Rocky Mountain High

Even if memory could be improved by time, I would still take pleasure in the misplaced memory. Stuffy corridors lined with the easily remembered only add to the latent ability to continually recall the never-forgotten and think on it as a comforting discovery. Memories of childhood come and go, disappearing into the ether of age. Wormholes open and close. The sweet air of spring brings to mind visions never seen or remembered in the winter months. They are, for the most part, unreachable. They gestate underground, unable to be accidentally (or intentionally) thought up to the surface until the time of their yearly, unannounced forthcoming. Perhaps I owe to April then, the dusty and faded hue of the green cotton Indian print tapestry that covers the stereo speakers where they sit on the living room floor of my childhood, where I too came to sit, and stare, and eventually, to stumble upon the world. The soft pieces of green Indian tapestry were cut from a thin cotton bedspread, the kind found readily in import shops and brought home for cheap. This particular one had been cut up, by scissors held by creative fingers, into two rectangular pieces, and then carefully applied with glue so as to cover the stereo speakers with Indian print design. It was into these uncharted depths that I would stare, sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening in turn to the ramshackle collection of records left behind by those who had come to stay awhile. I would sit there, directly in front of the speaker to the right of the turntable, intently watching the rhythmic vibration of the mystic speaker covering as it pulsated in and out in time with the music. Most often there was some small collection of adults in the house, so volume was kept at a minimum, and the cloth only danced and moved a little if at all. On a rare occasion of solitude, though, the volume could be turned up considerably until the green covering beat in and out with every crash of a drum or thumping of a bass guitar. The record albums whose music caused this rhythmic pulse stood upright between cinderblocks which, in turn, held the slats of recycled wood that were home to the turntable and the silver-knobbed amplifier with its two dancing VU meters. I can see the album covers now as I pull them out, one by one, from their dusty vertical silence. The wonderful, quiet hue of Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man album, complete with the worn round outline of the record itself showing through the cardboard. The stark black of Billy Joel’s The Stranger. The stretched-faced Stones album Aftermath. The psychedelic yellow and purple fishbowl of the first Jimi Hendrix album. The Byzantine orange and red of the Irish band Planxty’s Well Below the Valley. This brings to mind the tin whistle of the song "As I Roved Out," as sung by Christy Moore. I must have heard that whistle line play the song's melody when I was seven or eight, and have been hooked on Irish music ever since. There are other records here too: Alice Cooper, more Rolling Stones (including the album Sticky Fingers with the famous Andy Warhol cover. It’s a simple photo of the crotch of a pair of Levi's jeans, but the zipper unzips and the cover folds out to reveal a photo of a man’s bulging underwear). These and other albums I lost myself in. Tried to understand. Some I liked. Others went over my head, or else resided somewhere that I had no knowledge of. In the running continuum connecting childhood to the Now, and the long look back from here to there again, it is possible to feel the shadow of emotions that were first made by a great flood of a certain feeling of homecoming. This is the case for my memory of the glacial cool and evergreen cover of Rocky Mountain High by John Denver. In the cover photograph he is standing on an outcrop of rock framed by a mountain river. The water is running left to right, and from where John Denver is standing the river is running behind him and just taking a turn into a waterfall. Fingers together, he isn’t really posing for the camera but looking away downriver. Bulky hiking boots, red sweater, and black green check Pendleton jacket. He wears the round wire-rim glasses that only another John – Lennon – made more famous. This album was the soundtrack to many hours spent in quiet meditation, with a pre-adolescent blank stare at the soft green tapestry on the speakers pulsating along to the songs. "Darcy Farrow." "Paradise" by John Prine -- a 1970’s back to nature anthem if there ever was one, my mother used to sing it as she put me to sleep. "Mother Nature’s Son", a second, less successful back-to-nature anthem. Less successful, perhaps, because a rich Liverpool lad named Paul McCartney wrote it in 1968. But really this album revolves, literally at 33-and one-third RPM, around a single crowning glory – the sublime "Rocky Mountain High" itself.

Many things go into the making of a soundtrack to a life. Or a summer maybe. A patch of time perhaps. The radio rattling out a musical backdrop, drugs, a sweetheart, friends, adventure stories, they all go in the mix. And in 1971, an adventurous soul had several options for which way to go. If living, say, in Detroit or Chicago, and traveling the line between psychedelics and something a bit harder, the band MC5 might be the ticket. The explosive 1968 Democratic Convention, still fresh in the memory, was stirred in to a mental cauldron of the heady acid politics of draft cards, cops, smoke, and distorted guitars. This vision leads me to remember my attempt to make sense of John Sinclair’s book Guitar Army: Street Writings / Prison Writings and Platform of the White Panther Party. I couldn’t have been more than ten, but the book had migrated into the communal library. It featured different-colored blocks of pages which formed a rather less-than-vibrant rainbow. On the cover, John Sinclair is smoking a joint (interestingly enough, also wearing the revolutionary round wire-rimmed glasses). Above his head is a small symbol of an electric guitar, an AK-47, and a Native American peace pipe arced over by a rainbow. If you were moving to the country in, say, 1973, then the long instrumental "Jessica" by the Allman Brothers might be in heavy rotation. Or, perhaps, another pass at Bob Dylan’s confusing follow up to Blonde On Blonde, the cowboy album John Wesley Harding. For the future hippy homesteader, this ready-for-the-country soundtrack might also include Arlo Guthrie’s album, Washington County. On the cover, Arlo sits with an axe and a sharpening stone, bundled in a heavy jacket. The backside of the album cover finds the seasons have changed and Arlo Guthrie is standing, back to the camera, shirtless in a field, with a horse. His hands are on his hips as if he is surveying some task just completed or yet to be undertaken. Perhaps, as I’m thinking of it, it’s geography and drugs that formed the slowly diverging soundtracks of the early '70s. Scenes had changed, the drugs had changed, the war dragged, the campuses went quiet. There was a mass splintering, a societal divide, a changing of dance partners. The second great migration, this one out from the dustbowl of the culture wars. People took cover, scattering into every nook and cranny. They split the heavy scenes for places like Saugerties, New York. They lived in stoned, geodesic Hoovervilles in Colorado. They cut their hair and moved back to Green Bay to work for dad. Hippy Jesus kids sat in communes and spun God's Eyes from two sticks and bits of brightly colored yarn. Others joined the Peace Corps and rode bicycles to India. Kitchens smelled like bread. Someone was driving from Philadelphia to Seattle in a 1957 split-window Volkswagen bus. The steering wheel shutters, the windows are fogged up, it’s badly leaking oil and it shouldn’t make it. It makes it. Some of these cars came to live in our muddy parking lot while their owners came to stay awhile in my childhood farmhouse. Along with splitting shakes and digging the occasional outhouse, these people had come to study the earth and quiet spritual quests. They brought books and records, and quite often left them behind when the alternator was fixed and it was time to go. The women wore long white embroidered dresses, or tight blue polka dot blouses whose big collars triangulated out from under darker blue sleeveless V-neck sweaters. The men looked older than their years, in overalls or lanky bell-bottom jeans. Some wore the same Pendleton coats that John Denver wears on the cover of Rocky Mountain High. The geography of temperament, music, war, and drugs had landed them here. They had survived the perfect storm and searched now in the quiet flood for some piece of cultural jetsam that could float them back to dry land. As '60s euphoria tumbled over the mountain waterfall into late 1971, John Denver watched it go down and managed to rise above. On his sixth album, John Denver landed a song square in the middle of the societal campfire and gave people some lyrical context for healing. All the “adults” (they were younger then than I am now) whose old cars brought them to stay awhile embodied a simultaneous inward/outward focus. Inward in the quiet, still breath that follows tumult. Outward in the spiritual quest to study every leaf edge of creation. For them, the opening lines of Rocky Mountain High provided a comforting road map. The song is a postcard from an old friend, an unknown friend perhaps, in whose footsteps people began following in a quiet, freaked out, aimlessly contemplative way. These three-hundred-and-twenty-three words were the big bang that melded cultural spirituality and the environment in the early 1970s. They are also the Rosetta Stone of environmental songwriting.

He was born in the summer of his 27th year
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 every door
When he first came to the mountains his life was far away
On the road and hangin' by a song
But the string's already broken and he doesnt really care
It keeps changin' fast and it don't last for long
But the Colorado Rocky Mountain high
I've seen it rainin' fire in the sky
The shadow from the starlight is softer than a lullabye
Rocky Mountain high (high, Colorado)
Rocky Mountain high (high, Colorado)
He climbed cathedral mountains, he saw silver clouds below
He saw everything as far as you can see
And they say he got crazy once, and he tried to touch the sun
And he lost a friend but kept his memory
Now he walks in quiet solitude the forests and the streams
Seeking grace in every step he takes
His sight has turned inside himself to try and understand
The serenity of a clear blue mountain lake
And the Colorado Rocky Mountain high
I've seen it rainin' fire in the sky
You can talk to God and listen to the casual reply
Rocky Mountain high (high, Colorado)
Rocky Mountain high (high, Colorado)
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
And the Colorado Rocky Mountain high
I've seen it rainin' fire in the sky
I know he'd be a poorer man if he never saw an eagle fly
Rocky Mountain high
Its a Colorado Rocky Mountain high
I've seen it rainin' fire in the sky
Friends around the campfire and everybody's high
Rocky Mountain high (high, Colorado)
Rocky Mountain high (high, Colorado)
Rocky Mountain high (high, Colorado)
Rocky Mountain high, do de do


I’m supposed to be in bed. My mother has laid me down on a blanket on the second floor library of the old farmhouse. I would have remained there, too. But I woke up. Knowing for a fact that the second floor library is pitch dark and full of ghosts, and that black riders, at any moment, will charge forth on horseback from the room on the other side of the chimney, I have crept from my blanket and am watching the adults out in the big room from my perch in the doorway at the foot of the stairs. They lounge on collected and mismatched bits of furniture, drinking wine by kerosene lamp and woodstove. The room smells like homemade borscht and tuna casserole. It’s summertime, 1974, and I am six. My mother is holding court. She is talking about her dream that one day John Denver will come to our farm and play a concert in front of our old barn. She’s serious. This is important. It’s important for him to come and sing, in front of our barn and loft, that musical postcard to the very land, as a greeting and roadmap for others to find. My mother feels that that song should be here as part of the history of the land, buried in the earth, gestating under leaves and grass and soil until sung once again by other lips and throats, and also left floating as bits of musical architecture in the treetops and clouds and wind, blowing as mediation through long grasses, trees, dandelions, and nettles. An aural nod to the spiritual path that the people in my childhood living room are wandering. Also, perhaps, my parents themselves need some small acknowledgement that they weren’t all that crazy in packing it in and moving to the country. For they, too, are looking for a larger presence in the world.
John Denver may have never quite had the ear of his generation, but his songs contained the collective DNA expelled on that generation’s out-breath. His finest works are the albums Rocky Mountain High and Back Home Again. But in a catalogue littered with classics, much of his output has been lost underneath the impossible weight of corny '70s orchestral arrangements, and the drift that lefty singer-songwriters took in the late '70s and especially the early '80s towards the tepid, the divorced, and the overwrought.

I'm thinking now of a concert I've recently seen on TV. It’s John Denver’s “The Wildlife Concert,” from 1995. The local PBS station airs this concert often during its periodic fundraising efforts, and, as I come to find, my father has seen it too. Over tacos and a beer we discuss what we saw and come to realize that we both had some of the same reactions. We each found it a bit sad and somewhat unsettling, though it’s hard to put the finger on exactly why. Though neither of us knew it at the time of our separate viewings, the Wildlife Concert was one of John Denver’s final performances, but it wasn’t that. Surely, he's in fine voice, with a good band backing him up, and the telecast received warm reviews. This unsettled feeling, though, is compounded by the fact that the voice and the video aren’t lined up quite right, so that lips move before notes arrive and the general effect is a spinning head and a passing thought about John Denver’s poor luck. Still, though, something is off besides the video and audio. Something in his singing. Not from a technical point of view, but perhaps from a spiritual one. There's a pleading quality in his voice. My father felt the concert was, perhaps, a premonition of sorts, of an uncomfortable ending or doom. I look over a page of notes that I took on the show and find that I've written down the words “pleading” and “self-aware”. John Denver originally sang "Rocky Mountain High" from high up in the landscape of wilderness. The song was gloriously born, framed between mountaintop and sky. It was a song for people. Real people. It was a real song. And it remains so. The landscape around it, though, has changed, and the wild untrodden wilderness of spiritual expanse has been replaced with the perhaps even more terrifying wilderness of passing years. On the telecast, John Denver sang "Rocky Mountain High" as an old hit, with the quiet, plaintive quality of a man feeling somehow less than the sum of his years. His voice still carried the youthful clarity that people either loved or hated back in the day, but I couldn’t help wishing he'd sing with a little bit of grit, to stand and deliver with a straight backbone and the backing weight of years instead of tepid insecurity masked by over-enunciation and a forced smile. And for goodness' sake, he should have put the round wire-rimmed glasses back on. John Denver’s career began a steady decline the day he got contacts. He split his brain in two. He attempted to come across as grown up and not the “country kid” that his detractors pegged him for, but never turned an inner corner, somewhere in his throat and temperament, that would have made the change apparent in his singing and delivery. The most difficult part of the Wildlife Concert broadcast came at the very end. John Denver sings his sad, autobiographical song “Goodbye Again”:

And it's goodbye again,
I'm sorry to be leavin' you
Goodbye again,
as if you didn't know
It's goodbye again,
and I wish you could tell me
Why do we always fight when I have to go

As the song nears its end, John turns to the band to follow on the final chorus. As he sings, for the final time, “Why do we always fight when I have to go?” the audio and video crash at the same moment. It’s as if the film breaks in mid sentence: “Why do we always fight when I --” Dark screen. Silence for two or three seconds. Roll credits. Cut to PBS fundraising pitch. I sat watching it in disbelief at how things could have gone so wrong. As if the final, jarring cut was somehow indicative of John Denver himself, his career, and his luck. Two years after that concert, John Denver would die in an experimental plane crash over Morrow Bay in California. He had recently purchased the plane, but the builder had strayed from the original drawings, placing the fuel valve switch behind the pilot’s shoulder instead on the instrument panel in front. John Denver had to shift hard in his seat to flip the switch from one fuel tank to the other. One tank was empty. The second tank was full. A switch had to be flipped that, in this case, couldn’t be seen (Denver had to use a mirror to locate it behind him). He stretched ‘round but couldn’t reach it. This move caused his right foot to press against the right rudder control. The plane spun out and into the ocean, and he was gone. The thing about singers, though, is they don’t really ever die. They just go away and stop making records. John Denver never made it to my childhood farm to sing "Rocky Mountain High," but in a way, he did. I can’t imagine how many times that song has been sung over the years at the farm, but it's a healthy number for sure. When I’m finished writing this and time allows, I’ll go there with my guitar, find a little patch of bramble in the woods, and sing it again. It won’t be that John Denver will come back to life when his songs are sung, it’s just that he’ll never have gone away in the first place. It’s said that time stops for nobody. And it’s true. Thing of it is, though, that from time to time, time just disappears altogether. Just like what may have happened in the summer of his twenty-seventh year. Coming home to a place he’d never been before. Sound familiar?