dupe
I sometimes thought America was a Neil Young ripoff band. Mostly, I avoided thinking about them at all.
At the time, the Monkees were considered unhip & too commercial by us hipsters. Now, their stuff sounds pretty good. (Much better than America.) Some of the LA sessions cats who played on their first album also helped some of the “hip” bands sound like real musicians…
When I was a kid growing up in the 70’s in the general vicinity of the actual Ventura Highway it was well ‘known’ that alligator lizards would jump out of a tree at you.
“The Tropic of Cancer” and “The Tropic of Capricorn” were famous novels by Henry Miller - famous for having graphic descriptions of sex, and thus for being sought out at libraries by teenagers (like Jerry Seinfeld in one episode). Galahad, on the other hand, was legendarily chaste. So “The Tropic of Sir Galahad” is an amusing juxtaposition of “dirty” and “clean”.
(that’s what comes to my mind regarding the meaning of the line - no idea of whether it’s true)
I think America are excellent musicians and vocalists, but really, would it have killed them to hire a lyricist?
Is this not from Woodstock by Joni Mitchell? No obvious America reference to me.
Anyway, I remember being quite pissed off after I bought their 1st album - the UK release of it didn’t have Horse with no Name on it, which was all I had heard…
Joni Mitchell wrote ‘Woodstock’.
America had nothing to do with it.
This group may have the worst all-around set of lyrics for their body of work of any group, ever.
just read the lyrics to ‘Horse with No Name’ ‘Ventura Highway’, 'Tin Man". Gah. They may have been stoned, or more likely just hooked up with terribly poor writers. Songs were catchy tho.
…on this ever-warming globe on which we live on.
Steve Miller Band sucked ass. They had the best intros and the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard. The only halfway decent tunes they did were “Fly Like An Eagle”, and maybe “Keep On Rockin’ Me Baby”, although I suspect the musicians were drunk or high when they recorded. Or maybe not drunk or high enough.
Wait - I Love me some early Steve Miller. even up to “Livin in the USA”. Somebody get me a cheeseburger!
In the old days, SMB had a reputation for surreptitiously using pre-recorded music in their live shows. Nowadays this is pretty much par for the course in some genres, but back then, it was considered pretty jive to pretend you were playing music that was in reality coming out of a tape deck.
(I say this as someone who really likes a lot of the early SMB stuff.)
So it’s not The ectopic of Sir Galahad? Because I was thinkin’ hey, no problem because, you know, armor plating.
…live and let fry.
Everyone’s talkin about the Wolfman’s Pompatous of Love…
It’s a Book called THE TROPICS OF SIR GALLAHAD and tells about an adventure of a lord in tropical islands after his ship wrecked.
Is this his zombie returning?
Sorry
It is reckless for us not to be open-minded. America and The Steve Miller Band tried to run so deep that it was unlikely that songlyrics would be able to solve themselves.
Long live GTA San Andreas !!!
I realize this is an old post, but if I had replied at the time it was made, it would have been just as germane as it is now.
One of the three members of America Dan Peek, left the band in 1977 for a career in Christian music. The other two members carried on and are still active today. Dan Peek died in 2011.
A Boyce and Hart reunion tour seems unlikely, seeing as Tommy Boyce took his own life in 1994.
As for America generally, I don’t hate them, but they’re a very long way from being a favorite of mine. Unfortunately, my partner in my acoustic duo loves them, so we do several of their songs. Not, thank God, “A Horse With No Name” — I would draw the line at that!
To be fair, though, that song’s line “There ain’t no one for to give you no pain” is often brought up derisively — but in fact this locution has a long history in folk music that stretches right up through Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” (“I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade…”).
I agree with others that America is primarily of the “These words sound good, so let’s sing them and not worry about any actual meaning” school.