Have you ever seen The Last Unicorn? Unless you’re a Miyazaki fan, I don’t recommend it. The stunning animation was designed by future members of Studio Ghibli, but that’s the only redeeming quality of this laughably terrible 1982 film, which features Jeff Bridges as the voice of Prince Lír and a wretched soundtrack by America, the sub-CSNY stalwarts of AM Gold soft rock. I never would have known The Last Unicorn existed had I not spawned a child, and while I don’t recall exactly how the movie entered our lives in the first place, for a brief period during Magnolia’s technicolor-fantasy toddler years, it was on heavy rotation in the living room. We even owned the DVD. Mercifully, we no longer own the DVD.

But we do own America’s Greatest Hits – officially known as History: America’s Greatest Hits – and I’m not ashamed to admit it, or fess up to the fact it’s one of my favorite best-ofs in our library, an album I’ve loved since high school and will defend to the death with or without Prince Lír’s sword in my grip. As far as greatest hits collections go, History – which is being reissued on vinyl for Record Store Day April 23 – is damn near perfect in the way it distills the essence of America down to a dozen songs and renders the studio albums unnecessary, unless you’re interested in hearing inferior takes on the band’s derivative folk-rock formula or curious what “experimental” meant in America’s world. None of which I mention to hate on America; Dewey Bunnell, Dan Peek and Gerry Beckley were punching bags from the start, dismissed as watered-down ripoffs of Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stllls, Nash & Young and associated Laurel Canyon luminaries, and while America did ride certain stylistic coattails to ’70s radio success, I’m not here to beat a dead horse, especially when it comes to the creators of the undeniably great “A Horse With No Name.”

Okay, so maybe “undeniably great” is a hay bale of hyperbole; let’s go with “subjectively great,” because that’s what we’re talking about here. I was born amid the dying embers of soft rock’s golden era, the color of my soul is ’70s wood paneling and this music is as much a part of me as funk, jazz, post-punk, new wave and ’90s alt-rock. It’s telling that the best mixtape I’ve ever made was a summer-themed soft-rock ode to my early childhood, when I absorbed a steady stream of easy-listening radio inside the station wagon, dentist office and Montgomery Ward; and that in high school, America sat comfortably in between Alice in Chains and Tori Amos on my alphabetized CD rack. I wasn’t the only one. Several of my friends owned History CDs, an odd look for 16 year olds in 1994, but if emo is more a state of mind than a musical genre – and I’m of the opinion that it is – America was definitively emo for the teenage version of me who may or may not have drifted to sleep at night while listening to History on headphones and longing for the affections of certain girls at school and church.

Most people don’t overthink why they like something, and it sounds liberating to approach music that way (I wish it were that easy). Out in the real world, the average listener doesn’t give a shit what music writers or record store clerks think, and while I’m not casting America as victims of unjust critical collusion, from the start there was near-universal disdain for the group among reviewers. In The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, published in 1983, every America album with the exception of History was given zero to one stars out of a possible five; you’ll find much of the same in the updated 1992 version of the guide, with the critical analysis deeming America’s music “wimpy,” “weak” and “lame,” among other merciless adjectives, though History was at least upgraded from two to two-and-half stars in the third edition. No matter; out in the real world, people bought a shit-ton of America albums in the ’70s, and to this day you can find them in bulk at Goodwill, garage sales or any record store with a dollar-vinyl dump bin. I paid $3 for a clean used copy of History and that price was just about right. There just isn’t much demand relative to availability, though the Record Store Day vinyl reissue, pressed on two color variants, likely will sell like hotcakes.

There’s a subset of “serious” listeners, however, who won’t ever put fork to platter with History. There are lines in the sand – I have them, too – and several self-styled aficionados side with the critics and view America with predictable vein-popping derision. These listeners are typically older and male, staunchly political in their beliefs about popular music, and they tend to present opinions as facts and make absurd defeatist statements – like there hasn’t been any good music made since the pre-disco ’70s, or that Dylan’s worst song is better than 99 percent of everyone else’s best song. Then again, I wasn’t alive for the second wave of folk rock, when the edges were rounded off to appeal to youth pastors and Tupperware party hosts, and maybe I’d be bitter, too had I witnessed firsthand the safe descent into a softer state of mind in the wake of Altamont and Vietnam. 

In fairness to the critics and OG folk-rockers, they have a point. America’s strength was singles, not album-length statements. “A Horse With No Name” is a four-minute fever dream of ’60s-comedown mysticism, and 50 years later, as it gallops toward half a billion streams on Spotify, the song still resonates. Yet nothing else on America’s 1972 self-titled debut holds a candle to the single. The story’s the same with every other America album through 1977’s Harbor, the last record with Dan Peek who, no joke, left the band to get away from all the drugs and groupies and rebrand himself as a born again Christian solo artist. There’s no danger in America’s music and little in the way of tension, but there are plenty of gentle feelings and pleasant notions. Bunnell, Peek and Beckley were best when they stayed in their lane and didn’t try too hard to be anything other than who they were, but when they did veer off course, the results ranged from downright puzzling to endearingly comical. Hat Trick’s eight-and-half minute title track is about … something, or maybe three somethings, none of which seem to have anything to do with hockey. It might be about sex, but it’s hard to say – they were nice guys, after all, and it’s not entirely clear what’s going on there. “Woman Tonight,” meanwhile, is definitely about sex, or at least implied sex, yet their stiff-shouldered stab at the Almighty Groove makes Seals & Crofts sound like funk lords by comparison. Again, they were nice guys. In “Don’t Cross the River,” when they sang “ride my train,” I imagine the symbolism was much different than it was for say, Foghat. Nonetheless, I can’t listen to these albums without imagining some corduroyed dude with a Bob Ross perm working the hi-fi and the fireplace and a fresh jug of burgundy, hoping to get the Jordaches off his date but not be a dick about it if he doesn’t and all they end up doing is talking till the sun comes up again.

In fairness to America, writing is hard – and from what I gather songwriting is even harder – and once a band is firmly established as a punchline or four-letter word among critics and listeners, what emerges is a bias toward the source no matter the quality of the material. Imagine, for instance, that not America but Paul McCartney had written “Sister Golden Hair” with Wings. It’s likely those same listeners would hold it up as further proof of McCartney’s infallible genius. Same goes for “Ventura Highway” were you to switch out Dewey Bunnell’s name for Paul Simon’s. “Lonely People” may be the musical equivalent of a Hallmark greeting card, which is why it hit No. 1 on the easy listening chart in 1975, but is the song’s DNA that much different, that much worse than say, “Our House” or “Bridge Over Troubled Water?” It isn’t, and that’s an opinion I’m presenting as fact. Ditto my assertion that America’s oddly compelling studio albums aren’t nearly as bad as Rolling Stone wants you to think they are, and that if Nick Drake had written “Tin Man” instead of America – and it’s not hard to imagine the song fitting comfortably on Side 1 of Bryter Layter or in bare-bones form on Pink Moon – Wes Anderson would have used it in a film by now and you would marvel again and again at how effectively it mirrors the pathos of Bill Murray’s character.

Much of the America catalog trades in maudlin sentimentality, and that’s okay with me because I’ve always been emotionally predisposed to maudlin sentimentality, even if sometimes I try to hide it behind black jeans and Doc Martens. But there’s no hiding my affinity for America’s Greatest Hits. Maybe this all reads like another “defense of a guilty pleasure” piece, but there’s no guilt here and there never was – not in the way I wasn’t always forthright about owning a Sting solo record at 15. These songs have traveled with me since my technicolor-fantasy toddler years, when “A Horse With No Name” first imprinted on me, and the beauty of our ears is, they don’t distinguish between five stars or zero stars, they don’t care what critics or kids at school think, and anyway, even if we were a statistical anomaly among ’90s teenagers, listening to America was a genuine shared experience among certain friends. Every time I hear “Ventura Highway,” it’s a journey through the past to the half-hour road trip Aaron, Kelly and I took to Wadsworth to watch Darren’s wrestling match, and all the way there and back we listened to History at high volume, singing along in imperfect three-part harmony. Kelly was a year older than us and the closest thing Cuyahoga Falls High School had to a hippie at the time, and she was cool and interesting and had a car. (Years later, long after we graduated, Aaron and Kelly would reconnect, move to South Carolina and start their own beautifully unique life together.) U.S. Route 224 is not the Pacific Coast Highway, but for three Midwestern kids who had yet to step foot in California, the good tunes and taste of independence the drive afforded us on a cold and colorless Ohio winter night were enough to transport us to that mythical land of sunshine “where the days are longer, the nights are stronger than moonshine.” The free wind may not have been blowing through our hair, but we certainly felt free, and regardless of the source, isn’t that what music is about?

Happy Record Store Day.

Enjoy this week’s episode? Support independent writing and consider contributing to The Suburban Abyss tip jar, sponsoring an upcoming episode or telling a friend. Thank you for being here.