What easier target than John Denver, Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., Aspen’s poet laureate, that insipid 70s fauxkie whom if you turned on the radio you could not at the time avoid being made to hear or block from your sight on TV whether you tuned into the Grammys or the Muppets (and I know this, I was there), who would be singing about sunshine on his shoulders or being taken home along a country road, his senses filled up by his loving wife Annie (herself little more than a vehicle for the nature images Denver would summon to describe her, a night in a forest, a walk in the rain, a storm in the desert, a sleepy blue ocean—one heck of a relationship I guess), his “Rocky Mountain highs” presumably purer than Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way,” spiritual elevations delivered through nature’s bounty and domestic bliss, Ralph Waldo Emerson by way of Werner Erhard, but who we always suspected to be and later learned was (in part from Denver’s own autobiography, called what else Take Me Home) a celebrity stoner and cokehead (not that there’s anything wrong with that) who at one point in a mid-divorce rage chainsawed his beloved Annie’s bed in half. Easy peasy, a little cultural studies, a little Hollywood Babylon, done and dusted. I think there are other reasons as well why the above story is too easy.
But first the easy stuff.
John Denver’s music is terrible. It’s not, like, fucking terrible, I would submit, there are some likable bits and I don’t actually mind “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” plus the reggae cover of that song by Yellowman suggests the sentiment’s elasticity, it’s just that the music is so weightless and inoffensive it makes you wonder about the inner lives, to say nothing of the aesthetic attunements, of the millions and millions of fans who made Denver very rich. He somehow puts to sleep even the Tom Paxton and John Prine and Beatles covers he did on his first records, before, through his own vapid songs, he became the state of Colorado’s official poet laureate in 1974. As Robert Christgau put it at the time (if in slightly suspiciously-gendered language), if James Taylor is a wimp, John Denver is a simp, which is even worse. He sported helmet hair, a member of that distinguished 70s hair club that included Glen Campbell, Pete Rose, and Dorothy Hamill, and not infrequently wore bespoke Western shirts and some kind of cowboy-style hat. “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” he sang in one of his biggest hits, though when the Country Music Association named him Entertainer of the Year in 1975 (and see Eric Weisbard’s fabulous study Top 40 Democracy for an analysis of the CMA’s own 70s changes), presenter Charlie Rich lit the award envelope on fire. On stage.
The vintage Denver persona was sunny, slightly corny, feel-good for sure but always with just a tug of wistfulness—70s candy, in other words. I’d like to stay for a moment with that wistfulness—Sianne Ngai might call it an aesthetic category of “the wistful”—a melancholy so vague it seems itself like a cover story for something more. If I had time for just one example, and that is in fact the case, I’d take “Rocky Mountain High”: “He was born in the summer of his 27th year / Coming home to a place he’d never been before / He left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again / You might say he found a key for every door.” Born again in his 27th year, the young fellow I take to be a foil for Denver (cf. verse two about being on the road and hanging by a song, the string already broken) outlasts the 27 club, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and the rest by coming to the mountains. That’s as distilled a version of the ideology as you’re going to get, fire in the sky, starlight’s shadow, talking to God instead of your dealer. So why the wistful, dawg? You yourself say you can see “everything as far as you can see,” cathedral mountains, silver clouds below. A fleeting sense that self-knowledge, grace, and serenity elude him gives way to this: “Now his life is full of wonder but his heart still knows some fear / Of a simple thing he cannot comprehend / Why they try to tear the mountains down to bring in a couple more / More people, more scars upon the land.” Ahhh, it is enough to make one wistful, watching all those Starwood mansions go up ever closer to your own.
This, I would propose, is settler colonial sound, the sweet sound of settler colonialism and its affective undertow: the soaring crypto-Christian celebration of the natural beauty you discovered about ten minutes before those other people arrived to threaten it, song after song after song, in music so rootless, so devoid of any affiliation with roots music of any kind (save for a pedal steel guitar here and there), that it underscores your own attenuated connection to this transcendent mountain home. Denver’s lame attempt at a protest piece, “Wooden Indian” (I was strong and I was proud when I lived here and now I’m a cigar store Indian) attests only to his distance from the problem. That dissociation may in fact appear in “Rocky Mountain High” as the split between the “he” who was born at 27 and the “I” who sees fire raining in the sky. The embrace of home at last and roots ideology (and there was plenty of that to go around in the 70s, both good and bad—think TV’s The Waltons but also Good Times, Alex Haley’s Roots, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, George Clinton’s One Nation Under a Groove, mid-70s Springsteen, Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home, Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter [book and movie]—Jimmy Carter even managed to endow the White House with a fireside hearth)—home at last and roots ideology in this case disallows the recognition that you yourself are the problem. Denver was a military brat constantly on the move as a kid, so this concerted desire for home makes a certain kind of psychological sense, but, overdetermined by the settler-colonial imaginary, it makes for politics as impoverished as the music. Here, perhaps, is the harder stuff.
Denver’s great theme, if I may use those words in this context, is home/not home: a Freudian fort/da situation in which the bliss of home is dogged by the wistfulness of leaving it or longing to get back to it (basically because you’re on tour, as he will lyrically admit from time to time). His “Leavin’ On a Jet Plane” (yes Denver wrote it), “Goodbye Again” (essentially the same tune), and quite a number of other departure songs establish the importance of home only by its absence, define home as haunted by absence, a game that is temporarily won when (as per Freud) the singer masters the anxious “there” of travel by coming home again (or is it that the haunted home is mastered by going back on the road?). In any case to my ear neither condition seems altogether satisfying in Denver’s music (take the songs in which he and Annie bicker, or even “Annie’s Song” [“you fill up my senses”] above, which veers rapidly away from her into nature), as though settler affect unconsciously knows its own unsettlement, that it is home that is the problem, or that home is not home, or not your home.
“It’s a long way from L.A. to Denver,” Denver sings in “Starwood in Aspen,” longing again for “my sweet Rocky Mountain paradise” (“my” as possessive investment being the key word; Starwood was a gated community), not quite consciously naming the culture-industry foundations of that paradise (Denver was RCA’s top selling artist ever at the time, besting even Elvis) and naming as well the flight plan that brought Hollywood luminaries to paradise by the planeload in increasing numbers across the 1970s. The distance between L.A. and Denver grew shorter and shorter. Everybody, it seemed, had a home there—Jack Nicholson, for example, who was Denver’s neighbor; there’s a great entry in Andy Warhol’s Diaries in which Andy and his entourage are at Nicholson’s house for dinner and who should show up but John and Annie Denver, and John informs Andy that he knows all about him and that everyone always tells him he looks just like Andy! Aspen became over the course of the decade the perfect refuge in which to offload and disguise even more excess than occurred in the City of Angels. The town is in fact a small case study in settler colonialism. For one thing, it had not even been called “Aspen” for all that long. Formerly Ute City, it was tribal center of the Ute peoples, who when silver was discovered in the 1880s were quite quickly displaced by the silver rush. Fortunes ebbed and flowed as Ute City became Aspen, which after WWII became a destination ski resort, but Aspen’s downtown streets were only fully paved in 1962, after which word began to get around. By the time Hunter S. Thompson famously made his bid for sheriff of Aspen in 1970, the town was newly on the map (one of Thompson’s platform demands, in fact, was to unpave and resod the streets).
Ute City now an Aspen aerie purveying privacy at a price for the celebrity class, the sweet mountain paradise became a new kind of boom town. At its parodic worst there were the baser pleasures and unrulier passions unleashed in the homes of Denver or another of his neighbors, celebrity skier Spider Sabich. Denver in his autobiography is tortured by his road infidelities, which, together with too much money and alcohol and modish drugs, produced a rapid deterioration in his marriage. The divorce was not amicable. This led to the aforementioned episode in which an enraged Denver entered his estranged wife’s (that is, his former) home—really not his, now—and, after choking her, took a chainsaw first to the fine mahogany dining room table and then to the bed they formerly shared (bed and board, there’s a logic there). As for poor Spider Sabich, the tale is told elsewhere. At the boom town’s best, I would have to say, there was the sort of global celebenevolence manifested in the sorts of causes Denver threw himself into—efforts to end world hunger with est founder Werner Erhard, campaigning for Jimmy Carter, the embrace of environmentalism and ecology via celebrity marine conservationist Jacques Cousteau (which gave us his paean to Cousteau, “Calypso”—“Aye, Calypso, the places you’ve been to / The things that you’ve shown us / The stories you tell”—another settler song, this time a shanty in the key of Columbus), and so on. Most of this (but perhaps not all of it) was merely the meiotic obverse of the neo-silver mining and perverse expenditures of the Hollywood pleasure dome.
I would argue that John Denver is the perfect poet laureate of that place and that time. He functioned as its best face even when he wasn’t—its perfect well-meaning façade, a capital advance man who recapitulated its every impulse. He sounds Aspen, plumbs it and gives it sonic shape, working at the crossroads of New Age spiritual aspiration and culture industry venality. Which is why his starring role in one of 1977’s biggest Hollywood hits, Oh God!, is so genius. It’s a simple if period-bound tale, which is why you never see it in syndication: God in the form of George Burns appears to grocery store assistant manager Jerry Landers (Denver) to anoint him His apostle in spreading His word anew. Landers weathers the incredulity (and worse) of everyone from his wife (the eternal Teri Garr) to talk show hosts (Dinah Shore) to religious leaders of every stripe in sowing a gospel that is essentially Erhardian guff. The brilliance of the conceit lies not here but in the way it works as a culture industry meta-fable. Denver’s manager from 1970 on was Jerry Weintraub, yes that Jerry Weintraub, who vaulted himself to the status of legendary Hollywood mega-producer and friend of Clooney in part from his early success with Denver. Weintraub took Avery Corman’s 1971 novel of the same name to veteran writer, actor, and director Carl Reiner (Sid Caesar, Dick Van Dyke Show, on and on), who asked M*A*S*H writer Larry Gelbart to adapt it for the screen and got genius vaudevillian and TV star George Burns (who by then was 80) to feature alongside John Denver. The result is something like Reiner and Mel Brooks’s famous 1960s 2000 Year Old Man skits transposed for the New Age with Denver as a kind of latter-day goy-boy Moses (they actually make this joke). An Old Hollywood team fronted by Burns invents the prophet “Denver,” and the charming thing is I think Denver is wise to the gag and game enough to go along with it.
And he’s good! It’s actually my favorite version of Denver, with a wider range of expression and emotion on offer than you ever get in the music. In a sense he’s the 70s version of Rob Petrie, the Dick Van Dyke character on Reiner’s 60s show: where Van Dyke played a version of Reiner as head writer of a Manhattan comedy/variety show, Denver as grocer plays a version of any number of ancestors of the Bronx and Brooklyn born Jewish men who put him in that role (with perhaps a comic nod in the direction of Werner Erhard and world hunger). Denver is cast, within and without the movie, as the One to deliver us from bondage into the upbeat one-love culture industry promised land, precisely what Weintraub had had him doing all along. In the context of Oh God!, though, it feels somehow redemptive, Denver finally humanized—he’s again talking to God but now it’s George Burns instead of a mountain, Hollywood shtick where Denver finds his truth, and he does seem, at long last, home.
Denver being Denver, however, he had to leave it. In the early 80s Denver fired Jerry Weintraub, who had been pushing the star too hard for way too long. It was a bad breakup. Weintraub called Denver a “Nazi” and threw him out of his office. This may well have been what all these producers had always sneakingly thought; Weintraub seems to have, saying later, “I knew the critics would never go for Denver, I had to take him to the people.” And after all, hadn’t Brooks already written this script in The Producers just as Denver’s career was launched? You give ‘em Springtime for Hitler and they turn out to love it! Imagine the worst, give ‘em, I don’t know, “Sunshine On My Shoulders,” and it’s a hit! And then they turn around and fire you! Never overestimate your audience, their capacity to go low and embrace the worst, for whatever bad or even good reason. They’ll surprise you.