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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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Topic Author's Original Post - Aug 29, 2010 - 11:22pm PT
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Yeah, probably setting myself up for some flack. Just got through watching a KCET program on him. The guy put out some good stuff. Country Roads. Annie's Song. Rocky Mountain High.
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Studly
Trad climber
WA
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Aug 29, 2010 - 11:27pm PT
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What a very very talented guy he was. His songs were from a different era, a time past that I don't think we will see again. I listen to his music sometimes and drift back to another place I once was when life was easy and I was young.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Aug 29, 2010 - 11:34pm PT
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Leavin on a Jet Plane was lifted from a band he saw in a bar in Kansas.
I've always wondered how many other hits by name artists were similarly pilfered from unknowns.
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 29, 2010 - 11:38pm PT
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Yeah. The late seventies and early eighties were not simple times. His music found the innocence without down playing the angst. I really think he had a lot in his head. Popular media kinda washed it out in production.
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couchmaster
climber
pdx
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Aug 29, 2010 - 11:39pm PT
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Same here, loved his stuff. Still do. The man was talented, but sadly had let alcohol get into his life too far.
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john hansen
climber
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Aug 29, 2010 - 11:43pm PT
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He and his music also really started the whole early seventies backpacking craze, and the environmental movement that was going along with it.
Hiking boots,,check , down vest's, check.
"Friends around the campfire and every body's high,,, "
I betcha his songs got played around a lot of camp 4 fires BITD.
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ron gomez
Trad climber
fallbrook,ca
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Aug 30, 2010 - 12:07am PT
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???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
What's this place coming too????????????? John Denver?????????????????????
Peace
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Bad Climber
climber
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Aug 30, 2010 - 12:11am PT
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Yeah, kinda cheesy, but as a kid I loved his music. Guess that says something about the kind of kid I was--nerdy romantic who fell in love with climbing. Changed my life--climbing, not John Denver. Still, thinking about him now takes me back. So damn young, parents still around, no friends had died...nostalgia is a disease!
Take me home, country roads...
BAd
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BLT&P Sandwich
Social climber
Amazon
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Aug 30, 2010 - 12:50am PT
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He was and is a favorite
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Aug 30, 2010 - 12:54am PT
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When John Denver was alive and popular I would have said what Tami said, but if I heard him on the radio these days, I might enjoy it.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Aug 30, 2010 - 02:48am PT
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Go to that Greenie state, it's still the time and place he wrote about.
Um sis, his lic hadn't expired, there was another reason he had no "ticket to fly" on that day....
"Thank gawd I'm an ocean bouy"
He really did have his moments though, he wrote the lyrics to 'leavin' on a jet plane'.
I was not into his music, but I never doubted his sincerity, ( except when reading hunter Thompson)
Odd bit of Trivia, he was born in Roswell New Mexico the same year they allegeedly, scooped
aliens, there. Coincidence?
He kicked Ass on the Muppet show! Cooler than Elvis, way behind Elke Sommers....
Wish i coulda took him and Hunter up a wall....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2VbRiBDcCk
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Aug 30, 2010 - 03:03am PT
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He and his music also really started the whole early seventies backpacking craze, and the environmental movement that was going along with it.
John Denver started the backpacking craze? And the environmental movement?
Whatever you think of his music, it definitely did not start the "backpacking craze." And to say he and his music were responsible for starting the environmental movement is to misunderstand history on an epic scale. Somewhere, John Muir and David Brower are gagging...
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Aug 30, 2010 - 03:19am PT
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And a Yeti...
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Aug 30, 2010 - 03:29am PT
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Riley, Hunter called him a fascist, and said that he lived in a world, (Aspen) where poor brown people had been zoned out. Though, who's calling the what what? as they were neighbors in privaleged Woody Creek? A lot of this has been charactuerized in vintage Doonsebury.
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MarkGrubb
climber
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Aug 30, 2010 - 03:47am PT
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Like most people of this genre, JD was pro-environmental until it got personal.
In 1979 or 80 he buried a kilo-gallon gasoline storage tank in his yard in the ultra-exclusive Chic gated suburb of Starwood outside of Aspen. I recall he was concerned about a potential fuel shortage.
Hunter Thompson was not JD's neighbor. HT lived up Woody Creek in some beautiful terrain. He had his own gate along with a passel of fierce-sounding guard dogs and a .45 or three.
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JD's fuel-sucking Lear Jet "WindSong" was painted rainbow over earth tones". I almost hit it and his Dad, the pilot, head-on in a sailplane as we both were landing in Aspen, unfortunately in opposite directions (long story).
Additional uproars in Aspen ensued when JD shot a neighbor's dog or cat with an air rifle when it trespassed his garden. Almost as bad a vibe as that towards Claudine Longet (spelling?) after she "accidentally" shot Spider.
As the stomach turns in the land of the ultra-rich! :)
All that being said, JD was a nice and unpretentious guy around the airport and invited us ramp-rats to parties at his house. His demise in a flying accident was sad.
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kc
Trad climber
lg, ca
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Aug 30, 2010 - 10:26am PT
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"Cold Nights in Canada" should pretty much be the theme song of this site. Amazing artist.
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Crimpergirl
Sport climber
Boulder, Colorado!
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Aug 30, 2010 - 10:34am PT
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I was given three center front row tickets to see him years ago. I thought, "what a dork...I don't even know his music...oh well, I'll go." So a couple of friends and I went. It was fantastic. And to our surprise, we knew the words to every single song he played. It was an amazing concert. So happy we went too - it was only about two weeks later that he was dead.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Aug 30, 2010 - 10:40am PT
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i'm a particular fan of john's, though not out of nostalgia for the birth of backpacking. his autobiography, take me home, paints a more complex figure than his public persona, and i've wondered whether despondency was a problem for him. as he admits there, he may have been more in love with love than he was with annie, and love was something he could never quite get right.
i wrote the following on "annie's song" a couple years ago, for a booklet on "best love songs" for my nephews' weddings:
Annie's Song
My reading of this song has a bit of history, which began with Dr. Martin O. Svaglic’s Romantic Literature class at Loyola University of Chicago in the late 1960s.
Dr. Svaglic was a towering intellect in the English department. All the other professors were in awe of him. He was renowned as a scholar of John Henry Cardinal Newman and had published a definitive edition of Newman’s The Idea of a University. He was a classic egghead and looked it too—tall, slender, bald, ascetic.
So this guy is droning away on Byron, Shelley and Keats and opens up Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” and reads a few lines from near the end of that long poem in his usual monotone, “… and here we have probably the most beautiful description of sexual intercourse in the English language.”
Meanwhile someone had wired up all the metal desks in that classroom and plugged them into an electric outlet. Svag deadpanned over his granny glasses—didn’t crack a smile. I’ll bet he pulled it every year.
I’ll let you look up the Keats reference. For my money, John Denver tops it with this song, and I think Dr. Svaglic might have agreed.
You fill up my senses
Like a night in a forest
Like the mountains in springtime
Like a walk in the rain
Like a storm in the desert
Like a sleepy blue ocean
You fill up my senses--come fill me again.
Come let me love you
Let me give my life to you
Let me drown in your laughter
Let me die in your arms
Let me lay down beside you
Let me always be with you
Come let me love you--come love me again.
You fill up my senses
Like a night in a forest
Like the mountains in springtime
Like a walk in the rain
Like a storm in the desert
Like a sleepy blue ocean
You fill up my senses--come fill me again.
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
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Aug 30, 2010 - 10:53am PT
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I like some of john denvers songs....never made me want to backpack but i do know a trust-funder -dork who smokes way too much weed and claims denver's music inspired him to move to the mountains...the dork is still living the hippy dream sponsored by mom and dad's check book...rocky mountain high , in the eastern sierra...rj
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