Take Me Home: An Autobiography by John Denver and Arthur Tobier (1994) – A great book that discloses more than I wanted to know about a guy I otherwise adored.

Ever since I was a teenager with my own room, my own money, and my own record player on which I could play the music I liked, I’ve been a John Denver fan. It all rolls back to his top-selling album, John Denver’s Greatest Hits, the one where He’s sitting laughing in field of flowers holding onto his cowboy hat. Man, I loved that album.

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The problem for me, though, is that I was coming into the Folk music game about 30 years too late. This was the mid-90s, actually, and I was probably one of only a few teens buying up records at the time, so anything “new” to me was actually the stuff that had been popular during my parents’ own teenage years.

John Denver wasn’t much in the news when I finally came around to enjoy him (at least, not until his untimely death in the plane accident in 1997, three years after he published this autobiography), so while I had been aware of some of John Denver’s oddities from the snippets my mom had told me, I really didn’t know a whole lot about him. That’s essentially why I got this book, now nearly 30 years after its publication.

John Denver…Kind of a Creep

All told after reading this book, I guess I have to agree with my mom about what I now think of John Denver: we still love his music but otherwise think him a spiritual weirdo and kind of a creep. This book validates it all. In it, we get to learn all about his infidelities, his violent abuse, his divorces, his drug experimentation, etc. Beyond that, we also get to dip into his connections with EST and eastern mysticism which includes his close relationships with yogis, shamans, medicine men, and healers of all stripes. It’s an honest appraisal of his own life, no doubt, so at least he’s got honesty going for himself, but sheesh. Some of his anecdotes were hard to read.

Do you need a “for example”? How about the instance where Annie cuts some shrub oaks from their Aspen property while John is away, and he feels so slighted that he returns with a power-saw and, after nearly choking her in the kitchen, proceeds to saw some of her favorite furniture in half, like their dining room table and their headboard which he had always hated. He writes about the incident: “Later I cringed. What if the story got out? And I cringed, too, in self-realization; I hadn’t thought myself capable of that kind of violence. But otherwise I felt purged; I’d never been so hurt or angry in my life.” (186) There’s names for people who behave like that, and none of them are printable on a Christian blog.

Beyond stuff like this, you also get a sense that this is more a tell-all memoir than an autobiography, mainly because of all the complaining he does about other people, former spouses and partners especially. There’s reasons why I dislike delving into the secret lives of celebrities and hate even more reading their memoirs (like with Martin Short’s I Must Say), and this is a big one. His constant griping almost made me put the book down. Somehow, I pulled through.

Impressions and Quotations

But Ok, enough negative comments, because I actually did enjoy reading this book! The following sections and quotations are some of the impressions I jotted down while reading the autobiography—and I guess not all of them are positive either!

In particular, I liked gaining some context for a few of his more famous songs, especially “Rocky Mountain High” and “Looking for Space.” Suddenly the lyrics make sense to me, and I can enjoy them all the more. I also enjoyed his forays into describing his writing process. In the context of writing “Country Roads”, he muses:

I think I’m most myself when I’m writing a song, because I’m trying to be honest with what’s happening. I’m open. I’m really listening. You’re in touch with a whole spectrum of moods, you really are. You listen to this thing that’s going on in your head and the thoughts take direction. Suddenly there is a line of words on your tongue, and that one line brings with it hundreds of others. And then it depends on the day, and on the season, and on where you are—late winter, early spring in Minnesota, for example. … The first draft of a song is in my head when I sit down to learn it on the guitar. Sometimes the melody has to be changed, but once you get it started, once you sit down and learn it with the instrument, the learning of it—actually being able to sing it—leads you someplace. It’s the discovery of your song that’s so wonderful. In fact, if I start out thinking I’m in control of it, it doesn’t work. (94)

There’s so much in this book about Denver’s forays into mysticism that it’s easy to forget his German, church-going roots. About his semi-Christian upbringings, he writes of a memorable time when the priest started sharing his thoughts and removed himself from the pulpit to do so, instead walking on the level of the congregants, a move of honesty that impacted John. He expounds, though:

I had lost connection with the feeling that religion was all about a higher being who understands us and hears our prayers and answers them. For that matter, I don’t think religious feeling occupied much time at home…In fact, in my house, religion was a prayer at breakfast or at dinner and it was Dad who led it. It was always the same prayer: Bless this food to our use and us to thy service, and keep us ever mindful of the many who are needy. (16-17)

About his distant relationship with his workaholic military-pilot dad, he notes that papa Deutchendorf gave very little love or encouragement. In fact, one of the “nicest” complements he ever gave was when John was heading off to Texas Tech. He said, “You know, you’ve got talent. You can play guitar and you can sing. Not everyone can do that, but that doesn’t make you any better than anybody else. Just remember that.” (30)

In writing about his Wanderlust, Denver shows us not only the strength of his own self-love and pursuit of self-interests, but also shows why Marriage wasn’t ever an arena in which he found success. He writes:

The wanderlust was strong; it still is. I didn’t see that it mattered where I was if I was doing what I needed to do for my own personal growth, and anyhow, what I was doing I couldn’t not do. I needed those experiences more than I needed Annie’s understanding and more than I feared her anger. And in this arc of time, she became unforgiving. (141)

And so he moved to Alaska to shoot a documentary of life in those mostly misunderstood lands (a documentary I watched once and actually really enjoyed). And so, too, did his first marriage crumble.

Conclusion

This was an interesting book to read, and I’m glad I did, but like with Martin Short’s memoirs, I come away from it wondering why I like these guys so much. I suppose it’s good and healthy and safe to unmask the celebrity, and to recognize that they are real and broken people just like the rest of us, yet with a higher platform and a thicker mask.

Normally, I don’t like reading memoirs or autobiographies by anyone still living in (or just existing) their middle-aged years, because life isn’t over and I don’t really care to know what they’ve learned so far. But knowing that Denver published this book just 3 years before his fatal plane crash puts it all into a better perspective and I’m glad he wrote the book! Another great example of such a memoir—though published by his wife—is Keith Green’s No Compromise.

Denver ends his book by quoting a recent song (that never got popular) and saying that “I’m not home yet, but I’m getting there.” (250) How true that was, and it ought to make us all contemplate the fact that none of us are home yet either, but we may be sooner than we think. Something to think about.

©2022 E.T.

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