“I was young on this mountain, but now I am old.”
— Levon Helm, “The Mountain” (Dirt Farmer)

Back a bona fide Colorado-o-phile into an argumentative corner and force him or her to answer the question: “What is the most-famous Colorado song of all time?” (Beer might be required.) You are likely to get the very rational response, “America the Beautiful,” penned by Katherine Lee Bates in 1893 after she stood for little more than an hour atop Pikes Peak. Even though the word “Colorado” does not even appear in “America the Beautiful,” the fact that the song has twice been seriously considered by Congress as the country’s national anthem, and the fact that a great many people to this day consider it our unofficial, or at least our second, national anthem (it is often sung before sporting events in lieu of the “The Star Spangled Banner”) gives it a certain credence that is tough to trump.

But, anyone making the claim that “America the Beautiful” is the most-famous “Colorado song” had best be prepared for some justifiable and maybe even indignant retort by John Denver fans, who will argue that “Rocky Mountain High” is better-known, better and far more inspirational and important, at least partially because the lyrics mention Colorado a total of 11 times. Given the woeful state of historic understanding in the U.S. these days, it’s likely that only a handful of people outside of Colorado even know that Bates was inspired to pen the poem that became “America the Beautiful” based upon a foray to the summit of a Fourteener.

There is no such doubt about the roots of “Rocky Mountain High,” which transcended its pop-music roots and achieved almost instantaneous anthemic status among a certain long-haired demographic that came to redefine an entire state — sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse — clear up until most everyone sold their soul to the dark lords of real estate, and rationalized doing do.

No song that was born and raised in the Rockies and is about the Rockies has had nearly the influence or longevity as “Rocky Mountain High.” Sure, we’ve got Jimmy Buffet’s 1975 release, “Livingston Saturday Night,” which does not once specifically mention its Montana roots, though it does achieve extra credit for including several lines about trying to get laid. And you’ve got Joe Walsh’s borderline-incomprehensible “Rocky Mountain Way” and Steven Stills’ “Colorado,” both of which were on the charts about the same time as “Rocky Mountain High.” But neither of those songs managed to resonate in a way that made people put down the hash pipe long enough to pack up the van and head to Colorado, sight unseen, maybe forever. 

Denver, who was born Henry John Deutschendorf in 1943 in, of all places, Roswell, New Mexico (his name change was legal and duly recorded), penned the lyrics of “Rocky Mountain High” (Mike Taylor helped compose the music) after watching the Perseid meteor shower with friends at Williams Lake (I share the name only because it is so prominently mentioned in John Denver lore), near Snowmass, Colorado. 

This celestial inspiration transpired in the middle of a musical era long dominated by the Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Credence Clearwater Revival, Steppenwolf, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, The Grateful Dead, David Bowie, Dylan, the Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, the Electric Light Orchestra, and, of course, the Beatles. (The Fab Four actually broke up a mere two years before Denver penned “Rocky Mountain High.”)

I should note at this point that I’m not one of those people who believe, as one of my buddies is fond of saying, that no good music has been produced since 1975. I have an extensive music collection and almost every CD I own was produced in the past decade. The few Beatles and Dylan CDs I own are dusty and retain their place in my home mainly for nostalgia’s sake. Still, it would be imprudent of me to not place “Rocky Mountain High” in some sort of pop-culture context by revisiting some of the songs that were on the top-10 charts around the time “Rocky Mountain High” came out: “Heart of Gold,” by Neil Young; “Tumbling Dice,” by the Rolling Stones; “Imagine,” by John Lennon; “Stairway to Heaven,” by Led Zeppelin; “Maggie May,” by Rod Stewart; “American Pie” by Don McLean; “Don’t Get Fooled Again,” by The Who; “Money,” by Pink Floyd; “Piano Man,” by Billy Joel; “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get In On.” By 1974, reggae hit the top-10 for the first time, with Bob Marley’s, “No Woman, No Cry,” and, the next year, 1975, we saw Bruce Springsteen’s first number-one hit, “Born to Run.”

All told, within a three-year period, we saw the birth of Southern rock, the unveiling of the Eagles, the height of Fleetwood Mac, the best work Pink Floyd ever did, the last hurrah of Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan releasing what I think is his best album ever (Blood on the Tracks), the golden era of Motown and the ascension of The Boss. 

I mean, goddamn.

My overall ambivalence about music we now call “oldies” or “classic rock” aside, humanity hasn’t enjoyed a run like that since Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven were all tickling the ivories at the same time back in the late-1700s.

Six months before the release of Dark Side of the Moon, the groundbreaking album that ended up spending more time in the Billboard Hot-100 chart than any album in history to this day, and here we have god’s own dweeb standing there wearing wire-rimmed glasses, worn jeans, a flannel shirt and waffle-stompers crooning about sitting around a campfire in Colorado with everybody being high. (Just for grins, YouTube John Denver and watch some of those low-tech early performances. In the era of John Kay, Keith Moon, Jimmy Page and Keith Richard, I can’t believe someone didn’t just stomp Denver right there on stage, though, to be fair, his performance persona did improve greatly over the years.) 

Surprisingly, though many now consider “Rocky Mountain High” to be John Denver’s best song — verily, many people these days would be hard pressed to name another of his tunes — it never got higher than number-nine on the 1972 Billboard Top-10 chart, though it did make it as high as number-three on the easy-listening charts, which says a mouthful on many levels.

It was not as though Denver suddenly burst onto the national music scene with the release of “Rocky Mountain High.” It was not even his first brush with the upper echelon of the music charts. His composition, “Leaving on a Jet Plane” made number-one in 1969, but it was not Denver who performed that chart-topping effort. Rather, it was Peter, Paul and Mary who took “Leaving on a Jet Plane” to the top. (It marked the only time that seminal ensemble produced a number-one hit.) And Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads,” co-written with Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, made it to number-two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1971.

As well, it’s not as though Denver introduced a new genre to the music charts of the era. The folksy-country-ish-nature-twink-sorta-rock garden was already well tilled by the time Denver arrived on the scene with his jeans and guitar. James Taylor was a perennial resident of the top-10, and Arlo Guthrie and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were already veritable superstars when Denver was still wearing figurative denim diapers. As well, groups like The Band, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds and the Dillards were flat-out famous, as were, a couple years later, Poco, Pure Prairie League and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. Sensitive nature twinks were already doing just fine when Denver arrived on the scene.