JOHN DENVER: HIS ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGHNESS by Chet Flippo ASCAP TODAY Winter 1975 Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. (aka John Denver) was born in Roswell, New Mexico on December 31, 1943 - and has come a long way since then. The son of ASAF Lt. Col. H. J. Deutschendorf (Ret) and the former Erma Louise Swope, he is unquestionably a superstar songwriter and performer, a major concert and recording artist and the happy husband of Annie Denver and father of Zach Denver. An ASCAP member since 1966, he has earned many gold records, starred on television and will soon - it is reported - move on to motion pictures. Widely known as an ardent environmentalist and a clean-cut family man, he lives in Colorado when not on tour. He was interviewed in New York City by able Chet Flippo of ROLLING STONE, in which a much longer edition of this dialogue appeared. Were you basically very shy as a boy? I think I was. I don't know that I'm shy anymore and I'm a lot more secure in myself, but when I was a kid - most 13 year old kids are shy, whatever act they come on with to make you think they're not. So then, I moved on to Fort Worth and started high school in exactly the same situation, not really knowing anybody. And through church - more than church itself, I wanted to sing in the choir, but senior high fellowship is where I met a few kids that were going to the same school and then in school my guitar and sports are what made friends for me. I was working after school washing dishes at the McCrory Five and Dime on Camp Bowie Boulevard. My activities were centered around school and football and church and senior high fellowship and i got together with a couple bands and started playing parties, proms, stuff like that. It was the music that really worked for me. It was the thing that I always did that was easy and made me feel good. I liked singing for people. I had an electric guitar that my folks got me and I took lessons in Tucson with a guitar that my grandmother gave me - "This Old Guitar", that's a true story. As a graduation present my folks got me a Fender Jazzmaster and a Fender Pro Amp and I was getting more into folk music. I ran away from home when I was a senior in high school and it came out of all the conflicts that happen between parents and their children who can't communicate. Things weren't right and I felt responsible for it and felt that I should just leave. I didn't want to but that's what I did. I went out to California and I was gonna try to get a job on a boat or something. I really wasn't strong enough with my music then, but that didn't cross my mind at the time. So I got out there and pretty soon - about the time I arrived I ran out of money and didn't know anybody and got really scared and called the folks to find the number of a friend we had there. i went to stay with them and Dad came out and got me and we drove home together and talked a little bit but I don't know that anything was really solved then. So we got back together. Then I graduated from high school. Things had gotten to be good in school but still there was nothing solid there. Then I went on to Texas Tech. College was awfully exciting. All of a sudden I was on my own, didn't have to go to bed at any particular time, could study when I wanted to - and my grades showed it - and I really enjoyed playing football - it was a very carefree time. i was majoring in architecture which is something that I still really enjoy. But a lot of stuff that I was doing just didn't have any meaning at all. The second year was very much like that except I pledged a fraternity but didn't make my grades. I was playing with a band again - playing a lot more than I ever had before and I was also singing by myself. I was learning from Joan Baez and Tom Paxton and the Chad Mitchell Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary and the New Christy Minstrels. I was just eating that up. I loved all of that music. That was the kind of music I had been singing and now it had a label. People called it folk music. I was doing all of that music and I was going to school and enjoying the architecture but nothing was happening in Texas with the exception of the music and nothing else really worked for me. The one thing I really decided to do as good as i could and learn and grow with was the music that I did. And it got to the point again that things got hard with my parents. So, halfway through my junior year at the semester break I left. Everybody - and I mean everybody - said that I was making the biggest mistake of my life. Also I found out they'd been betting on how long I was gonna last. My friends in the architecture department had been betting on whether I was gonna last through the semester. And then I'd gone home to my folks and all they did was give me s__t about my grades and there was really no interest in finding out what was going on for me in my life and so finally i left. Then i had to write back and tell my folks what I was doing and they did what was probably one of the best things they ever did for me and I think the greatest thing any parents could do for their children: They gave me the space to go. They sent me $200 and they said, "We don't approve of this, we would prefer that you stay in college and we think you're gonna go slouch around and when you get tired of playing around like that, then let us know and we'll help you go on from there with your education." I think they had the feeling that music was something you really like to listen to and it was nice that I had a talent - played guitar and sang in the choir and stuff like that - but entertainment wasn't something you did for a living. So I went out to California and got a job working for a draftsman and then started singing everywhere I could. I went to all the hootenannies and they were going on all over everywhere in L.A. The second year I was there I went to Leadbetter's, which was owned by Randy Sparks. I sang and he came back after the show and said he'd really liked my voice and would like to talk to me about working there. Someone somewhere has a tape of the first week I worked there and I think you would be amazed at how - in a sense - how bad it was but - see, I went from being just terrible to being only pretty bad in about five days. That first weekend I started getting encores and I was extended to 26 weeks there and started getting jobs around the country. I signed a contract, which i couldn't legally do because I was only 20 but I wasn't gonna let not being 21 get in the way so I lied and signed but then....Randy was getting tired of me, and on a trip I auditioned at a club in Phoenix called the Lumbermill and they hired me. I went back to L.A. and got a call that Chad Mitchell was leaving the Trio and had given them six months to find somebody to replace him and wow! This was far out - here was a chance to audition for somebody i had listened to in college. They were interested in the audition tape I sent and they flew me to New York. I guess they had gotten 250 or 300 other tapes and I had had a cold and was trying to sing like Chad. So I got to New York and at the first audition I tried to sing like Chad and just did terrible and they sent over to Joe Frazier's house on the West side and I learned two songs and about an hour and a half later we went back to Milt Okun's office with Joe singing with me and it was a whole different thing. They sent me back to Phoenix and said, don't call us, we'll call you. So I sat around waiting for the phone call - I mean, i didn't leave the motel at all except to go to the Lumbermill to work at night. A couple of days later the call came and they had picked me. So we rehearsed for six days and then opened at the Cellar Door in Washington D.C. So that started the thing with the Mitchell Trio. I really learned a lot with the Trio. They were really professional, but quite often one of the guys would be late and I would go on and do kind of an opening show by myself. And then when we were in places like the Cellar Door I would do hootenannies; I'd go on and do stuff that the Trio didn't want to do. And a lot of people said they would like to have a tape of some of those songs that I never got to do with the Trio. So one year, '67 I think, I made a Christmas album and had 250 copies pressed. It had 13 songs on it and I gave it to all my close friends and my family and "Leaving On A Jet Plane was on it. Peter, Paul and Mary really liked Leaving On A Jet Plane and they recorded it on the Album 1700. That was a great acknowledgment for me. INSTANT REPLAY Chad Mitchell left, and the Trio continued with Denver, David Boise and Mike Johnson. After the Mitchell Trio debts were paid, Denver changed the name to Denver, Boise and Johnson, which John still insists was the best of the Trios. That lasted until Johnson decided to pull out. Denver decided to dissolve the group. Denver started thinking about being a single singer. He went to Aspen, Colorado, since he had heard about it and had determined that the best place for an unknown name to start would be at a ski resort where there would be no pressure and where he could collect himself. He did well in Aspen, moved on back to the Cellar Door in Washington, and hit the college coffeehouse circuit. During the course of that, Denver met Jerry Weintraub who impressed Denver because he did not want to sign any contracts and wanted to groom him for television. That was in 1969. Weintraub was right; he kept him on TV and kept his RCA recording contract alive, although Denver's records weren't chart busters, as they say. Denver admitted that this was the only period in his professional life that his self-confidence wavered. He persevered because his audiences liked, nay loved him. They still do. Back to live action. So you never considered quitting, as long as you could see that crowd reaction, even if the crowd was only a dozen? Exactly. That time onstage was always just about the best part of my life. So we kept going and then we got together with Jerry Weintraub and he had me recording. Then I was at the Cellar Door with some friends, Bill and Taffy Danoff, who called themselves Fat City. They wrote a song for me called "I Guess He'd Rather Be in Colorado", a beautiful song I wish I'd written. After opening night at the Cellar Door we were gonna go back to their house and jam and we were in a car accident and my thumb was broken. I went to the hospital to have a splint put on and by then i was wired, you know, after a car wreck. So we went over to their house and in the early hours of the morning they showed me this chorus and part of the verse to a song they were writing called "Country Roads" and I flipped over that song. They'd had it for a month and hadn't been able to do anything with what they had. That morning we finished writing that song and I said we've got to record this on the next album, which was "Poems, Prayers and Promises." He heard it and said here's a record worth working for. He got onto it and by the end of March it had gotten up to about 50 on the charts - the first record we ever had on the charts - and RCA wanted to put it back and release something else. Jerry and I both screamed. Jerry and I kept at it and it went to be a Number One record. It really changed the whole situation. I had a record on the charts and all of a sudden it's not John Denver, the writer of "Leaving On A Jet Plane", but it's John Denver who sings the song that you heard on the radio. All of this time, I was growing, learning more about myself, noticing what music was coming out of me and where it came from and how it worked and what it had to do with and so I was able to cut away a lot of the nonsense that starts getting in. Like one of the things that I got through very quickly was, well, now that you've had a hit, how are you going to follow that? What have you written since "Jet Plane" what have you written since "Country Roads"? I finally got to a state where I realized that I had never tried to write a hit record. And I haven't yet. I am the most unprolific songwriter that I know. I've gone periods of six months without writing a song. You have to wait till the spirit hits you? That's exactly it. And that's a thing that I feel very strongly about. I don't feel that I write the song. I think the songs are out there and I think - Bob Dylan said this and it was the first time that I thought about it and then Paul Stookey said it better for me. He said that you don't so often feel like the creator of a song, you feel like the instrument of that which wants to be written. See, so I don't think that I create the songs, although I'm willing to take full responsibility for the songs because I put myself in a particular space where these songs are coming to me. I just happen to be this way and live this way that I live and these particular songs are coming through me. "Rocky Mountain High" took about nine months to write. I had the chorus to it that I had gotten from a camping trip to Williams Lake, about 25 miles from Aspen. I was telling these guys about this meteor shower. I said, you guys are gonna see some shooting stars tonight and you're not going to believe it. So it's gettin' dark and I noticed, there was no moon that night, and we were up at about 11,000 feet and there're so many stars and the sky gets to be so deep and so clear that you have a little pool of shadows from the starlight. And then these guys were saying, all right, shooting stars.....And then pretty soon there were balls of fire going across. It goes all the way across the sky, you can see the smoke, you can see it and you can hear it. It's great, it's so far out, and I was saying, Rocky Mountain high, I've seen a ray of fire in the sky and the shadow of the starlight, look at that. And then it took me awhile to write that song, to put the story around that song, which is totally autobiographical. Then, "Annie's Song" I wrote in about 10 minutes on a ski life. See, but the songs, they come when they come and I can't force them and it's not my objective to do that. When they come, they come. What I want to be clear about is that I'm not writing songs to please people. I'm not writing what they want to hear. And if a lot of people happen to like it, that's nice, but it's not essential? Then that's the most far-out kind of chocolate icing that you can have. I get to go out and do these songs that are my favorite songs and talk about things that are totally real to me. "Matthew" is a true story - the names are changed to protect the innocent but it's a true story. "Rocky Mountain High" is my story, you know. Now I know that as many people that have listened to that song have gotten that many different things out of it. It's totally okay for me for people to get whatever they get - I don't want to get in the way of the music. I go out there and sing these songs and don't dance around. i try to sing 'em as good as i can and sing 'em how I feel them. And now, not only do I get to do that, but we get to go all over the country. What is life like for you in Aspen? Do you keep a routine...get up and run or anything? Totally undisciplined. I think - I try to discipline myself really extensively around the work that I do. When I leave home, when I'm out making a record, I want to put the energy there and I don't want it floating around in eight million different ways. When I'm at home in Aspen some days I get up at dawn, especially now with Zach. i like getting up when he gets up and feeding him and playing with him in the morning before everybody else gets up. And sometimes I just sleep in. When I'm home I really need time to myself. I need time to play and this is something that I recognized in my own life. A lot of people get stuck into thinking that you're a grownup now and you can't play - you can't waste time. There's no such thing as wasting time in my dictionary. I like to play and I like to be out in the mountains. I like to ride my motorcycle and really gettin' off on learning how to fly. I love to listen to music and I don't like to go home and sit down and start dealing with business. Would you ever run for public office? That's an interesting question 'cause I've thought about that a lot and over the past year I've had a lot of people ask me about that and I don't know. I'm really intrigued about politics. I've thought bout it and I lean two ways. I would love to do that because I think I work with people well. I think that I'm capable of making decisions and I also feel that I'm able to put people around me to give me the knowledge that I don't necessarily have myself. I've got a really good family of people who are helping me support what I do in music and it's working. And I think that I could expand that and so that aspect of it is not something that I would be afraid of but I don't know that politics right now is something that's working. I personally think that my music is working better than politics is, in regard to serving the people. I need to have some time at home - I need it for me - I need it for me in regard to me and Annie. I need it for me in regard to me and my little boy. I need it for me in regard to me and the universe. I'm involved with the Bicentennial Commission in Colorado and I want to get involved with the Bicentennial Commission on a national level. What I would like to do and what I am doing in Colorado and hope to expand on a national level, is to get through to young people - elementary school, junior high and high school people - and to open up the space for them to take a look at who we are: who came from where to this little place here on this river and built the town and how did it start and how did it get to be this and where does it look like this is going and how would I like it to be. I'd like to do it through public schools and the thing about it is it's not gonna cost any money, and we're spending millions and millions of dollars on stuff for this bicentennial, some of which I think is a total waste. But what I want to do is get young people involved, like planting flowers and cleaning up the streets. I want to do an American symphony with Lee Holdridge and incorporate all the elements of music that I'm aware of that have come down from our history starting with folk music and folk dances; the blues and the sounds of people working on plantations to the jazz coming out of new Orleans and what happened when it moved north and went to Chicago, to cowboy music; to country and western; to rock & roll; to the Beatles when they came over; to today. And do it in a way that incorporates the whole area of music and dance - and with a symphony orchestra to then go around the country and perform it. I want to write a book. Want to try to put some things down in a way that's not disciplined or defined by song, music. Sometimes that's a confining space. Especially confining when radio stations won't play a song that's long than three minutes.