That's the only time Dean Parks and Greg Beck have played together, according to Greg. Twenty-eight years later I had Greg Beck overdub an electric guitar and that is what you hear on this recording. We were wearing earphones with the speakers turned off, and 50 feet away at the other end of the studio on the other side of the glass with earphones, was Jim Varley playing drums. Dean (playing bass) was sitting with me (I was engineering, playing the acoustic guitar and singing live) in the control room. The recording session of my demo in 1972 was with Dean Parks and Jim Varley. I got home, picked up my Martin guitar and had the music finished in 5 minutes a pretty good 15 minutes. I wrote the words and melody, a cappella, driving on the Ventura Freeway in about 10 minutes. I remember getting excited about the sound of the word, 'Shambala.' Before I wrote the song, I called a friend, Eddie Zip, who I'd been working with and telling him, 'That word Shambala has a magic sound to it, you ought to put together a band and call it Shambala, you couldn't lose.' We had just recorded one of his songs titled 'Don't Make God's Children Cry.' We were getting - ELEVATED! And when that replica begins to light up or glow (meaning you are cleaning up your act and becoming more spiritual minded or raising your consciousness to a higher level), there is point where your replica gets bright enough to warrant a spiritual teacher being sent to you. It basically said that there was a gigantic cavern under the Gobi Desert that has a replica of every evolving human being. Some were weird, some were goofy but the one I liked was found in Alice Bailey's Treatise On White Magic. So I did some research and found dozens of references to the word Shambala, the 5000-year-old word originating from Sanskrit. After recounting several past lives the letter ended with, 'My messenger tells me to tell you, 'Let your light shine in the halls of Shambala.'' In the phone conversation at that point Matthew said, 'Shambala, what the hell is that?' He had sent a letter to her requesting this information. 'In 1972 my brother, Matthew, called me and informed me that he had received a letter from Dorothy Beg at Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts that told him where and who he had been in his past lives.

The song's writer, Daniel Moore, told us the story: The word 'Shambala' has a spiritual meaning in the Buddhist religion, and some Tibetan Buddhists believe that it is a mystical land hidden somewhere in the Himalaya mountains.

Shambala three dog night