When Gerry Beckley's band America scored their first No. 1 hit single, he still wasn't old enough to drive to their gigs.
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Beckley formed the band with friends Dewey Bunnell and Dan Peek in London in 1970.
"We were gigging around London and we were sons of American servicemen living over there," Beckley says.
"Naming the band America was just a little way to tell the backstory of the group at that time.
"There were a lot of bands playing pubs in London so we thought 'call it America and it'll be the first step in describing one of the things that made us a little bit unique'.
"Of course when we got back the States and toured, the posters said 'direct from England - America'. So it all got a little bit complicated."
Beckley was 16 when the band formed and, a year later, they recorded their first album. That album included a little song called Horse With No Name and both the single and album went to No. 1 in the United States and several other countries.
There he was, just 17 and his band was on top of both the album and singles charts.
"It was pretty cool," Beckley drily admits.
"Teens can get just as excited as grown-ups. But if anything we were just a little bit jaded too. When you're young and you put a record out and you're all excited, it's not until it goes in the tank and you try again and again and again that you get a dose of how hard it truly is.
"In our case we put out a record and both the album and single went to No. 1 and we were like 'yeah, that's how it's done'.
"We certainly paid our dues following that. Not every record was a No. 1 record from there. When you start at the top it's very hard to follow that up."
Which isn't to say they struggled; there were more than a few top 10 hits after that. Songs like I Need You, Ventura Highway, Tin Man and Sister Golden Hair helped keep them in the game for more than four decades.
This year the band celebrates its 45th anniversary - a milestone which wasn't even on its radar back in those early days gigging around London.
"There's a joke I say on stage that when we were 17 and 18 and putting it altogether, 45 years wasn't really part of plan A," Beckley says.
"You don't really look that far ahead. There was a famous quote from Mick Jagger who said quite publicly, 'obviously we can't be doing this when we're 40, can we?'
"But had we looked around at the time at people like Fats Domino. Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry, these people weren't stopping. They were turning 40 and 50 and they were still carrying on.
"The elements of rock and roll are things like youth and rebellion and they just don't seem like characteristics you would carry on into your later years.
"But, God forbid, if you treat it like an art, artists carry on throughout their career if they are fortunate."
Having a hit album and single right out of the gate made America seem like they came out of nowhere, but Beckley says there was a lot of work that went to get them to the stage of releasing the debut album.
"There's a Malcolm Gladwell book where he talks about people who appear to be overnight successes," he says.
"But his point is that if you look, almost to a person they've done what he calculated to be 10,000 hours of preliminary work. In my case I started piano when I was three and I played a lot of instruments non-stop from that age and added guitar at 10. So I certainly did my time, it just wasn't on the record books."
That first hit - Horse With No Name - has resonated with a lot of people. Some have queried the banality of lyrics such as "the heat was hot" and "there were plants and birds and rocks and things".
Others have felt there was some deeper meaning to the song, while some were sure the horse of the title was a reference to heroin.
While bandmate Dewey Bunnell wrote the song, Beckley says he's heard his bandmate explain in interviews what the song is about that he knows what's going on.
"It's basically a literal trip through the desert, he's just used this horse as a vehicle," Beckley says. "The irony is for all of its cryptic, surreal stuff, all this 'hey what's he on about?', you come to the chorus and its all 'la-la-la lalala" and the entire world starts singing along.
"I've seen bullrings in Ecuador where 20,000 people start singing along."
And that talk about it being an ode to heroin?
"It had nothing to do with that, although it was banned in certain places." he says.
"That song's had a great life even recently. It was in an episode of Breaking Bad called Caballo sin Nombre, which is Horse With No Name in Spanish. It was the opening track in the fantastic American Hustle movie and it's featured in a Toyota ad all through Europe."
Beckley views Horse as the "vehicle that took us on this journey" but added there were other hits. They've been played on classic radio stations for decades but Beckley says a lot of people don't realise it's America until they come to a live show.
"If you come to see a show it's virtually a whole evening of familiar material," he says. "It's nice to see the looks on people's faces, because there's a little bit of the 'oh I forgot they did that song' look. They might know Ventura Highway and Sister Golden Hair, but when you hear a dozen or so in a row and you know every one of them almost word for word, that's quite a good feeling."
Playing the same songs night after night isn't necessarily boring, Beckley says. Rather, the 90 minutes on stage is viewed as a place to relax in a day full of the hectic pace of touring.
But if you want to know how Beckley feels about the gig, just check to see if he's smiling after the first song.
"We start with Tin Man usually and I can tell what kind of evening it's going to be," he says.
"We'll start playing Tin Man and sometimes it seems to take 20 minutes to play the song and you think 'oh God, this is going to be a long night'. Other times, whether it's the chemistry in the room or whatever, it just flies by in about 30 seconds.
"Those are usually a bit more fun."
■ America perform at Anita's Theatre, Thirroul, on May 7.