Requiem For A Lightweight
Since writing about John Denver the other day, I found to my surprise the thought of him kind of stayed with me. This was rather unnerving, and mildly annoying. Especially because, at first, I could not understand why he was haunting me so.
I finally remembered, or thought I remembered, that I had written something more extensive about him around the time of his death.
A two-hour search of the hard drive later, I had confirmed my recollection. The following is a reprint of Denver's "obituary", from a sort of column I wrote at the time. Seems I had a more complicated relationship with John Denver than I let on initially.
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October 13, 1997
(A rather light, uplifting column had been planned and worked on for this week. . . Alas, that has all been pushed back for now. This is a special edition, conceived and released after we received the truly earth-shattering news this morning that that monolith of soft rock, the champion of mindless back-to-earth sentiment, Jacques Cousteau, soft country, and the environment (with a little "e") had crashed his plane into Monterrey Bay in California Sunday and perished. John Denver is gone, gone . . . "Johnny, we hardly knew ye.")
John Denver meant very little to me during his life, and his music even less. So it would be just a little bit maudlin, and hypocritical, for me to mourn him now that he has passed. However, the one thing we owe each person, the one thing we do almost inadvertently when the news comes that even the least among us has passed on, is to do a tiny assessment or inventory to see if that person had any impact on us personally when he or she lived, and thus we measure to what degree we should then mourn their passing. This sounds, on the surface of it, extremely cold and dispassionate, but thus is the human animal wired together. It is up to his family and close friends (and fans, if he still has any) to bury him and do the crying and serious mourning out there in California or Colorado or Idaho or wherever. For the rest of us of a certain age, we think about it for about five minutes over coffee on a Monday morning, before moving on to more uplifting news about Coffeegate and sexually rapacious drill sergeants and Bosnia and Uganda and everything else. For me though, to my surprise (and to my chagrin), the death of John Denver stayed with me a little longer than that. I thought about it some more in the shower, and then later at work and after. This is a guy who I had no regard for when he was in his heyday twenty-five years ago, and had given little if any thought to since, and yet here his death was kind of sticking with me, much longer than those of supposedly much larger luminaries (just recently, for instance, Jimmy Stewart or Princess Di).
When John Denver died, he was flying an experimental aircraft he had recently purchased. The single-engine Y-shaped Long EZ plane, built by aviation legend Burt Rutan, had a long history of pilot misadventure, crashes, and death. Reports said Denver had done a couple of touch and go practice landings at a Monterrey Peninsula airfield and had then radioed he would be flying for about an hour. Shortly after he turned his plane out to sea, his engined stalled, and the plane plummeted directly into the water. Denver's badly mangled body was recovered sometime later. A rather cryptic note at the end of the report stated that, as was routine with any NTSB investigation of a fatal crash, toxicology reports would be done on the pilot.
"D.W.I., D.W.I.,
National pastime of the average guy,
I measured point four-five
Man, I'm lucky I didn't die." -- "D.W.I.", The LeRoi Brothers
After he became famous and made his money and repaired to his palatial hacienda up in Colorado, one of the main things that kept John Denver in the news over the years was his numerous arrests for driving under the influence. He was only convicted of it twice, but he must have been arrested for it dozens of times. One imagines the Aspen cops and Colorado State Troopers had a sort of weary resignation about it. Denver would be pulled over again on a local highway for extremely erratic driving, and then shortly a call-in would crackle over the police band: "'Country Boy' is all out of his head again. . . I think I'll just drive him home, and save on the paperwork." "Ten-four." As it was, at the time of his death, he was awaiting sentencing on his second conviction.
I had always thought of John Denver, when I thought of him at all, as a sort of bloodless mercenary, who sang his pointless, limpid songs with zero emotion, and who was in it strictly for the money and the fame. I have seen or heard nothing since to change my mind any about this, but I must say when I began hearing of his drunk driving arrests twenty or so years ago, well, it is bad to say but, to my thinking at that time, his DWI's sort of painted him in a more favorable picture for me. It gave him some life in my eyes, and as a person who back then had no qualms about driving under the influence practically all the time, the thought of John Denver careening around the mountain roads of Colorado or Idaho (where he had another home, I think) with a bottle of Black Tower on the dashboard that he would periodically take long pulls out of was comforting to me, I guess you could say. In a sick sort of way, I regarded him as a brother. It makes me wonder, though. Even though he was famous and could and did presumably "get out of it" many times when he was stopped for driving erratically, he was still convicted twice. Take it from someone who, during his serious drinking days, drove around under the influence many times and, purely through luck and Providence, never got caught; I wonder if John Denver just had bad luck or how many times he was driving around those steep switchbacks half out of his mind on gin aside from the times he was caught. Hmmm. Like I said, to my twisted mind back in those days, thinking things like this made me think that John Denver was not such a bad guy, after all.
But he was, of course. He was mewling and maudlin and his songs were formulaic and had all the imagination of a fourth-grader's poetry and musical range that three chords could muster. He cared not one whit about what he sang about, but only the money and the fame and the security it could bring him. He would go do concerts and tours and act like he gave a rat's ass about his legion of adoring (if gullible) fans. All he really cared about, I guess, was getting back to the mountains, where he could booze it up and live a life of self-absorbed stoned leisure.
And now he is gone, and the world is not noticeably any worse off for it. Before I can leave him, though, and put him to rest, there is that issue of why the news of his passing lingered in my mind all day and drove me ultimately to compose this admittedly not 100% flattering eulogy for the man. I think I know why, and a person would have to be of a certain age to really understand it.
John Denver's seminal song for me, I guess you could say, the only one that had any (though little) merit at all and had any impact on me, was "Rocky Mountain High." This song came out when I was in 8th grade. I remember this because some of my friends and I did a poll of the guys who were in eighth grade at Memorial Jr. High at the time and came up with a Top Ten or Top Twenty of popular songs. I cannot remember exactly. I do remember that "Rocky Mountain High" was voted the top song (I think I voted for "Tumbling Dice", by the 'Stones, as a write-in). Now, you would have to go back through Billboard's archives or somewhere to find out what all else we had to choose from back in Fall 1972/Spring 1973. I am pretty sure you could come up with something better than John Denver for the top song, though. I remember thinking even then that "Rocky Mountain High" was a pretty stupid song to be Number One among my peers. But even though I was smart enough even at what? Thirteen years old? Fourteen? To know John Denver was worthless musically, I must in all honesty admit that "Rocky Mountain High" did at least indirectly have a lingering effect on my pubescent life.
What John Denver started, or at least engendered, with "Rocky Mountain High", namely a sort of "back to the mountains, back to nature" craze, was in full flower by a couple of years later.
And as much as I would really, really, really like not to admit it, I fell for this, in all its pretentiousness and vacuity; fell for it hook, line and sinker. Up to that point I had a more or less stylish haircut and wore more or less stylish clothes, but in the summer leading up to my sophomore year I grew my hair long and stringy and traded in all my trendy clothes for flannel shirts and fatigue jackets. I wore my dad's old army boots to school every day. I suppose in retrospect, and to be kind to myself, I could say I was affecting an un-style born of quiet rebellion, but that would be a lie. I had fallen for the mountain man thing. At that time, the leading proponent of this lifestyle, and my personal hero, was Bill Walton, the basketball player. He had come out of a straight-laced program at U.C.L.A. (Coach John Wooden), but when he got to the pros (Portland Trail Blazers, I think) he had turned hippie. He grew his hair long and lived in a cabin somewhere in Oregon and was kind of an iconoclast. Man, that was just too irresistible for me. Here I was, a son of the coastal plain, someone who should (and shortly thereafter would) have been imbued with the myths of my geographical upbringing; namely, you know, the beach and the ocean and all of that. But no, here I was dressing and trying to act like some guy 5,000 feet up in the Rockies, living off of the fat of the land. This is so painful for me to admit to; it was just incredibly pretentious, but there you have it. I used to watch, well, I used to watch "The Life And Times Of Grizzly Adams", perhaps one of the stupidest TV shows ever made. I used to watch it just because Grizzly Adams had left society behind (he had been wrongly accused of some heinous crime, I think) and had gone to live in the mountains, cradled by nature all around (and some old fat prospector and a remarkably benign and helpful Indian named Nocona or Kokomo or something). Of course, I did not know at the time, as I found out later, that Dan Haggerty, the"actor" portraying Grizzly Adams, was buying and snorting up vast quantities of cocaine, and apparently losing his hair (he has recently been active on late night infomercials extolling the virtues of some hair-replacement surgery clinic). It would not have mattered anyway, I was so into this mountain man thing.
I was eventually "cured" of this ridiculous mountain-man obsession; cured of it, as we so often are, by a woman. I got a girlfriend, and she engendered in me the desire to alter my hairstyle and my clothes at least to some extent, I think because, as men have known and done since the dawn of time almost, I sensed that in order to get what I wanted from a woman, whether it was intellectual stimulation or stimulation of some other kind, I would have to make a trade, and I gladly made it. I came back to the land of the living, and reality, and I have not until now thought much about those "mountain-man" days at all in the intervening years.
But now that I have, I can still sense how strong the allure of that was, and I am not sure why. I think it is some psychological kink of my own, actually. There is the tendency to want to be outgoing and ebullient. That tendency is absolutely balanced and at times, as we have seen, overwhelmed by the exact opposite impulse, to turn inward and silent and away. . .to do, as another enduring hero from childhood, Bugs Bunny, so often did -- to jump down a hole and then pull it in after me. And that is what my "mountain-man" days were really, an attempt to opt out of the often difficult transition from childhood to young adulthood. And the things started by that stupid song, "Rocky Mountain High", made it easier for me to do this.
And so the passing of John Denver cannot go entirely unnoticed by this now otherwise normally sensible individual. For he influenced my life at a vulnerable time, however indirectly. He was able, through his "music", to engender cultural events that drove me down and down. And so I can say on this day, the day after your death, with all equanimity I can say, "So long, brother. And I hope they bury you very, very deep."
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And so it goes. John Denver has been gone ten and a half years now. Here's hoping I never think of him, much less mention him in my blog, again.
