We liked to sit in the car and work out harmony parts. “We were going to Dan’s house or my house or in a car,” Bunnell says. They’d played in teen bands at school, covering popular songs such as “Nights In White Satin,” “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” and “Born To Be Wild,” but the emergence of the singer-songwriter super group Crosby, Stills & Nash in 1969 inspired them to start writing their own material, which they all got together to share and sing when Peek returned to England for the holidays. Air Force base near London where their fathers were stationed, had the vaguest of ideas about what he might do next, leaving for what ended up a single semester of college back in the States. It went kind of from a train to a rocket ship.”Īll three had graduated high school in the spring of ’69. “To be honest, there really wasn’t a whole lot of deep thought about, ‘Oh, I don’t know if this is going to work or something. “That led to a contract, and that led to recording, and that recording was a No. “And being in London, being in the right place at the right time, we ended up on some fantastic shows,” he says. “We were gigging within a month or so,” Beckley says as he and Bunnell - Peek departed the band in 1977, passing away in 2011 - prepped for America’s 50th anniversary celebration that includes a show in Los Angeles on Friday, June 21, and another in Costa Mesa on Aug. Gerry Beckley sounds only slightly apologetic for the nonchalance with which he, Dewey Bunnell and Dan Peek accepted the speed of success they enjoyed with America, the folk-rock group they formed as expat teens in London over the Christmas holidays of 1969.
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