America – A Horse With No Name

It knocked Neil Young off No. 1 while half of America thought it was Neil Young.

In March 1972 the record that took the top of the American singles chart from Neil Young’s Heart of Gold was a song a great many people had already decided was by Neil Young. The confusion was general and it ran deep — Young’s own father is said to have made the mistake. The song was A Horse with No Name, the singer was Dewey Bunnell, and the band was three men who had met at school in London.

Keep watching: America – Ventura Highway

It nearly did not exist. America’s debut album had come out in Britain to a polite reception, and Warner Bros. did not think I Need You — the song everyone had assumed would be the single — was going to break them on radio. The label asked for more material. Five months after the album, the band went into a small London studio and demoed four new songs, and the one Warner picked was the one Bunnell had thought least of. He had written it under the title Desert Song, and his own assessment when he first played it to Gerry Beckley and Dan Peek was that it sounded like a novelty.

He had written it at Arthur Brown’s home studio in Dorset, in the rain, trying to summon somewhere hot and dry. The images came from a Salvador Dalí desert painting and an M.C. Escher print with a horse in it, and underneath both of those was a real memory: driving through Arizona and New Mexico as a child, when his father was stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The horse itself, Bunnell has said, was a way of getting out of a confused life and into somewhere quiet.

One tuning, used once

They cut it at Morgan Studios in Willesden with Ian Samwell producing, and Kim Haworth brought in to play drums. Samwell is the one who changed the title. The guitar is in an open tuning — D, E, D, G, B, D from the bottom up — and America never used it on anything else, before or after. Two chords, essentially, moved against each other for four minutes. The band took some persuading to play it at all, on the grounds that it was too simple to be worth much.

Warner released it in Britain on November 12, 1971 and in America the following January. The debut album had already shipped without it. When the single became a hit, the label pulled the album back and reissued it with the song added — which is why the pressing you find in a second-hand shop may or may not contain the track it is famous for.

It went to No. 3 in Britain, which remains the only time America reached the UK top 40. In the United States it went to No. 1 and stayed three weeks, and the reissued album held the top of the album chart for five. Some stations refused to play it, most notably WHB in Kansas City, on the grounds that the title referred to heroin. Bunnell’s response when this was put to him was that the interpretation was news to him.

The comparison that would not go away

Cash Box, reviewing it, called the band CSN&Y soundalikes and moved on. The listening public was less restrained. Bunnell has been candid about it ever since — virtually everyone, he has said, assumed on first hearing that it was Neil. He has never denied the influence, pointing to Young’s first two solo albums as what he was immersed in while writing, and locating the resemblance in the structure as much as in the voice. The backlash, he has suggested, was people defending their own hero rather than attacking him.

Young was reportedly less relaxed about it. And the timing did nothing to help: the imitation, as some heard it, arriving to take the chart position from the original.

The performance on this page is from America In Concert, May 24, 1973 — a year past the argument, with the band on the other side of a second album and a second hit, playing the song to people who by then knew exactly whose it was.

© 1971 Warner Bros. Records