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 written for this documentary special, something that is apparent in the lyrics.

I would see the "Rocky Mountain High" album in the record bins at the FedMart (a long-defunct department store chain) on Orange Street in Redlands for the next couple of months. It had a sticker on it for $3.19. I finally decided to part with scarce allowance money and buy it. I played it on the turntable in the big Magnavox stereo in the living room, holding a microphone on my Panasonic cassette player/recorder to one of the speakers, thereby allowing me to listen to the album in bed before falling asleep. I did this nightly for the next three months.

I was 15, and I'm embarrassed now to say that I had still never turned on a top-40 radio station. When summer break came in 1973, I did something radical. I turned on a contemporary radio station and listened to it. Before that, my primary musical experience was listening to Christian hymns sung by artists such as Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jim Reeves, and Loretta Lynn. The only secular music in the house was two western albums, 'Cattle Call' by Eddie Arnold, a Sons of the Pioneers album, one of Jim Reeves's non-religious albums, and a 3-record collection of classical music. Thus, at long last, I was finally listening to popular music and can remember what many of the hits that summer were: "Delta Dawn," "One Tin Soldier," "Loves Me Like a Rock," "The Morning After," "Why Me," "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," and others.

Sometime in this time period, my dad discovered my secret recording of "Rocky Mountain High." When my mom and I arrived home from church (he rarely attended), he yelled, "Who the hell is John Denver?" and went on to assure me I'd be going to hell for listening to evil rock music. (He did later come around a bit after hearing, somehow, "Take Me Home Country Roads." He even came to enjoy two Beatles songs, "Yesterday" and "Long and Winding Road").

The church elders, it turns out, were right. Someone as innocuous as John Denver could nevertheless be a gateway to the devil. Under Rich Hogg's influence, I soon began listening to Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" album and John Lennon's "Working Class Hero," which is notable for containing an f-bomb in its lyrics.

As Rich and I started the new adventure of attending Loma Linda Academy that fall of '73, we somehow learned John was coming to the Swing and we decided we would go. All in all, for me, it was a very pivotal experience. I was fortunate to see John three more times: once at the Universal Amphitheater with George Burns on September 28, 1980; once at the University of Portland during my last semester of law school on October 1, 1987; and at Boise State University's Pavilion on July 17, 1992.

A little over 5 years later, on October 13, 1997, I was driving south through White Plains, NY, on I-95 when I heard the tragic news that John had been killed the preceding day in a plane crash here on Monterey Bay. A month later, on November 12, a day after the death of my mom in Yucaipa, I attended an International Day of Remembrance event in Ontario, California, hosted by a United Church of Christ pastor and Denver fan at his church. It was a beautiful service, and it was good to experience collective grief with other fans.