By Jeb Wright

Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell are American icons of soft rock. As America, they have reached heights of success few have achieved. They had two No. 1 hits in “A Horse With No Name” and “Sister Golden Hair.” They reached the Top 10 many more times with such classic songs as “Ventura Highway,” “Tin Man” and “You Can Do Magic.”

America still writes songs and tours regularly, however the duo’s latest project features no original tunes. Instead, America teamed up with producer Fred Mollin and recorded 12 songs they wish they had written. The result is America’s newest release, titled “Back Pages.”

GM: Before I get into the songs, tell me about the artwork.  
GB: Dewey oversaw that. We have a pretty good logo that we have used over the years. This time, instead of using our aging faces, the idea of using a book cover came up.

GM: It’s too bad that we are in the day of the download, as this would look great on an album cover.
GB: I think the songs themselves warrant that. We have had some success in the past releasing albums on vinyl. We have a new relationship with E1, but I am hoping we can get a vinyl release for this album, as I think it would be very successful.

GM: America has written many iconic songs. Why do an album of covers instead of new tunes? ?
GB: We certainly have covered a lot, over the years, with our own writing. The concept here was to come up with a list of songs that we wish we had written. This gives us some new songs to play live along with our classic songs.
I don’t think that we jeopardized the ‘Gee, I wish I could hear 10 new America songs” with this release. Not that there is anything wrong with that, as I write as much as I ever did. I think it was better to approach this purely as a project of recording songs that are important to us, rather than just doing covers.

GM: Let’s talk “Woodstock.” Joni Mitchell did it her way,
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young did it their, way and now you have made a new version of it.
GB: Each one is completely different. I have to be honest; we are fans of Iain Mathews and his band, and they did a version that was much closer to what we did. We knew that it worked at that kind of tempo.  We tried to make a hybrid. There were lines that were not in the CSNY version, and we wanted to make sure we used those that were in Joni’s version.
I think it is one of the best examples of the type of songs that are on this album. When we made the list of songs, we had three or four CSN songs that didn’t make the final cut. We really wanted these to be unique versions of these great songs. I think that is part of the success of the album. “Caroline No” is a great example of that. I think Dewey just nailed that. We played it for Brian [Wilson], and he just loved it.

GM: How did you decide what songs to record?
GB: We each put together a list songs, including Fred Mollin, the producer. Once we had our lists, we started to hover over them until we had the ones that made the most sense. For instance, we couldn’t end up with three James Taylor tunes on the album. We also knew we needed to have a Jimmy Webb song on there, but we needed to find the right one. It was an interesting, and, frankly, a fun process. All it has done is baited us to where we want to go and do it again. If we have success with this, then we will be going right back in and doing No. 2.

GM: Mark Knopfler is an amazing guitar player. “Sailing to Philadelphia” was a great choice.
GB: That is the only song that Dewey and I were not familiar with. When we listened to it, which was long before it became apparent that Mark was going to play on it, we realized it was an incredible song. There are so many things about Knopfler that are great, his guitar playing being one of them. This song really points out what a great writer he is. On his version, it is a duet between him and James Taylor, so that really lent itself for Dewey and I to do a duet of it.

America — comprised of Dewey Bunnell and Gerry Beckley — is still going strong. The duo's most recent effort is "Back Pages," a collection of cover songs. Photo: Travis Schneider.

GM: My favorite one on the album is the song that has the same name as your band.
GB: “America” is an iconic tune, as are many of the songs on the album. It would be pointless of us to cover a song like “Yesterday,” but Paul Simon’s “America” is a real treasure. This song just worked. It came out great, and it is America doing “America.”
I teach a class at Loyola, here in L.A., and I talk about iconic songs. I always mention “America,” because there is no rhyme in the lyrics. It usually goes by unnoticed because it is such a compelling lyric. You don’t need it to rhyme because you are so involved in the story that it is prose.

GM: Talk about the song you did with Fountains of Wayne.
GB: We have worked with them before. We did an album with Adam Schlesinger. Fountains of Wayne are not a new band, as they have been around quite a few years, but this is a song that is going to be on their next album.

GM: Do you stay up to date with music?
GB: I like to think that I am up to date with newer music. My oldest son, Matthew, is 32, and is quite a successful producer. He steers me to music that I might have missed. He’s always saying, “Dad, you’ve got to hear this.”

GM: I was surprised to hear you do the “Till I Hear It From You” by The Gin Blossoms; that was co-written by Marshall Crenshaw.  
GB: The criteria for the album were that they had to be killer songs that are great examples that come from our best songwriters.
In the case of The Gin Blossoms, it just so happens that Marshall co-wrote the song. I think the song stands on its own, and I love their version of it. That is one of the songs that we are doing live. It is really going down well. Some people will think we are just showcasing the greatest writers of the ’60s, but we are not. I think that widens the whole scope of what we are doing.

GM: Which came first: the name of the album or the decision to do “My Back Pages” from Bob Dylan?
GB: We knew we were going to do a Bob Dylan song. We did this song with a very simple, stark, piano and vocal. It came out so well that we thought about it, and Dewey said, “That would be a good title.” It quietly refers to exactly what we were doing.

GM: Is there any temptation to run through the entire 12 songs in a live setting?
GB: We’re doing four, and that is a big chunk of a 90-minute show. It really allows us to pack the rest of the show with our biggest hits.  People also know all of these songs, and they go down really well. I suppose we could play the entire album, as a lot of people are doing that right now.

GM: The twist would be that you would not be doing your biggest album, as most of the bands are doing. This would be your new album that consists of these great songs.
GB: I think that is a good idea. Later this year, we are also doing our first-ever Christmas tour. There are a lot of new things, after 41 years, going on with America. Believe it or not, the album is No. 1 on
Amazon.com, so go figure.

GM: Last one: What’s the difference between writing America tunes and reworking other people’s songs into your own?
GB: We started inside out in America, with all original material. Having said that, all bands, in high school, are cover bands. I usually make the analogy that the most iconic artists of all time, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, didn’t write a note; it was all about interpretation. I would hope that when you write that you really make it come from your soul.  That doesn’t mean that you don’t have the right to immerse yourself in the work of others.
If we had gotten halfway through the project and discovered that we had six really bad cover songs, we would have scrapped it. We saw, clearly, where this was headed and it became better and better. We are really pleased with the outcome.

10cc was a fine studio band, but its live outing, "Live and Let Live," is a bit of a disaster, according to Goldmine's Dave Thompson. U.K. Records publicity photo.

By Dave Thompson

David Bowie’s 1978 European tour was not a glorious affair. First, he butchered his image — baggy pants and skewed sailor hat are never a good look, even if you are the chameleon of rock.

Then he butchered his songs. When your last two studio albums were semi-impenetrable slabs of Krautrock-inspired instrumental meanderings, the last thing you want to do is sing “Suffragette City.” And it showed.

And then, when he realized that the mini-Zigs in the audience were still having a good time, he butchered the live album that was supposed to document the occasion.

Out went the one truly inspired performance of the entire show, a dissolute swagger through Brecht and Weill’s “Alabama Song.” Out went whatever internal logic had dictated the original set list, as he realigned the songs in loose chronological order. And finally, out went the audience, and, although he still had the temerity to title the ensuing double album “Stage,” he could just as easily have titled it “Me and My Mates Mucking About In An Empty Room.” Because that is what it sounded like.

Live albums are a curious phenomenon. On the one hand, their purpose is simple — to offer audiences a takeaway taste of a singular occasion, and a chance to relive a concert in the less-sweaty surroundings of their own home. And on the other, they are a shop window for the as-yet-unconverted, a chance to show the doubters what an act is really made of.

To this, you could also add the less salubrious reasons for releasing one: running down an old record contract (“you still owe us three albums” or “my next one’s a triple live”); filling a creative void (“I’ve not written a decent song in three years; I’d better dig out the old ones again”); and, beat bootleggers to the punch (at least, that was the reasoning behind some of the best live albums of the early 1970s). Famously, The Stones’ “Get Yer Ya-Yas Out” and The Who’s “Live At Leeds” were both official responses to ultra-popular bootleg discs, while Dylan and The Band’s “Before The Flood” was so titled because they hoped it would be in the stores before the flood of souvenir boots.

Then something happened.

“Frampton Comes Alive” happened. And long before it had chalked up even a fraction of the 10 or 11 million copies it inexplicably went on to sell in the USA alone, every band on the planet was suddenly rolling the tapes and then redubbing the solos (and the vocals, and the drums, and the bass), in the hope that Frampers-shaped lightning might strike them as well. Suddenly, what had been a comfortable cottage industry of megastars rewarding their fans for being faithful became as much of a marketing gimmick as anything else that the mid-1970s could conceive, from 12-inch singles to picture discs, and on to the free razor-blade-sharpening cardboard pyramid that came free with Todd Rundgren’s first Utopia album. (I am not making this stuff up.)

Live albums changed overnight. In the past, live albums were an event. For a band to even dream of cutting one, they needed to have attained a certain level, whether of popularity, acclaim or simply critical kudos. The disc itself might still have been a stopgap between regular releases, but there had to be a meaningful gap that needed to be stopped. Now, they were inevitable. The modern mantra of “I tour, therefore I release a live album” was born here.

Double live albums, too, had been rare (triples even rarer, but beyond the proggy circles trod by the likes of Yes and ELP, nobody really took that amount of time to play a handful of songs in those days). Now, they were de rigueur.

And lousy, horrible, please-don’t-ever-make-me-listen-to-that-drum-solo-again live albums could be counted off one by one: The Stones’ “Got Live If You Want It” (1966), with the screaming audience seemingly captured at twice the volume of the band itself; The Kinks’ “Live at Kelvin Hall” (1967), where the equally irritating screaming was matched only by the sheer ineptitude of the performance (never record a concert if you can’t actually hear yourselves play) and, surprisingly, because it should actually have been a lot of fun, the Plastic Ono Band’s “Live Peace In Toronto.” Side One — Lennon and friends jam some old rock ’n’ roll standards. Side Two — Lennon and friends watch Yoko writhe in a bag. Yeah, maybe you had to be there.

Personally, I always thought Dylan’s “Before The Flood” was a slapdash affair, as well, wasting wax and electricity that would have been far better saved for 1976’s “Hard Rain.” But the world’s favorite septuagenarian had far worse in store, if only you stuck with his career long enough. “Real Live” (1985) was real boring, and “Dylan and the Dead” (1989) suggested Dylan was dead, and in those last months before “Oh Mercy,” maybe he was. But to single out Dylan as a serial purveyor of dodgy concert recordings is to overlook the contributions made to the genre by far less forgivable souls than he. 10cc, for example. Irreproachable geniuses in the studio, even they admitted that their live show left a lot to be desired unless you came from that peculiarly American Midwestern school of “When in doubt, muthas, boogie.” But “Live and Let Live” (1977) caught the boys throwing caution to the wind regardless, and it emerged almost defiantly unlistenable.

So, three years later, did the first live offering by the one U.S. band whose studio perfectionism matched 10cc’s. How could anybody even have imagined that an Eagles live album (“Eagles Live”) would be a good idea?

In 1977, The Rolling Stones followed up their most divisive studio album yet, the love-it-or-hate-it “Black And Blue,” with a double live set that actually made up your mind for you; “Love You Live” wasn’t simply a flaccid run through of a bunch of songs that were already well past their sell-by date. It suggested that the Stones themselves knew it, which is why they gave one entire side over to a semi-secret club date where they went back and played the blues. And that is the side that people still play today. The rest of the disc is filed away as a gruesome prophecy of the future that awaited Mick and the gang, who now seem to release a new live album every time they leave the house. It has yet to be confirmed, but “Keith Pops Out To Buy Some Cigarettes” (2009) is earmarked for release next summer.

We could go on. Any live disc The Who has released since they stopped being a band and turned into a pension-renewal scheme can be safely discarded. Likewise for 90 percent of the coasters that bore the dread Unplugged logo; seriously, if you really needed to hear Bon Jovi play without an electrical supply, you could just unplug the CD player.

Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains The Same” (1976) disappointed on release and, that admittedly stellar “Stairway To Heaven” notwithstanding, still creaks out loud today. While we probably shouldn’t poke fun at archive releases that were actually blocked by their creators during their own musical lifetime, The Beatles’ “Live at Hollywood Bowl” takes a lot of beating in the “Dear Santa, I hate you” thank-you letter stakes.

But if there is any one live album that, more than any other, advocates the immediate incarceration not only of the band that made it, but also of every single person in the room who encouraged them while they were doing so, it is — the one that you, the Goldmine readership, nominate. So, get going! Drop us an e-mail at goldminemag@fwmedia.com, or leave a comment below.

Sid Griffin
“Shelter From The Storm: Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Years”
Jawbone Books, ISBN 978-1-906002-27-5
Paperback, 256 pages, $19.95

With Dylan’s 1974 opus “Blood On The Tracks” universally regarded as his greatest LP, at least of his post-”Blonde on Blonde” career, any attempt to chronicle his career in its aftermath has to begin in that shadow. Yet there’s an alternative way of thinking that aligns “Blood On The Tracks” not with rebirth, but with a death of sorts.

It marked the end of Dylan as a purely self-propelled machine and his awakening as a social animal, one whose choice of musicians and methods of working stepped away from the insularity that hallmarked his first 12 years of recording and into a new world of regular bandmates (as opposed to the regularity of The Band), nonstop touring and increasingly esoteric albums. And if “Desire,” the record that inaugurated this era, is to be considered the true apex of Dylan’s ’70s-and-beyond output, then the Rolling Thunder tour that accompanied it marks one of the highlights of his entire on-the-road life.

“Shelter From The Storm” is the story of that tour … another story, in fact, following the now-classic, in-person accounts by Larry Sloman and Sam Shepard. Drawing from the recollections of sundry players, but more tellingly built around author Griffin’s own knowledge of and thoughts about Dylan, it is the kind of book that sends you scurrying to your music collection in search of your cache of period bootlegs to listen to while you read.

A scrapbook of fascinating literary ephemera appears — a cassette tape that Roger McGuinn left rolling on the tour bus, capturing the conversations taking place around him. A scene-by-scene breakdown of the four-hour Renaldo and Clara tour movie (with Griffin playing editor and suggesting the scenes that should be cut in order to render the film a more viewer-friendly length); an almost frame-by-frame recounting of the NBC TV special that wrapped up the tour; and song by song accounts of the most memorable shows.

There’s a close eye focused on the recording of “Desire,” a discography of related recordings and a veritable storm of information that will keep the reader entranced for hours. In fact, the only real criticism is that Griffin’s writing takes the entire period a lot more seriously than Dylan seemed to. Replay “Desire” and rewatch the movie, and Dylan probably laughs and smiles more there than he had in the decade beforehand. Even the photos here don’t capture that.

— Dave Thompson

What’s on your want list? We want to know! Whether you’ve got a line on these records or want to share your own list, send an e-mail to goldminemag@fwmedia.com, or write to us at Goldmine, Attention: Most Wanted Stories, 700 E. State St., Iola, WI 54990.

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1. JULIANA HATFIELD would be at the very top of my  want list. Specifically, I’m looking for a clean copy of the (unauthorized) recording titled “GOD’S FOOT.” I’ve always loved Juliana’s music, and that’s one of her records that has been eluding me for quite some time now.
2.  TALKING HEADS — “Talking Heads Live on Tour” (1979) Warner Bros. Music Show
3.   TALKING HEADS — “Puzzlin’ Evidence” (1986 Promo Label)
4.  BOB DYLAN — “Great White Wonder”
5.  BEATLES — “Watching Rainbows”

— Gary Kahn, Michigan

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JOHN LENNON original ( and not a re-release of John & Yoko’s green vinyl single) “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” is on my Want List, as it was our Johnny’s 70th birthday last October and 30 years since we lost him.

— Paul, via e-mail

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I’m very much into mono pressings of records made at the time mono was being phased out. My top 5 finds reflect this.
1. THE MONKEES — “The Birds, The Bees & the Monkees.”
2. THE DOORS — “Strange Days.” As I have the mono pressing of their first, I need this one to complement it.
3. JEFFERSON AIRPLANE  — “After Bathing at Baxter’s.” OK, so I have the Sundazed re-pressing … I still need the RCA original.
4. THE BEATLES — “Magical Mystery Tour.” I bought the mono pressing when it came out in 1967. I lost it in 1975. I haven’t had it since.
5. THE MOODY BLUES — “Days of Future Passed” The album cover says it should exist, but I’ve never seen one. Being a Moodys fan, if it does exist, I want it.

— Frank, via e-mail

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As a long-standing collector of THE MONKEES records and the Colgems label in general, the holy grail for me has been the original U.S. mono version of “The Birds, the Bees and the Monkees.” Although I currently have digital copies of this album, which were sent to me by other record-collecting enthusiasts, I have never physically even seen the U.S. mono version of this recording, even though I know it exists. Years ago, I bought the U.K. mono version of this LP, but, alas, it features mono tracks, but from the stereo source. I have looked far and wide for the U.S. mono, but I haven’t come up with it yet. And I don’t know if I ever will.

— Larry Lapka, longtime subscriber, via e-mail

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1. BOB DYLAN — “Highway 61 Revisited” This is considered the best album Bob Dylan created. I found only one Dylan album “Bringing it All Back Home.” I have been searching for years, and there are not a lot of Dylan albums out there.

2. THE BEATLES — ”Yellow Submarine” Considered the weakest of The Beatles albums, but I have all the others and this would complete my collection. Because this wasn’t a big seller, I guess there were not a lot sold and therefore not a lot to find.

3. THE ROLLING STONES — “Their Satanic Majesties Request” Also considered the weakest of The Rolling Stones’ offerings. I have not been able to find a copy for one reason or another. This album was a real style-changer, and I would like to experience it!

4. JOHN LENNON — “Plastic Ono Band.” The debut single of John Lennon. Like Beatles albums, this is very collectible and hard to find a vinyl copy in good condition.

5. ROYAL GUARDSMEN — “Snoopy and his Friends” This album by the Royal Guardsmen is a guilty pleasure. The other albums are a more serious nature, and this is just for fun, what a record should be! Never found a copy of this album, period.

6. “A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records” This is an album of Christmas songs, produced by Phil Spector (just in case Santa is watching.) This album came out at the same time that John Kennedy was killed, and I don’t think too many people were in the Christmas mood, making it particularly hard to find.

— Dave Sherman, Georgia