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239 CHaPter 5 The John Denver Tenor a lot of coloradans Will cringe at this, But Back in the 1970s the leading symbol of their state was John Denver. Yes, he of the toothy grin, blond mop, and granny glasses, who lived near Aspen and sang of sunshine and soaring eagles and needing nothing more than mountains to get high.1 For the rest of the country—and for a great many Coloradans too—this shy but strangely ebullient former folkie absolutely embodied Colorado’s recreational-environmental ideal. His songs and TV specials were calls for caring about nature, his concerts multimedia celebrations of the Colorado lifestyle. You could count on lots of strumming, picking, and harmonizing up on stage, while a screen overhead showed movies of Denver, his wife and friends hiking in the high country, skiing, climbing, and roasting marshmallows over the fire. Other screens flashed postcard images of peaks and sunsets, bighorns and birds of prey. “We’ve got a far-out show for you tonight!” Denver would happily shout to the sold-out crowd. “Make believe you’re in the Rocky Mountains . . . sitting around a campfire!”—as much as that was possible for sixteen thousand fans packing an arena in Los Angeles or New York.2 The music critics ripped him. They called him hypocritical for selling outdoor solitude to a mass audience and saccharine for fixating on only happy things. “It’s nice to sing about the Rocky Mountains and sunshine,” grumped one reviewer, “but what about the troubles of the cities and the despair that surrounds so much of modern life?” But John Denver’s huge fan base would not hear it. After a negative review, one Los Angeles critic found 240 chaPter 5 himself flooded with indignant letters. “Rock music has a proliferation of darkness in it already,” said one Denver defender. “Let’s have peacefulness, serenity, love, beauty without having always to be cynical.” “If only more people could hear what John Denver sings,” mused another, “maybe I could find a place to walk and view the stars unobstructed by city lights and building heights.”3 Escaping from the city, returning to nature—the yearnings that made John Denver so popular were the same ones that sold Colorado vacations. Like a vacation, Denver offered to steal you away from the everyday and make you happy by placing you in the high country. His lyrics, like the pictures flashing on the screen during his concerts, worked on audiences because they traded on the familiar (detractors would say hackneyed) highcountry imagery that tourist boosters had long since ingrained in the popular imagination. (At least one critic spotted the connection, likening Denver to “an undercover agent for the Rocky Mountain tourist bureau.”)4 But Denver ’s appeal went well beyond the fact that he confirmed Colorado tourist clichés. His fans seemed really to love not just his songs but him. Even one of his most persistent critics conceded he was “one of the few pop figures able in recent years to forge a sociological—rather than simply entertainment— bond with a vast mid-America audience.”5 A big reason for this was that he embodied a still deeper postwar yearning . Denver was not just a tourist but a full-time liver of the tourist lifestyle, a man who found in Colorado’s wide-open spaces fun, fulfillment, a new home, and a new meaning in life. Colorado literally gave him a new identity; his old one was the less poetic Henry John Deutschendorf Jr.—something most of his fans probably did not know. But they did know his life story of feeling lonely and rootless until he discovered Aspen. He confessed it in interviews, lyrics, and between-song patter, and he made it the basis for his signature song, the autobiographical “Rocky Mountain High.” “He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year,” it began, “Comin’ 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 ev'ry door.”6 This may have been the language of 1970s self-discovery, but it drew on much the same emotional-environmental association that had been the stock-in-trade of Colorado tourist boosters since at least the 1940s. But if John Denver crystallized Colorado’s outdoor mystique, he also hinted at how that mystique was changing by the early 1970s. Beyond his endearing (or cloying...

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