They Write the Songs
THEY WRITE THE SONGS
October 12, 1997 was a day I will always remember. The event which had occurred on that day knocked me sideways and brought me to my knees. It was the day someone who had been in my life since the early 1970’s had died. He was my third musician crush just after Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy. I didn’t know him personally, but when I first heard the clear, magical voice of Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr., AKA John Denver, I wanted to know everything about him. I was obsessed with his lyrics, the way he stood up for the planet, his floppy blond hair and his wire-rimmed glasses. I’ve always had a thing for men who wear glasses.
He sang about truth and love and friends and the environment. He sang about wanting to fly with the eagles and knew that to live on the land we must learn from the sea. He loved to sit around a fire and pass the pipe. Even now, as I write about him, tears sting the corners of my eyes. I still feel the loss of this wonderful, heartfelt man.
I know he had his demons, but so what? Who doesn’t? My demons showed up and broke me down — which is why I wrote all these essays — to try and find out what caused the breakdown I wasn’t supposed to have.
Even post-breakdown, when I’m having ‘one-of-those-days,’ I’ll find Denver’s music and take a long drive; sometimes having to pull over because crying and driving don’t mix.
I was in our newly remodeled living room that October, cleaning the floor when I heard that he had died. The television was on in the background keeping me company, and when the newscaster announced his name my ears perked up as they always did when I heard his name. The news station wasn’t talking about his latest appearance before Congress, fighting for some environmental cause. Similar to what he did when he spoke out against the Reagan administration’s environmental and defense policies. The talking head wasn’t announcing how his second marriage was failing, and how he was trying to reconcile with his first wife, Annie.
They were saying something about a new airplane he had been piloting and that he had been in a terrible airplane accident in Monterey Bay. The Long-EZ plane he was flying had run out of fuel or he hit the wrong button as he was trying to shift to the second fuel tank. No one really knew. All I know is that the day John Denver died, I felt like a part of me had died along with him. For me, it was the day the music died.
I rubbed that same spot on the floor over and over again, tears mixing with Murphy’s Oil Soap. I felt the loss so acutely it frightened me. What kind of person mourns and cries and falls apart for a man she only knew through his music? I guess the type of person who was on the verge of falling apart anyway. It only takes one piece of straw to break that camel’s back.
Years later I was on an airplane somewhere over Montana when I keyed in on a conversation across the aisle. Two gentlemen were talking about real estate in Idaho and Montana and then the conversation turned to the Monterey Bay. One of the men had been on the rescue team that pulled John Denver from the bay, and in a morbid sort-of way, I let myself listen to all the gory details.
It still breaks my heart to think about his untimely death. I hope that maybe, someday, if there really is life after death, I’ll be in the ethereal audience for one hellofa spiritual concert. After all, his voice was of an angelic realm.
Plane crashes took the lives of Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly, Jim Croce, Big Bopper, Richie Valens and Mr. Denver. Karen Carpenter died of complications from anorexia. John Lennon was shot. George Harrison, Joe Cocker, Dan Fogelberg, and David Bowie lost their battles with cancer. Freddy Mercury died of AIDS. Glenn Frey died of too many medical complications to list. And we all read about what the autopsy found when the coroner opened up Tom Petty after his untimely death just days after his last concert at the Hollywood Bowl. .
When one of the musicians I adore and idolize dies, I stop my world and take inventory of what I was doing, who I was with, what I was wearing, and how many of their albums or CD’s I have in my collection. I sink a little bit more into the earth and start asking questions about existence, self-worth and fear. I wonder if, as a writer, I’ll ever finish all the stories I have in my head before I die. I wonder if they thought the same thing as their soul was reaching toward the light. I wonder if Jim Croce said, “Hey! I’m not done yet! I was just getting started!”
Linda Ronstadt can no longer sing because of Parkinson’s. Joni Mitchell said smoking cigarettes ruined her voice and I don’t think Crosby, Stills and Nash will ever sing together again. By his own admission, David Crosby was a total ass for years. Stephen Stills and Graham Nash haven’t spoken to him in a long time.
I’m grateful that Bobby Sherman, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Neil Diamond and Carole King are still this side of the dirt. Even if most of them don’t record anymore, just knowing they are still around gives me some comfort.
Music has been an integral part of my life for as long as I can remember. When we lived in Reseda, California, my mother would often slide the album “Whipped Cream” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass onto our RCA turntable. She would take my hands and twirl me around to the rhythm of the title song, Whipped Cream, or Bittersweet Samba. One day she made an offhand comment about Alpert attending her high school in Los Angeles. He was two years older than her at Fairfax High. If they had hooked up, wow. My life would have been entirely different. I would have been entirely different.
I was 10 when I put my first nickel into a jukebox. It was located by the front door of some dive-restaurant in Kernville, California. We were on a camping trip. My mother was sick of camping food, peeing in an outhouse, and watching my father pull hooks out of trout, so we drove into town.
I was in heaven. Dozens of songs at my disposal with just the slip of a nickel. To this day, my mother remembers me bugging her for nickels to play music. There was no eating lunch in peace if there was a jukebox around. I played “I’m Henry VIII, I Am,” and “What’s New Pussycat” over and over and over.
When I was 12, I got a pink Barbie 45-RPM disc player. It looked like a small, plastic suitcase. The turntable was bookended by two speakers. I would take it to my friends’ houses, plug it in, open it up and pull out my 45 collection. My first records were the “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin, “Draggin’ the Line” by Tommy James and “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard it Should Be,” by Carly Simon. Many other 45’s followed, adding to my growing collection.
It’s no wonder I ended up with a job in the music industry. Maybe I should have tried harder to get a job with John Denver’s record label or management company. Instead of going up in a handmade airplane that October day, perhaps we would have been on a business call, deciding how much money he would make if he licensed Rocky Mountain High for some advertising campaign. We would have been in an argument because his environmental standards would have gotten in the way of a hundred-thousand-dollar paycheck. I would have talked him into the deal, and it would have been too late in the day for him to fly. He would have had a dream that night that he needed to go up in the plane with another person, someone who would have had no trouble switching on the secondary fuel tank.
One thing is for sure, when it’s time for Jackson Browne, Steven Tyler, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Don Henley, Paul McCartney, Neil Young or Ann Wilson to go way over yonder, I know where I’ll be, what I’ll be doing, and probably what I was wearing. That’s if I don’t cross over first. One never knows, does one?
