Take Me Home An Awkward Long-Distance Farewell to the King of Uncool by Martin Azevedo BAM Magazine - October 1997 Somewhere in Germany: The picnic tables in this particular beer hall are packed with frat boys wearing stupid scarecrow hats (apparently made of dryer lint) and chubby families, all clinking enormous steins of beer together. On a platform in the center of the room, a busload of German brass-band musicians wearing lederhosen strike up a weirdly familiar drinking song. Within a few notes, everyone is drunkenly singing "Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenendoah River..." I really didn't understand until I left the United States a month ago. The week before Oktoberfest, I sat writing postcards outside a hostel in Spain with a gang of German students, who were singing "Take Me Home, Country Roads" as if to mock the effort I'd gone through to get there. Later, I stayed in Bavaria with a charming elderly couple who spoke no English; the radio was tuned to some schmaltzy German easy-listening station playing "Take Me Home, Country Roads"in German. I'd travelled far to learn how the rest of the world lived, and discovered that I already knew. I'd always thought we were alone. John Denver was the chicken pox of American pop music: If you didn't get it as a kid, your adult body wouldn't respond to it properly, and it would most likely make you break out in hives. He wrote songs about children and flowers and getting stoned around the campfire and my mother bought all his records and we played them whenever she was angry at us and like magic she always calmed down. Soon I decided this was a good thing. His records were not the soundtrack to my childhood - I had KFRC Top 40 radio for that. But John Denver's music *was* childhood. It was naive, emotional, idealistic, nakedly sentimental and shamelessly uncool. It was everything I was before I figured out how to act so other kids wouldn't make fun of me. John Denver wasn't just not cool; he was the opposite of cool, relentlessly positive and confidently sentimental. He made Huey Lewis seem like James Dean. He sang about getting stoned with his friends and he made it sound as dangerously enticing as shopping with Grandma. Some of John Denver's lyrics were potent, eloquently simple and sung with graceful restraint (listen to "Matthew"). Many others were so outrageously, playfully sincere as to be remarkable, mostly for the lack of shame with which they were performed: "You fill up my senses...like a sleepy blue ocean," "Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy." These are daring lyrics, if only in their appalling refusal to become deeper upon further examination. John Denver played wonderfully silly children's songs and hilariously heartfelt adults' songs, and much of the time it was impossible to tell them apart. And in the end, I've always been grateful to him for that. If I'm the only one who thinks this way, I suppose I've buried myself too far already. As it is, I wish I could be back in the U.S. just to groan as the local comedians collectively recognize yet another easy target rising to the surface. But I know somewhere out there, closeted John Denver fans by the thousands are hauling old records out of closets and pondering the meaning of this weird moment. Most celebrity deaths are either of the youth-drugs-hotel-room variety or the "Uh...he was still alive?" variety, and the news coverage invariably gets tedious either way. Meanwhile, the guy whose long-unhip, still-popular music I'll always love died coincidentally, not with a bang but an awkward splash. Surprising but not really devastating. Perhaps it's the natural and unspectacular end befitting the beloved king of the uncool. Maybe it's the sound of my own life moving another notch into adulthood. But as long as I still have my old records, at least I know what some small part of that adulthood is gonna sound like. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _