John Denver: Windsong : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

John Denver made $10 million this year, and every nickel of it, we can imagine, sported a buffalo. Denver celebrates an aspect of this land, its unspoiled mountains and waters, its fresh breezes and uninterrupted sunshine, that most of us observe fast becoming extinct. With remarkable steadfastness, Denver continues to cling to the nature mystic's vocabulary, despite its increasing inapplicability and Denver's own altered circumstances. In other words, no panegyric to the neon of Las Vegas, though he has played there, can be expected. Of course, Denver is a Johnny-one-note on the subject of his favorite terrain precisely because it is remote from the experience of his average listener. It is extremely unlikely that sunshine on his shoulder makes him (or anyone except a miner) high; the contents of Windsong are a hermetically sealed fantasy designed to alleviate the deprivations of the average city dweller.

At this point, John Denver albums are as numerous as potted plants in the apartments of these urbanites, and both are symptoms of the same longing. The singer acknowledges his average listener in "Fly Away":

Life in the city can make you crazy
For sounds of the sand and the sea
Life in a high-rise can make you hungry
For things that you can't even see.

In reality, wilderness is dramatic and ferocious, but Windsong has us thinking of it as a rather breathtaking suburb. It is a measure of Windsong's effectiveness as fantasy that it is above all tranquilizing.

Like some ancient Greek philosopher, Denver endlessly contemplates the elements - earth, air, water not fire, however. He even has a penchant for Greek mythology. (One song is entitled "Calypso," and "Spirit" pays its respects to Hercules, Apollo, Orpheus. Andromeda and Vega.) Besides the vacant nature hymns, Windsong contains songs which cast him as the great quester, and a couple in which he's more the typical earthbound C&W protagonist. Every number echoes as if it were recorded in some vast Gemeinschaft in the Rockies. The title song is unbounded echo and little more, giving his irritating, diaphragmatic but pallid vibrato special prominence. "Cowboy's Delight," which has a pretty melody and a thoughtful, swelling arrangement, is the sweetest of the bunch, but still only a better version of what he does elsewhere. It seems we readers of "Doonesbury" can expect John Denver to remain Duke's bete noire for some time to conie, and that of anyone else who has no great weakness for pipe dreams.