John Denver: Spirit : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

There is a repellent narcissism implicit in the work of John Denver. It's the lingering, anxiety-free, never-faltering vibrato of his voice, the parochial (and therefore false) expansiveness of his lyrics, and the contrived and rigidly controlled Americana of his instrumentations. The man's saving grace is that he has occasionally written some excellent melodies ("Rocky Mountain High," "Leavin', on a Jet Plane").

Unfortunately, Spirit has no blockbuster melodies and only two songs, "Come and Let Me Look in Your Eyes" and "The Wings that Fly Us Home," come close. But the former is a gelatinous mass of Bert Kaempfert-style strings that absolutely shimmies with Denver's profound appreciation of his own true love, and the latter, fired up by those same strings, a monstrously heroic victory march right through the cosmos to the far reaches of Warbling Heights. The album's best song, "Baby, You Look Good to Me Tonight," attracts almost as a curiosity. In it, we find Mr. Clean on the road, cajoling a "local angel" into a one-night stand. In Denver's context, this is risqué and finally becomes — when he sings, "Thought I must be in a dream/When she asked me if I wanted cream"—positively pornographic. Jamming the words together with Dylanesque density and a chorus almost identical to "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" clinch the accidental appeal.

Denver continues to regale us with tales of old-fashioned joys and the True American Spirit (as indicated, perhaps, by banjo fills) and to point proudly to the bounty of his own guileless ("Far out!") glee. But John Denver remains insipid: as efficient as any prefab Swiss chalet in the Colorado mountains and just as inappropriate.