumb lyrics, quite honestly, were their only memorable ones.
By that criterion, Bunnell's "Tin Man," from 1974, is America's most memorable song ever; a song about the least interesting character in The Wizard Of Oz (suggesting a possible connection to the group Toto), it also concerns itself with "the traffic of Sir Galahad." (Oops, correction: I misheard the lyric. The correct lyric is "the tropic of Sir Galahad." Of course, how could I expect the stupid lyric I thought I heard to make any sense?) Peek, meanwhile, can't offer any better advice in 1974's "Lonely People" than to drink from the silver cup (oh, you mean the Holy Grail that Sir Galahad was looking for on his tropic?) and "ride that highway in the sky," a metaphor that was idiotic when B.W. Stevenson first threw it out in his own execrable hit "My Maria." (The harmonica solo in "Lonely People" suggests that they weren't done ripping off Neil Young just yet. "Hit it!") How dumb did these guys get? They actually covered Willis Alan Ramsey's ode to rodent romance, the insufferable "Muskrat Love," and though America's 1973 cover here is more energetic (barely) than the Captain and Tennille's 1976 version, they were smart enough to let it be associated with that duo when Daryl and Toni had the bigger hit with it.
And the less said about Beckley's "Sister Golden Hair," where he sings about romantic feelings as noncommittal as his music ("I got so damn depressed!"), the better.
As a retrospective of America's work, History is really something. It somehow manages to sum up the weaknesses of seventies California pop (slickness, detachment) without accentuating its strengths (bright melodicism, rich vocals). And yet America, after unintentionally parodying Crosby, Stills and Nash's sound, have been influential in their own right. Janet Jackson sampled the riff of "Ventura Highway" in her 2001 song "Someone To Call My Lover," and there are echoes of the opening bars of the lame Beckley ballad "Daisy Jane" in the intro of her 1986 hit "Let's Wait Awhile." After History's release, though, America went through a lean period, and Dan Peek (who died in 2011) left to become a Christian singer. And then, in 1982, just when it seemed they were past their peak - or Peek - Bunnell and Beckley finally put out a good single, "You Can Do Magic." They finally figured out how to write a sharp, intelligent song? Of course not - it was written by legendary British songwriter Russ Ballard.
As a Crosby, Stills and Nash fan, I like to ponder what might have happened if the trio had spent more time in the seventies recording together than arguing with each other. I've constructed an alternate history in which they recorded four or five albums between 1970 and 1977 and one of them was their greatest record ever. (I've often contended that, because CSN spent these crucial years - years in which they wrote some of their best songs - on solo and duo projects, and because the two attempts they made at a new album during this time - both with Neil Young - ended in failure, their greatest album of all time was never recorded.) And, in this alternate universe, America ignored America. It's wasteful to ponder what might have been, yes, and it can drive you insane, but I think I'd rather go crazy pondering such an alternate history than go crazy pondering this History.
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