1982 · Behind the Songs
An English hitmaker, a glittering video and the song that put America back on the radio.
By 1982, America was in trouble. The trio was a duo — Dan Peek had departed in 1977 — and the hits had dried up. The band’s last Top 40 single, “Today’s the Day,” was six years in the past, and the soft-rock sound they had helped invent was being crowded out by new wave, MTV and a new generation of studio gloss. Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell were still writing, still touring, still harmonizing as beautifully as ever. But the radio had moved on, and the question hanging over them was the one that haunts every seventies act in a new decade: does anybody still need us?
The answer arrived from an unlikely magician: Russ Ballard. The English singer-songwriter — formerly of Argent, and the pen behind hits like “God Gave Rock and Roll to You” — was one of the era’s great hired guns, a writer who could conjure a chorus out of thin air. Rupert Perry, the A&R vice president at Capitol Records, had an idea: what if Ballard wrote something specifically for America? Ballard delivered two songs, “You Can Do Magic” and “Jody,” and then did something even more valuable — he produced the sessions himself, returning to record production after a four-year hiatus. The band that had once defined California soft rock was about to be rebuilt in an English studio, by an outsider.
The making of the record tells you how complete Ballard’s takeover was. Beckley and Bunnell — the entire membership of America — appear only on the vocal track, singing Ballard’s song in their famous blend. Every instrument except the drums was played by Ballard himself; the drums were handled by Willie Leacox, the band’s longtime touring drummer. It was, in effect, a Russ Ballard record wearing an America costume. And yet the costume fit. Those harmonies could only belong to one band, and Ballard was smart enough to build the whole glittering edifice around them.
The magic worked. Released in August 1982, “You Can Do Magic” climbed the Billboard Hot 100 all autumn and peaked at number 8 in October, where it held for five weeks — America’s first Top 10 hit in six years and, as it turned out, their last. The parent album, View from the Ground, rose to number 41 on the Billboard Top 200: the first album by America as a duo to reach the chart’s upper half. For a band that had been written off as a seventies relic, it was a genuine resurrection, engineered almost entirely by a man who had never been in the band.
It helped that the song arrived with a video made for the new medium. The “You Can Do Magic” clip opens with a gloved hand tossing glitter into the air; the image pixelates and resolves into the band performing amid drifting clouds, while disembodied hands flip playing cards in classic close-up magic. It was literal-minded and completely charming — a magic song with actual magic tricks. In 1982, with MTV barely a year old and hungry for content, a video like that was a passport back to relevance. America, the most un-televisual of bands, had stumbled into the video age on a handful of glitter.
The song even found a second life in an unexpected dugout. In 1982, “You Can Do Magic” was adopted as the opening theme for regionally televised Baltimore Orioles games — a year before the Orioles won the World Series. There is something fitting about a comeback song becoming the soundtrack to a team on the verge of glory. All across the mid-Atlantic, the song meant summer evenings, the crackle of a broadcast about to begin, the feeling that something good was coming. A pop hit can be many things; few get to be the sound of baseball.
Ballard’s rescue mission extended to one more album. He produced 1983’s Your Move, which gave America a final Top 40 entry with “The Border” — and then the moment passed. The mid-eighties belonged to younger hitmakers, and America settled into the long, honorable second act that so many of their peers found: the oldies circuit, the faithful crowds, the songs everybody knows. But “You Can Do Magic” had done its job. It proved that the band’s harmonies could survive any production, any decade, any magician’s trick. The duo of Beckley and Bunnell would keep touring into the next century, and every night, somebody in the crowd would be waiting for the glitter.
There is a tendency to treat outside-written hits as lesser achievements, as if a band that didn’t write its comeback somehow cheated. It is a silly prejudice. The history of pop is the history of great singers finding great songs, wherever they come from. Ballard wrote “You Can Do Magic” specifically for America — for those two voices, that blend — and the result sounds like no one else could have sung it. The album’s other Ballard composition, “Jody,” is fine; “You Can Do Magic” is the one where writer, singers and moment aligned. That alignment is the real magic, and it cannot be conjured on demand. Ballard just got lucky — the way all magicians do, through preparation meeting opportunity.
In the end, the story of “You Can Do Magic” is the story of a band willing to be remade. Lesser groups would have guarded their sound, their pride, their authorship — and faded. America handed the controls to a stranger and let him drive, and for one glittering autumn they were stars again. It takes a particular confidence to do that: the confidence of musicians who know that the thing people love is not the production or the songwriting credit but the sound of two voices in perfect, unmistakable harmony. No producer can manufacture that. No magician can fake it. You can do magic, the song insists — and for five weeks at number 8, America proved it.