John Denver: Rocky Mountain High (RCA) : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

There he is on the screen of your color TV: blond, bespectacled, and peach-faced the sight of him makes you want to adjust the hue, because John Denver's flesh tone is just a shade too flesh-toned. He's the balladeer for the masses, sweet-voiced, ingenuous, and completely devoid of human characteristics. He seems sincere enough, but it's hard to sense any character in anything he says or sings. Seeing Denver in his frequent TV appearances over the last couple years suggested this inherent blandness; listening to any of his five previous albums confirmed it. Whenever there was a possibility of something real happening, Denver's nightclubfolky voice and delivery would effectively douse the spark.

So if all that is true—and there was little doubt in my mind that it was until just now—what's going on here? This Rocky Mountain High record must be by some other John Denver, because it's a crisp, muscular album with compelling singing and some of the most powerful acoustic guitar-dominated arrangements I've heard on record. Denver may well have tired of hearing himself on the radio interminably crooning "Take me home, country road," and "When I come back, I'll wear your wedding ring," and decided to cut loose just once in his successful, determinedly modulated career.

The key is those arrangements. More than anything, Denver needed some hard edges—some arrogance, meanness, smelliness, some unspeakable aberration—anything that would dirty up his act. Changing his style to include any of these humanizing elements would not only be wrecking a good thing commercial-wise, it would also be extremely hard on the credibility. So instead of overtly toughening himself, Denver has surrounded himself with toughness in the form of biting instrumental tracks. The complement includes the acoustic guitars, keyboards, bass, and drums currently fashionable for the recordings of singersongwriters from Denver to Rod Stewart, but there's a difference here. The sound is echoed, treble-boosted in the manner of a Dave Edmunds-type neoclassicist rock 'n' roll mix, underplaying the mellow middle of the acoustic guitar's sound and exaggerating its jangly top end. The technique is ridiculously simple in theory, but it produces almost miraculous results for Mr. Denver.

"Prisoners" is the key song in terms of Denver's new approach. Two acoustic guitars and electric bass kick it off with strident tones set into a march tempo like something from the first Byrds album: it's immediately compelling. Denver's voice has to battle with these sharp-edged, cutting notes and chords for the dominant sonic position, and the struggle adds some spunk to his voice (that, and a little treble boost on the vocal). He sounds no nastier than usual, but his singing resounds with what could pass for real tension and edginess, and this is without a doubt the strongest thing Denver's ever put on a record.

"Prisoners," which, incidentally, has been released as a single under the title, "Hard Life, Hard Times (Prisoners)," is the culmination of a fast-moving, carefully structured side of songs that includes Denver's typical choices of Beatle and John Prine material plus a fake folk song (Steve Gillette's "Darcy Farrow") and old and new original tunes. The Beatle song, the much-recorded "Mother Nature's Son," is particularly intriguing: instead of going in the expected "isn't it tranquil out here in the woods" direction that the melody and lyrics more than suggest, Denver fills the song with intended or intuitively summoned irony. Again, the guitars jangle edgily; even more surprisingly, they refuse to resolve the melodic progression at the end of the second line of each verse, and their refusal leads to a sudden lurch in the movement of the song rather than the expected smooth transition. Denver has to work to keep the track from tumbling out of control—it never quite tips over completely, but the struggle produces plenty of anxiety, transmogrifying the song in the process into something sinister, an oblique refutation of the lying - in - the - grass - letting - the - world - go - by mentality intended by the writer.

The second side is taken up mostly with something called "The Season Suite"; surprisingly, even that has enough jangling urgency to keep it mildly interesting. I doubt if I'll ever be inclined to play "Season Suite" again, but that other side will be hard to resist, it all works so well. I went back to the earlier five LPs to see if I could find foreshadowing of this kind of sound or tone or sense of drama on any of them—after all, they were all produced by the same team of Denver and Milt Okun, and they all contained the same instrumentation—but there was nary a clue. Maybe it all came to him in a dream, I can't figure it at all, but the guy has finally made an album that's really worth owning.