Gerry Beckley, The TVD Interview

One of the running tenets that makes up the current incarnation of America the band’s creative creed is the idea that while Dewey Bunnell writes the group’s “outdoor songs,” like “A Horse with No Name,” “Ventura Highway,” and “Tin Man,” his bandmate and creative partner for the last fifty-one years, Gerry Beckley writes “I Need You,” “Daisy Jane,” and “Sister Golden Hair”—the “indoor songs.” Possessing a penchant for self-examination and introspection, Beckley favors the navigational terrain of the ever-elusive human heart—and its frenemy the mind—and the moments when they do and do not work together when carving out compositions.

America (originally a trio until band member Dan Peek departed the group in ’77) has left quite a number of ’70s-So-Cal-and-beyond culture-defining songs in its wake since debut hit single “A Horse with No Name” arrived in late 1971 in the UK, and in early 1972 in the US. And the band has led a corresponding road-life to keep such a legacy and long discography alive, having celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in the strangest of all last years, 2020, which was accompanied by the release of an all-encompassing boxed set, an authorized biography penned by yours truly, and a fiftieth anniversary multi-national tour, which has of course been delayed.

Gerry’s compositional character, like that of his bandmate Dewey, is an interesting one. As a songwriter his philosophy is in the school of “write ten to get two” good songs—which not surprisingly has resulted in a plethora of material since he began writing songs as a teenager. Although America has continued to record and release some quality studio albums in recent years, Gerry Beckley’s work has also led to his intermittently releasing solo studio recordings since 1995 with Van Go Gan.

Last month, Beckley released a solo best-of through Blu Elan Records entitled Keeping the Light On, which spawned an associated release of Beckley covers by an all-female cast of Blu Elan artists entitled Watching the Time. Available digitally, on CD, and on transparent double vinyl, the compilation is comprised of fifteen of Gerry’s favorite solo songs from his seven past solo records and five newly recorded tracks.

Keeping the Light On, taken as a whole, stands as a thorough overview of Beckley’s musical output as a solo artist, displaying in full his artistic totems: twin lyrical focuses of time and its passage, and romantic love and its myriad of complications and possibilities for ultimate bliss or total annihilation; intricate studio production; and of course, his McCartney-esque gift for crafting melody.

In a fun, lively, and enlightening chat with Beckley from his home in Sydney, Australia, we learn more about Keeping the Light On – the Best of Gerry Beckley’s genesis, Gerry’s long-standing working relationship with the home recording studio, and how his compositional career’s lyrical theme of time is about as universal as it gets.

What led to your new release of this greatest hits compilation, Keeping the Light On? Had you been planning it for a while, or was this a more recent decision to make a compilation record of your work, plus new songs?

Kirk Pasich at Blu Elan had come to me over a year ago and asked if I would consider it. They (Blu Elan) have two of my solo projects, and the last two have been with this label. So it meant, would I be OK with opening up the access to the other ones? And it was not a tough decision; I said I’d love to. And you’ve got to pick the tunes, you’ve got to go through seven albums. There’s a lot of stuff to pick from. I’m not opposed to including other people’s opinions, but it really comes down to me considering what do I want to put on it? That’s kind of interesting to go through and see which ones have stood the test of time. I’m not really sure what the criteria is. But it’s neat. And it’s nice it’s a double vinyl.

Can you speak a bit more to how you chose that particular 20 that you ended up with?

For the years that I’ve been doing these albums, I usually have more songs than I need. And so the compilation was kind of a similar thing. But each album had included 10 or 12 or so of already selected songs. So it wasn’t like, “I don’t think this is up to snuff” or something. It was really more a case of, to put it mildly, what do I think are the strongest selections?

So, it’s a mixture of things—there are certain ones that everybody agreed on. And then I thought of certain ones that I really loved and wasn’t sure they’d gotten any attention at all, let alone enough attention. When I used to talk at Loyola (Marymount University, in Los Angeles), I’d say that when we used to make an album, which is how I still approach it, what starts side one, what ends side one, what starts side two—all of that went out the window when we switched to CDs because people might not get to track twelve. You don’t want to close the second side with the big killer song if nobody’s ever going to hear it.

So we ended up with this, unfortunately, really counterintuitive thing where you front load with what people agreed might be the strongest stuff. So the album was with diminishing returns—here’s a great pop album and it all kind of turns to shite or it fades in intensity. So that’s kind of how I approach it, an album listening experience. I wanted to make the whole thing listenable.

The songs taken from other solo albums—have they been remixed or reproduced in any way or are they direct takes?

There are five songs that weren’t included before, and those had to be addressed completely from scratch, and some of them were rebuilt and recut almost. But most of the other stuff was mastered. And because it was mastered with (America’s archivist) Jeff Larson’s help, there wasn’t a lot of, you know, “We better go back in and now’s our chance to fix that.” There was never really any mastering issues, even from Van Go Gan. I was pretty happy with how the tracks sounded. Now, once you put them all together there might be some uneven levels and things that do need to be ironed out. I leave that to the experts. But there was certainly no remix.

You’ve been using the home studio concept for a while. Do you remember any particular “wow moments” that you experienced when you first embraced the home studio tactic that made you see how different it was from working in a bigger studio in the ’70s and ’80s? What are the pros and the cons?

I did. I’m one of the few people who still works and records, who’s had a home studio almost the whole time. Since ‘72 when we first moved to LA, I had a home studio and it was a four track—quarter inch. But I’ve watched over the years how these things have evolved and there are obviously milestone things—when you switch from analog to digital—that affected home studio systems as much as it affected all the professional places.

Because I play most of my instruments myself, you can’t hang the mics and do the rhythm section, and the drummer, and the bass player, and combine them all. You can’t do stuff like that. You’re playing everything. So very early albums—the reason I call them early albums is because they were the first of these “somebody playing everything” albums. Emitt Rhodes, the first couple of Emitt Rhodes albums, he played everything.

So what do you learn about this? First of all, I’m not saying click tracks weren’t available. I suppose you could have had a metronome quietly or something. But far more important is, you start to understand about generation loss and about if I’m going to bounce these tracks to one, they’re going to go down a generation. They’re going to lose some of the quality. So you would use the things that were going to be featured, or the most important, you would do them last so they wouldn’t suffer generation loss.

So those were the things that I learned over the years, tricks about how to do that. And that morphed from year to year. One of the final things was when we all got home digital studios, it used to be that if we’re just recording this at a quarter inch, it’s not going to be great. Emitt Rhodes had, I think, an eight track, eventually a one-inch, eight track in his house. And the McCartney album, the first McCartney album, that was a half inch, four track, I think. Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush—some of these home recordings that were done were really an education to me because I’m listening to the songs and I love these albums. They are some of the most pivotal albums to me, Gold Rush in particular. But also as a producer, I’m listening to how to do that technically. I call them gags, you learn these gags.

Much of your solo work and some of your America compositions too, investigate the connection between time and the human experience. How perhaps some of our best moments manage to transcend time and exist in a different place—but that essentially we’re limited by time. You’ve said that time is a challenge, not an enemy. But when a composer like yourself is captivated by that idea, a way of addressing that issue is through music, because music uses time, literally. It’s potentially a way of combating that anxiety around endless time or limited time, and instead using time, taking it for yourself and creating a song with it.

Well, it’s one of those great universal topics. It translates in any language. I was watching a YouTube clip of a guy I’m kind of interested in who plays strange instruments, different instruments. There’s an instrument called a mandocello, which is basically a mandolin for double strings. But mandocello is on a much bigger scale than a mandolin. So there’s the mandolin and mandocello and it is the most beautiful richer, deep sound.

And a guy who is obviously far more talented than I am was demoing it for this particular record store. And he started playing the Bach cello suites, because it’s kind of the same thing, four strings tuned to fifths. And I thought, “God, there is something universal about time there.” My thought was that it’s wonderful how well that stuff can translate, not just from decade to decade, but from century to century.

Now, that doesn’t work for lyrics. And if you’re a songwriter with lyrics now, you have a much different element, because if everything was instrumental for all of us, like “Classical Gas” or “Telstar” or some of the great instrumentals—the idea of “Boy, you could never say that nowadays” wouldn’t enter into it. I use the Brian Wilson line of his song “I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man.” Obviously as a teenager, you absolutely have every right to say and sing that line, but it doesn’t come off well if you’re thirty five or forty or so. “Get over it dude.” It’s a long-winded way to say yes, I’ve used that as a topic.

Our joke is—you’ve heard it many times—I write the indoor songs, and Dewey writes the outdoor. But I’m not as good as he is at articulating that beautiful expanse of visual beauty and stuff. I’m a little bit more of an internalizer. Therefore—and I don’t mean to say it’s better by having more thought—but there are usually direct or literal thoughts as opposed to observations and descriptions or something.

We include “Watching the Time Go By” on this album which I did with Robert (Lamm) and Carl (Wilson), and that was written in the ’80s. And even in the ’80s when I wrote the song, the line was “I was a child of the ’50s” and Robert and Carl said “Maybe we ought to change that to the ’60s.” We all were children of the ’50s, but they weren’t quite as ready to embrace it as I was (laughs). So that reflects time and how you address it.

“Watching the Time” is one of your most literally autobiographical songs—directly commenting here and there on your own life, similar to your song “1960” on America’s Silent Letter album. There’s an element of that going on here which directly references the decade. For instance the line “scarred by constant departures.” As a child growing up in an Air Force family, that was a major theme for you.

“Wounded severely at an early age.”

What a way to start out!

I always like to start with a big up tempo theme in my songs, too. “Tried to make it Sunday, but I got so damn depressed.” As Neil Young said, he wasn’t flat, “That’s my sound.”

In some ways you’re one of the most realistic songwriters around, emotionally speaking—articulating emotional realism.

Well, try and write your head and heart and hopefully if something’s going on there and you at all have the ability of your craft, then you’re going to find a way to convey. I mean, obviously, the turn of a phrase is a simple thing to say, but very tricky to come out. And some people, the Van Dyke Parks of the world, and Tom Waits, it’s just in their conversation, and as a result, their music reflects that.

In Simon and Garfunkel’s song called “America,” what’s unique about it—there’s not a rhyme in the whole song. People don’t always catch that, and the reason they don’t catch it is they’re so involved with the beauty of the message in the song—turns of phrase so incredibly good, it doesn’t even get around to “But that doesn’t rhyme.” It’s just inconsequential.

“Emma” originally on Van Go Gan, might be one of your best pop compositions. And it also has this ’90s alt-rock sound in its production like a Matthew Sweet record or a Marshall Crenshaw record with that kind of guitar.

Sometimes the simplest is the best. Occam’s razor—the simplest decision is more often than not the right one. The right song can stand on its own two feet. I’m as guilty as everybody is of layering up and adding more and more. “What about strings?” But sometimes it all works out pretty simply. I’ve got a few songs like that in this batch. I’m really intentionally trying to keep them simple.

The British speaking voice at the beginning of the original cut of “Emma”…

…is Di Farrelly. She was a lady who lived in the same village that I lived in in Sussex, England. I had a house for 30-some years in Sussex, in the country. When Di heard through my mum or somebody that I was a musician, successful musician, she started to leave these cassettes at my door. She was a frustrated songwriter, a married lady in her 60s or so. And she had a little setup in her house, a little cassette machine and an organ with a little wooden box, drum machines. So she would send me, not every time, but if I went to England every couple of months, there would be a cassette there.

And they were these lovely tapes that weren’t just “Here’s my latest batch.” There would be, “Hello Gerry. It’s Di Farrelly here.” People thought it was me doing a voice or something. She’d play a song, and then she’d go, “This next one is about whether to go on or whether not to go on and what to do.” The unfortunate aspect of all of this was, that as much as I appreciated her enthusiasm and stuff, the tapes were really a gem for her comments more than they were for the songs.

So we then took all of the cassettes and transferred them digitally and separated all of her talk and we made it into a monologue about her life. “Heaven is Very Beautiful” is a song that we assembled from her cassettes that she gave to me. Bobby Woods, who is the Les Deux Love Orchestra, is a fascinating guy, and I’m on quite a few of those albums. He was in the group that was the house band at Les Deux Cafe—this is all going to get a bit dated—it was a wonderfully hip place in a parking lot of a Hollywood building. And Michele Lamy was the matriarch of this place. Really one of the great restaurants in town. And they had a house band which was Bobby Woods and Larry Klein on bass and stuff, and that became the Les Deux Love Orchestra. I highly support looking them up and going to some wonderful records that they made.

I was glad to see that your song “Norman” is on this record. I know it’s a fan favorite. A lot of people remember that from one of America’s live concert discs, but it was never released as an America studio recording. I remember you telling me how you had played it for Sir George Martin, who produced you for years, and he told you how Norman was a term for a British guy.

He said, “No, you can’t call a song, ‘Norman’.” Like they say in England, “Oh, he’s Norman.” He just kind of shot it down right away. And as you know, I’m never short of songs. So if I came in and that was one of my ten, I was happy to just shove it aside. But we had been playing it for the summer, so at the time we were presenting it as one of the new ones we were going to record soon. But I did it with Jeff Larson years later, and then we went back and presented it with me doing it. So that’s why it’s on here. It’s about Norman Bel Geddes, the industrial designer. I was a huge fan of his work. So, you know, better late than never.

Didn’t you mention that Jimmy Webb liked him also and you guys used to talk about him and his work?

That’s exactly right, Jimmy. Yeah, he loved him and probably still does. Jimmy’s a fascinating guy for many reasons, but he has a real aesthetic sense that goes beyond just music; he’s into design and things.

Similar to how you’ve always been captivated by certain models of planes and cars and things, knowing the stats of technology.

You suck this stuff up as you’re moving through life, I guess. And some of it you spew out and it’s gone forever, and other stuff sticks. Like when I got into Norman Bel Geddes, there’re some lovely illustrations and pictures of his models from that era. He did futurist kind of ocean liners, big jumbo planes and things. And they were all just fascinating, the kind of thing that would look almost out of Metropolis now, looking like some ’20s version of the future. He did one ocean liner that almost looks like a submarine. I remember it was just really beautiful, and his daughter was Barbara Bel Geddes, the actress.

In “Calling You,” your vocal delivery is almost hard to listen to. It’s very raw and emotional. There’s a desolate quality and it kind of fits the desert sort of atmosphere that the song’s lyrics touch upon. In a way it’s reminiscent of themes on Joni Mitchell’s Hejira album.

“Calling You” is actually a song by Bob Telson (and performed by Jevetta Steele) for the movie Bagdad Café. I have a song called “Calling,” which was on 5 Mile Road, a lovely tune, and I’m proud of that one. But we also ended up covering “Calling You” years ago. Bagdad Café is a lovely independent film with Jack Palance about a little cafe on what’s left of Route 66, which has been overgrown and redirected and stuff. But there are people who follow the original—and if you get out there, there was this place and it wasn’t called Bagdad Cafe, it was called the Sidewinder or something.

But I went there because I knew about it from the movie, and they said, “Oh, well we’re famous now because of the movie and we’re going to call it the Bagdad Cafe.” So they changed it, I think. But apart from being a wonderful independent film, it had this incredible theme song called “Calling You.” And for us musicians, when you hear something where—it’s a hard thing to put chords together that you don’t always hear together, that also sound right. Because the reason that certain things fit is you’ve heard it before; this is what popular music is based on. Certain things are good to the ear. They just flow.

But in this song, there’s some really lovely semi-tonal stuff that—it was one of those things when the minute I heard it, and I never do this—I had to learn it. I had to go out and figure what’s going on here musically? Because it wasn’t part of my DNA. So I learned the song, and I cut the song. And then we recut it again with producer John Fields for this version on Keeping the Light On. And he had to learn it because I played—it’s a very articulated piano tone, this eighth-note piano structure. If I had to do it today I’d have to start from scratch. It was tricky. People who know the movie, they know the song instantly. There are a few other lovely versions of it.

How did you settle upon the term “heart slave” for one of your new songs? There’s a bit of a tongue-in-cheek quality to it.

I wish I had a better answer, but it just was one of those phonetic things that seemed to work at the time before I was two or three minutes into writing it. I’m proud of that song. But I always try and explain, at the risk of over-analyzing, that song was as much an experiment with combining different sounds. There are all kinds of gongs and timpanis and different things in the construction of it instead of just two guitars and a bass and drum. So the outro, for example, has bagpipes and sitars. You don’t ever hear bagpipes and sitars together, but it works because they’re both droning instruments. I have a palette of sounds that I like; mellotron, flutes, and things. If I get a little bit too corralled in the corner, it’s nice to branch out a little bit.

One of my favorite uses of the mellotron sound is in that Beatles song on Magical Mystery Tour…

“Flying.” The mellotron was a revolution when it came about, kind of like the Fairlight was, when somebody invented this way to sample everything. Nowadays, it’s pretty common. I’ve got full orchestras, BBC Symphony and stuff here in my studio. And in a sense, it steers you back towards what do you really want to do. Because you have everything at your disposal. I can play instruments. I can’t play horns; I’m adequate at the other ones, but I don’t have an accordion here because I’ve got wonderful accordion patches. Pump organs, all of these things, we now have everything at our disposal.

It really comes full circle back to “What are you trying to say?” Because if you get into the “Well, let me see what my options are,” you’ll be here for the next two days going through the thousand sounds. I make the analogy that when I grew up in England we only had three channels on the TV. So what are you going to watch on BBC 2 or ITV? And in the States we had 13, the dial. If you look at old vintage TVs, there were 13 choices.

So the dynamic of “What’s on? Well, let’s see…” It wasn’t that hard to go around 13 and say, “We’ll watch Gunsmoke,” you know. But when that switched to 246 channels—some of the first cable options had 246 channels—you could no longer do “Let’s see what’s on.” It’d take you the rest of the evening to go through them. And now there are thousands of channels. So my point there is that it has forced us to come back to what are you trying to say, what are you trying to accomplish? Because the notion of “Let me just see what my choices are” is now endless.

Keeping the Light On, the title track, is reminiscent of a vow to keep showing up in your life every day—for the theoretical relationship that’s alluded to in the song, or just in general, for yourself. It’s reminiscent of Darkness on the Edge of Town by Bruce Springsteen, the title track on that album. It’s like the self-pledge that you intend to keep.

It’s lent itself into this compilation because the original song on Horizontal Fall really didn’t have anything to do with a compilation or a “greatest hits” or what’s the bigger picture about. It was a song with a pretty, pretty clear message. But in addition, I always send this stuff to Cameron Crowe who is a friend of mine and he said “Oh, that’s my favorite, I love that song.” I was so happy to be able to say not only are we going to use it on this record, but it’s going to be the title.

And there is a parallel project Blu Elan’s released called Watching the Time, which is all of these different ladies covering some of my songs. That comes with the album, and it’s really lovely because they’re all different artists. So the constant is that they pick songs of mine. It’s fascinating to hear all different production ideas and different voices and ages. That’s really been kind of a treat, because some of that’s getting airplay. “Sister Golden Hair” by Chelsea Williams is all over KCRW and stuff now. Which I don’t think my cut would have ever showed up on; I think I would have been a bit too mainstream for stations like that. I think it’s an honor reaching a new audience. That’s cool. And to get back to the talk about time, Watching the Time… I think Kirk picked the title for that compilation and I said “It works for me.”

Your catchy song “Self Image” addresses the concept of self-image where there’s the superficial end of it, the image that we all construct and present to the public, and really how we think of the role we play in the world. But there’s also that deeper self-image, the real one that nobody outside us can get to. Your song really ties those two seemingly opposing ideas together, which I was impressed by. And it also made me think of the concepts which I address in the America biography, about how your band struggled somewhat with finding or defining an image of what the band behind the logo was. I quote a snippet from a 1975 LA Times article by Cameron Crowe, in which you and Dewey are talking about how you’re frustrated with your image in the public eye. The band’s records are selling great, you’re doing really well, but your personas are separated from it somehow. So it made me think of that idea of self-image too. It’s like a PR concept in a way.

Well, that does go on professionally. We’ve been going through a big concert we did in ‘75 at the Hollywood Bowl with George Martin and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And it’s a really nice moment in time because Dan (Peek) was still in the group. Most of it had occurred by then—“Sister (Golden Hair)” and “Daisy (Jane)” were in the show. So a lot of lovely reasons to make the effort and try and get the recording presentable. But all the pictures—there’s the three of us in these white Nudie suits—you know, it’s all the embroidery and we’re all out there. So it’s like going back to your high school pictures now.

The production on “Self Image” has an ’80s quality that works quite well.

It was even more ’80s when I turned it over to (John) Fields, it was basically almost Oberheim, “Shock the Monkey” kind of stuff. And we thought, “OK, we’ve got to boil some of that out.” So we replayed the bass. He’s a very talented guy, John Fields—we played a few of the instruments again and it still sounds totally ’80s. But in that song, there’s “Put a shine on your shirt, polish your pants” and everything and I think all of that has unfortunately played right into its direction because everybody is so self-obsessed with all of this now, with social media. It means more now than it ever did.

And just the ’80s, when I think of the America album cover of Perspective from ‘84 where you and Dewey are sporting your blazers in front of that shiny office building. The cover captures that same slick aura that was permeating that decade. The “Wall Street” decade.

Miami Vice.

Do you have a favorite greatest hits record released by another artist? Like Best of Bee Gees or something?

That’s it, that’s my favorite one. Because I was such a Gibb brothers fan, that first one, before all of the disco and everything. It’s got “Mining Disaster” and “Words” and all the lovely songs. “Holiday,” which was one of their first singles, first songs ever. So I go back to listen to those, because I love the tunes. They’re very simple, and sometimes our earliest, naive work is our best work, whether we like it or not.

Because as Francis Ford Coppola said when he was asked about why his daughter was in a sense making better films than he was at the time, he answered along the lines of, she was making all kinds of technical errors that he wouldn’t make. He was trying to find a way to wrap it, basically saying that when you’re younger, you’re a little bit more, “I don’t give a damn” or something. You’re not sitting there stressing over everything. I love that. And I love that early Gibb stuff. That’s really beautiful.

Have you seen the new documentary How Can You Mend a Broken Heart that came out a couple of months ago?

Yeah, that was good. These stories are all pretty sad. It doesn’t matter who you bring up, because the arc—and in particular when you’re dealing with popular music which is kind of a young guys’ game—it’s very difficult for us olders to be continually relevant. So my line about that is, it’s very hard to get these latter chapters right. Take some thought and some consideration, and there’s a million ways to do it.

But the reason I bring it up is, one thing that I am sure that I don’t want or I would advise people about is, just don’t add bitterness to it. Because there’s an unfortunate dynamic that happens when we’re all big and more famous and we’re cruising along. I don’t know why people can’t understand that this ain’t going to last. This is going to be over at some point, so get ready. And I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer, but it’s just all part of life. So as you get older, I think that’s the challenge—how do we handle these latter chapters? And at the moment, I couldn’t be happier. My kids are healthy. I’m still working. I’ve got a greatest hits album here, America had a big boxed set out last year, which was a 50 year summation. And our biography, your book.

Is there one of your solo albums that you feel best represents your compositional character other than this one? Or would you say this is the definitive because it takes from different albums?

Now the other ones—even though every one of them was recorded over time and it’s never a case of this album reflects just last year—but of the solo albums, Unfortunate Casino was far more current. That was a majority of stuff that I had written at that time and I really love that album. But it’s a darker record. It was a rougher time emotionally for me, and the songs were really successful, in my head. And I’m very happy with the work.

But I think that I would probably pick Horizontal Fall, because just everything kind of came together on that album. It starts with a lovely instrumental, and it ends with this beautiful “Somewhere Somehow,” which includes my friends from Low, the indie band. I’ve got a lot of fond memories from that album, and so that would probably be my choice.

Do you take a certain stance on vinyl records? Your new one is being released in a cool looking vinyl package. Do you have an attachment to vinyl as a listener or are you more open to all kinds of tech?

Both, in that I’m totally open to all technologies and there are really wonderful things about CDs, as much as I berate them. But, we grew up with vinyl. My and I think everybody’s memories, just like for most kids—whatever music they heard between the ages of 10 and 20—doesn’t matter if it was on vinyl or cassettes or whatever. That’s going to be imprinted on their souls. And in our case, that included the whole ritual of vinyl, blowing the dust off the needle. “We’re going to sit down, and we’re going to listen to side two of Abbey Road…” or something.

And it was a far more lengthy experience, it wasn’t just “Let me hear the first 30 seconds of this and then move on.” So I think of vinyl, not just purely in terms of “Oh, it’s much warmer. And don’t you love the sound?” which I do. I totally get all that. But it was also much bigger: the graphics, the artwork for the album covers, the lovely 12-inch look—that stuff doesn’t translate.

There was a stat released the other day where for the first time ever, vinyl outsold CDs. Vinyl is back.