John Denver and Me, or how John Denver helped me throw off fundamentalist Christianity
The ticket stub above is from a John Denver concert on September 22, 1973, at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino, California. It was my first concert that wasn't some Christian traveling group. Not quite a year earlier, sometime in October 1972, a nature documentary aired about bighorn sheep. There were various promos leading up to the air date featuring this guy I'd never heard of with longish blonde hair and granny glasses named John Denver. He meant nothing to me at that time, but I was already keenly interested in all things wild nature. Rich Hogg and I had become backpacking enthusiasts a year and a half earlier, and I had painstakingly worked my way through Thoreau's 'Walden' the preceding school year. In the TV special, Day of the Bighorn, John sang 'Rocky Mountain High', 'How Do You Say Hello to a Grizzly Bear', and other songs that would become dear to me, including 'Rocky Mountain Suite (Cold Nights in Canada)', which he had w...