When Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell and Dan Peek decided to start a band in the ’60s, they were just a trio of teens from the U.S.A. living in England, where their fathers were stationed at the United States Air Force Base near London. Appropriately, they named their band America…and took inspiration from the U.S. soldiers who shared their stories with them for one of their most successful songs, “Sandman.”
As Bunnell explained in the booklet for the Highway: 30 Years of America box set, he based the lyrics for “Sandman” on his conversations with airmen at the base returning from Vietnam.
“They’d buy us a beer at the commissary and tell us stories about the war,” Bunnell recalled. “We weren’t very political or very military. But ‘Sandman’ came out of our eyes being opened to the fact that these guys weren’t much older than us.”
“One of the things that I vividly remember hearing one guy say is that he hardly ever slept in Vietnam — he was afraid to go to sleep,” he continued. “So there’s the line, ‘You’ve been running from the man who goes by the name of the Sandman’ — you don’t want to go to sleep because you might be killed. I thought, What a lousy way to live.“
The lyrics paint a harrowing picture of what those soldiers went through:
‘Cause I understand, you’ve been running from the man
That goes by the name of the Sandman
He flies the sky like an eagle in the eye
Of a hurricane that’s abandoned
Ain’t the years gone by fast
I suppose you have missed them
Oh, I almost forgot to ask
Did you hear of my enlistment?
Funny, I’ve been there
And you’ve been here
We ain’t had no time to drink that beer
His time in England as a young man deeply affected Bunnell, as well as his bandmates, as he explained in a 2021 interview with Glide.
“As you can imagine us, being American teenagers thrust into a whole new cultural change, and in my case, it was an extension of my family because my father was American and my mother was British,” Bunnell said. “We were over in England because our families’ fathers were in the US Air Force stationed in London. We were then in an American school for US citizens and military kids — literally a melting pot of us from around the U.S.”
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“We all bonded in a very unique way, as none of us had normal support groups like we would have had in the U.S.,” he continued. “So certainly, if there’s anything that one finds in common with each other, you really grab on to it. We were guitar strummers and very excited to meet each other, find out which songs each guy knew, and so forth. Basically, Gerry had a band called the Corporation and I was kind of an interloper, listening and introducing myself to them. So, anyways, one thing led to another. The long and the short of it was when we all began writing our own songs and music, that really changed the formula, and that was a bit later when we graduated in 1969.”
After graduation, they “realized we all had a little stash of songs we’d written,” Bunnell added. In 1972, America released their self-titled debut album, which included “Sandman.”
“Sandman” wasn’t released as a single; “Horse With No Name” and “I Need You” were the big chart-toppers from that first record, which ended up going platinum. But “Sandman” ended up getting tons of radio airplay anyway, bringing the band’s signature harmonies — and one soldier’s memories — to an ever-widening audience of listeners.
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