When
America started out in 1970, the band's trio of singer/songwriters --
Gerry Beckley,
Dewey Bunnell, and
Dan Peek -- were still teenagers, England-based Air Force brats and
Neil Young fanatics blessed with a surfeit of creative ideas they scrambled to record on an almost daily basis. It was out of those exuberant early days that hits like the breezy "Ventura Highway" and "A Horse with No Name" (included here in a cappella form as a hidden bonus track) were born, launching the band to almost immediate icon status. The 2017 anthology
Heritage: Home Recordings/Demos 1970-1973 documents those heady sessions when the band was working out its evocative folk-rock sound. These are raw demos of songs (some not yet complete) recorded for and during the release of the band's first three albums, 1971's
America, 1972's
Homecoming, and 1973's
Hat Trick. Some, like 1970's "Riverside," are essentially finished pieces, and sound not too dissimilar to what made it onto the finished albums. In contrast, a track like 1972's "Wind Wave" finds the trio laying down a live, drummer-less, acoustic guitar and vocal-based rendition of the song. Unadorned by a full backing band and minus any studio sheen, one can fully imbibe just how much
Crosby, Stills & Nash, and especially
Young, influenced
America. There are also tantalizing song fragments that never made it onto an album, like
Beckley's sweetly attenuated multi-tracked harmonies on "When I Was Five." Particularly magical is the crisp early take on "Ventura Highway," bookended with studio chatter during which someone (
Bunnell?) offers the understated assessment, "I think that one was better." Similarly engaging are the band's nascent readings of such well-loved songs as "Here," "Monster," and "Goodbye." ~ Matt Collar
