Something very new and beautiful came into my life oh, it must have been about three years ago, and since then it’s put me through so many mellow changes that I just had to share it with you. If you think that’s the first sentence of some kinda setpiece Marin County consciousness parody, you’re dead wrong, Jake. I love John Denver, just as I love this great land of ours, and I make no bones about it even though I keep calling up my friends all over the country and raving to ’em about John’s art and beamy beatified visage, and they poopooh the pressed duck with “Yeah, sure, okay Lester...” They think I’m putting them on, trying to be camp or something, but I’m not at all. I’m in love and here’s how it happened:

It started vaguely. There was a local AM station that prided itself on playing “progressive” album cuts all goddam day, imitation FM on the AM, and even though I’d always perferred the Top 40 to the hip pretensions of FM I was listening to it more and more because with the idiomatic mergers of the 70s it seemed to matter less and less and I was just beginning to get into MOR muzak and folkie mocha and all the other wimpfronds I wallow in these apres midis.

So I’m cruising along in the car letting the solos flow, and every once in awhile I hear this absolutely shining slice of transcendent d ultimo wimp, big production and high gloss. Sure it was polished pone, but the damn thing was persistent, it just kept recurring with such regularity that you knew pretty soon there was no escaping your ultimate destiny of loving the lymph, out of the utmost object of your scab proud scorn. In other words, it was so great that it jumped cross the fence and realigned your priorities and your way of seeing the world. Sound too cosmic? Nah, it’s simple.

Look, I’m over at A1 Niester’s house getting sudsed when in walks this Nook broad, and we’re teasing back and forth ‘cause she’s a folkie and I’m a hardrock heavy metal zealot. I laugh at her faves, but allow as how I can kinda dig this deck by John Denver called “Rocky Mountain High” they’re always playing...

“What?” she scorns. “Pshaw! That’s just commercialized pap, that’s not real folk music like Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell!”

Hmmm. Okay, now I knew why I liked the bug in spite of myself, because it was really commericalized pap instead of some deep sensitive ruminations like Judee Sill or James Taylor. The ultimate pretzel of all this, though, is that of course it’s all commercialized pap, except maybe Joni Mitchell, who may well be getting there. And what of, course, is wrong with c.p. in the first place? Is it not by definition nonthreatening?

Thereis nothing so degrading as wallowing in apple pie.

Not necessarily, say some of my colleagues and Denver detractors. I can recall riding in the car with Ed Ward when John Denver came on the radio, and Ed gave out with “Speaking of evil...” In his mind, Denver lulled folks into a state of complacency and simplemindedness that made them perfect fodder for the next Manson . I also once wrote a review where I speculated on whether America might be not quite as innocuous as they seemed, and I had all kinds of sound logical axles to back me up, but I reached that point mainly because I’d been talking to Greil Marcus on the phone and he said “You know, I think the America album and the whole idea of that group is one of the closest things to something really evil I can think of these days.” Why? Well, it all bad something to do with them being Americans who went to Britain, put Indians on their album jacket, subtly identifying themselves and what they stood for with America and what it stands for...

In a way he was right, because one of the things America the country stands for is the glorious institution of the supermarket, and it was in one of our local supermarkets that I first realized what America the group had done to me: I looked at a cheese display case, and there it was spelled out in lettering totally unlike America the group’s logo: “AMERICAN CHEESE.” And damned if I didn’t immediately flash on those three bakery faced college creeps and all their whispy, wimpy little toons! In fact, they had so great an impact on me that the whole syndrome followed me around for months afterward, every fucking time I saw the name of our great nation written everywhere, those bastards and their records bounced back again into the frontscreen of my skull. Talk about subliminal conditioning, this was genius. Particularly if you wanted to de-patriate somebody — what could be more erosive to the monolithic majesty of the fatherland than pavlovian association with something as insipid as “Sister Golden Hair”? The New Left never had it so good, and at this point it is hardly even around to appreciate the inadvertent spoils..

And John Denver has only finished the demolition job on our national cultural chauvinism which America began. There is nothing so destructive to any piety as making it the object of kitsch, and John Denver is kitsch at apogee. In this sense, he is a true decadent unrecognized in a sea of dildowaggling pretenders who don’t have the sense to realize that there is nothing so degrading as wallowing in apple pie; it certainly beats eating dogshit, which can only be marketed once (resulting in I’ve-seen-it-what-else-yougot), and besides enjoys a certain integrity which is perversely the opposite of true decadence’s passive abusiveness (i.e., it takes a certain amount of physical courage to eat dogshit, whereas it takes nothing to exhort everybody to see the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet). If we are going to admire people for being disgusting, which is certainly the cultural history of the 1970s, then we should admire most intensely those (Helen Reddy, say) who offend in the cheapest and most cowardly way.

In other words, John Denver is sleazier than Divine, and should be respected for it.

And not just respected. I have here a copy of John Denver’s recent Windsong album, a lovely sluice of pablum from the same spigot as all his other records. Thematically speaking, if we throw out all excess lyrical baggage and collect the key terms which recur throughout his oeuvre, we may condense the contents of Windsong to the following very concrete piece of poetry, which is presented as documentation and you are certainly not expected to read:

TURN TO PAGE 72.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 31.

wind earth wind sky wind wind wind darkness dawn wind rain rainbow wind wind wind hay wind stallion summer’s wind canyons thunder mountains sea wind mornings wind welcome wind breezes wind sunrise night stars darkness moon mountains sky sunrise night mountain stars mountain swan dark clouds wind space smoky galaxy time winter’s moon summer sun dark clouds wind fly space dream fly eagle universe sunshine space dream fly eagle day space stars dream fly eagle raindrops wind stallions blizzards lizards meadows sun daylight sun daylight darkness sand sun daylight sun daylight darkness morn daytime midnight dawn nite nite nite nite Lord nite nite nite nite Life Life fruit birth soul Love Life Drinkin’ fountain Sweetwater salt sea moon mountain wind Life heart stallion sun night light Life ducks cold hands cold water’s morning duck blind river of gray snow ducks cold hands Lord ducks ducks cold hands snow ducks cold hands ducks cold hands cold rain night days cloudy dreams nights shady life sand sea life hungry see fly world children spring dream crystal ocean storm life living growing dolphin light darkness silent world live land sea tide wind-swell day’s Nighttime sky’s all on fire light’s day trails birds canyon cottonwood Wyoming driftin’ dreamin’ river prairie moon bright coyote Wyoming dogie range angel fly cloud badlands bird tree wind sage heaven Wyoming Wyoming

I mean, it may not be Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” but it’s damn close. I left out the negative words, of course, such as “city,” “crazy,” “whiskey,” “tobacco” and “coffee,” all of which are on this album, along with the cryptic phrase “I’m sorry for the way things are in China,” which might lead more paranoid political elements to speculate on whether John Denver is actually a secret operative for Chiang Kai-Shek. But they would be dead wrong. John Denver is one of those who, as Norman Mailer once suggested, destroy the System by boring from within. He does this by being boring, and by reducing everything connected with possessing a sense of wonder about things in the natural world to the level of a bad joke. He deals in a certain worship of the elements, he markets that worship, and like Arizona Highways he turns the awesome beauty of a sunset into banal trash. Which can only be a service to all of us, because the way things are going ecologically and sociologically there are only so many sunsets any of us are going to get the chance to see after this anyway, and nostalgia is the most indefensible form of emotional garbage. Unfortunately for everybody who ever watched an American eagle so^r above a.Rocky Mountain, John will soon have us all so sick of eagles and clear snowpeaks that it won’t even matter that the old bird is expiring in a moulting mulch or that the snowcaps look like they been dipped in chocolate syrup.

Now, with the collapse of our national ideals, it seems only fitting that we have one grand bespectacled avatar to ram them down our throats one last time, along with all that hippie peace and love crap, to make double damiY sure that we avoid nostalgia for lost innocence and squandered glory at all costs. John’s our man, the one with the plan to get the job done forever. These are the simple things you cannot comprehend, and for these he certainly deserves some form of tribute, if not outright obeisance. Far from the freckled, feckless country boy just a mellowin’ back with his old guitar, he is a new Babylonian shibboleth. The fact that he doesn’t know it, that he is actually sincere and believes in what he purports to be, makes him all the better candidate for Godhead: a huckster who doesn’t know, the Manchurian Candidate, stupid enough to hype Werner Erhardt, a magical innocent who cheapens, and thereby destroys everything he thinks he is celebrating and preserving, every time he opens his mouth. Under such conditions, it is nothing that he owns seven separate mountains in Colorado — this man owns the American Dream, and is thankfully doing it to death by selling it at top dollar, which is what it was designed for in the first place.