I picked up one of their CDs, and played it…they sounded pretty good. They reminded me (vaguely) of Neil Young/CSNY. Anyway, how longdid the group last? Are they still around?
Still touring. I only know this because they were performing in my town recently. According to the tv commercial two original members are still with the band.
Apparently still touring with two of the original three members.
Their heyday was in the mid '70s, though they had a minor resurgence in the early '80s. They released an album in 2007, their first in 20 years.
Folk rock (a category which would also include CSNY), fairly pop-oriented, popular in their day, they had three or four songs that still get some airplay on classic rock / oldies stations. I like them, though they wouldn’t make my list of favorite bands from that period.
Trivia: despite the name, the band was started in England (all three of them were sons of USAF servicemen and English mothers).
They were very good. You have to remember much like Hip-Hop is dominant now, back then the soft adult contemporary sound ruled the roost, so to speak. The Carpenters were the king of this type of music.
People tend to associate Disco with the 70s, but it was underground till the movie Saturday Night Fever blew it wide open. Of course you had a few earlier hits like “Disco Lady.”
Now with that you had two types of groups, those who originated the sound, and those who made it popular. The Carpenters are an example of the latter. Karen’s voice was so suited to the soft, easy listening type of music, it was difficult to find anyone who could do it better. Indeed when music changed to Disco, the Carpenters failed to produce hit, though Karen’s voice still was better than pretty much everyone else.
I put America in that category. They knew how to take it and popularize the sound. While Neil Young and John Denever pushed and made the sound, America was in another category. They found the sound and were able to shift their group to capitalize off the sound.
This isn’t a rap, this is how Madonna got where she is, by recognizing a trend and being able to change her music to capitalize on it.
Great band. I always enjoy hearing them, though it’s always through pure chance when I do.
One nitpick: You’re out in the desert, there’s no one around to talk to, give the damn horse a name already!
“Horse With No Name” is frequently mentioned in lists of all-time dumb song lyrics.
Self-correction: the 2007 album was their first major label release in 20 years.
Some very nice melodies: Ventura Highway, Sister Golden Hair, Don’t Cross the River…
Lyrics that ranged from bland to portentious to painfully clumsy: Ventura Highway, Sister Golden Hair, Don’t Cross the River
The sonic resemblance to Neil Young (mostly on Horse With No Name, their first hit) made them seem more like imitators than substantial artists.
Nice melodies though.
I really liked their musical sound and harmonies, but they did have about the dumbest lyrics goin’.
Dan Peeks left the band in 1976 or 1977, after they released Hideaway, and dabbled in contemporary Christian music. He released a half dozen or so mediocre albums over the next couple of decades but has had no real success AFAIK.
The other 2 guys, Dewey Bunnell and Gerry Beckley, kept plugging away and have had a decent return on their efforts, especially this decade with a couple of live recordings, a holiday album and a retrospec collection of their work, Highway.
Their 2007 album Here & Now had them working with various contemporary artists such as Nada Surf and Ryan Adams (of Whiskeytown fame) and was very well recieved by critics. That didn’t translate into huge sales, but they still tour and draw decent crowds.
Interesting note: their first, eponymous, album was a flop when released. When they played a new song at shows, it was such a hit that the album was re-pressed with the new song. Re-titled from “Desert Song” to “A Horse With No Name”, the song became a huge hit, sending the album to the #1 chart spot for 5 weeks and eventually gaining platinum status.
You can read more here and here, and the band does maintain a homepage at http://www.venturahighway.com/
“For there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.” I’ve never been able to work out who is or is not giving or receiving pain, if anyone.
I liked the Bob Rivers parody that came out around the start of the Afghanistan/Iraq wars:
Osama’s riding through the desert on a horse with Hussein
It felt good to be out of the cave
In the desert you can make up a fake name
And there ain’t no bombs for to give you no pain
Allah, blah, blah blah blah blah
Allah, blaaaah, blah …
Note theme in album titles.
This is all well and good - I remember enjoying some of their songs as a kid and I think **Markxxx **frames the context decently well…
But they wrote **Muskrat Love **- and for that they must never be forgiven. And don’t tell me it was a hit with Captain & Teneille - I know that; but they wrote that…that…
Oy.
yeah I noticed that, too, Biffy
I saw them in Kansas City in the 1980s on a double-bill with Three Dog Night. They were playing Worlds of Fun amusement park.
Good enough show, but it was indeed a Spinal Tap moment.
Any band that can slip alligator lizards into a song is okay by me. 
We will not forget! :mad:
I don’t think they wrote Muskrat Love. Pretty sure it was written and recorded by someone else, then covered by, among others, America and C&T.
This is the most common complaint about the song (I think it’s even in Dave Barry’s “book of bad songs”) but I have always had far more of an issue with another one of the lyrics: “After nine days, I let the horse run free, because the desert had turned to sea.”
He let the horse run free? Where did the horse go? Did it drown? If the desert had turned to sea, the horse would have to have drowned. My interpretation of the song had always been that the desert just magically turned into a sea, and the song’s narrator was floating in the sea or something, but I guess another way of looking at it is that after traveling through the desert, he came upon the seashore. If this is the case, then he would have let the horse run free in the desert. In which case the horse would have slowly died of thirst.
See what I’m getting at here? There are only two possible outcomes for the horse, and neither of them are pleasant.