A few weeks ago, I talked about the anniversary of what would have been John Denver’s 80th birthday. As stated, I was a huge John Denver fan and I was going to marry him when I was eleven, ha! His music touched my soul in a way that few ever have and at a very influential time in my life. While I don’t listen to secular music much anymore, John Denver’s classics like Annie, Rocky Mountain High, Some Days Are Diamonds, Poems Prayers & Promises, Thirsty Boots, etc., sound as good to me today as they ever did and on occasion, for fun, I play some of my John Denver CDs. His earlier music, in my opinion, was the best.
Because of the way that his music touched my life in a positive way, I had a lingering hope about Denver’s salvation and his eternal placement – would I see him in Heaven one day? I recently bought and read his autobiography, “Take Me Home,” written just a few years before he died. Hope is just hope until the thing hoped for is realized and this book did nothing for the spiritual hope that I had reserved for him and in fact, put it to bed so to speak.
Before I read the book, I knew there was a possibility that he killed himself or at least didn’t care one way or the other. After reading the book, I’d say the possibility moved into the realm of probability. In fact, he talks about a time when his marriage to Annie was deteriorating and he thought about ending it right then, so the thought had crossed his mind before. We will never know for sure whether he did or didn’t but it was obvious reading the book that his was a very troubled mind with many unresolved issues from childhood.
As I talked about in my previous Denver post, his life was a tangled up mess at the time of his death; after reading the book, I realized that declaration was an understatement. He was one messed up dude! At one point, he made a comment about communism, “What’s so wrong with communism?” He asked. What the hell!! He was also into the New Age cult very deeply as was his wife, Annie. He was all over the place with his belief systems at times and cheated on Annie with many women.
Is the book worth the purchase and read? Absolutely! It was hard to put it down at times. If you are someone with an interest in music at all, especially the decades from the 70s to 2000, the music history and dealings alone make the book worth reading, but then when you add Denver and his life around that music history, it becomes exponentially worth it.
The big, wonderful surprise for me was the music history in “Take Me Home.” As someone who grew up in the music industry in the same decades as Denver, and was a singer/songwriter myself, I was completely mesmerized and fascinated by it all. It also made me grateful once again, that I never saw music as a viable way to make a living and therefore never pursued it as such. I had seen my mom’s band struggle and go through things that I wanted to stay far away from. I’m not a risk taker, and to be successful in music, you have to be a risk taker - so many things have to line up perfectly into place that it would be easier to just buy a lottery ticket – the odds of success are about the same.
“Take Me Home,” is an entertaining read about someone whose music touched my life; someone who was a risk taker and chased the music dream to his grave. Definitely worth the read.