America
Highway - 30 Years of America
Rhino

I would like to propose a wonderful collection that just came out: Highway - 30 Years of America. This is an extraordinary 3-CD release that presents and highlights America's 30-year career in a wonderfully informative package. The box contains an amply illustrated book that recounts America's story from their London, England meeting and beginnings to their recent American Gramaphone albums and almost everything in between.

I still remember the first time that I heard America's Horse with No Name in Athens, Greece. It was a 45 RPM that a friend of mine had managed to stick on the record player, somewhere between Alice Cooper's School's Out and Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water. I was immediately impressed by America's ability to create a new form of rock that had, in its sparse simplicity, the same force and punch as the hard-rock groups in vogue then.

The group followed their first success with hit after hit. Songs like I Need You, Sandman, Ventura Highway, Tin Man, Sister Golden Hair and others have helped define the musical horizon of the 70's. Somewhere at the end of the 70's, I lost track of the group thinking that they had disbanded. Instead, this box comes to set the record right by presenting a body of work that is as exciting and fresh as the one produced during the group's early years.

This is truly a box for the America aficionado as well as the person who enjoys good music that spans a generation.

Copyright © 2000 Stavros Moschopoulos