Damage Case #4: God Dammit, John Denver!

The only musician my mother listened to when I was a child that really made enough of an impression on me to vividly remember was John Denver.

I have vague memories of drives through the brown, grassy hills of California, bound for my aunt's house in Walnut Creek, staring at one of his cassette's liner notes and thinking he looked like an  androgynous church organist or Roy Orbison's foreskin as my family sang along to Annie's Song. 

But man, we loved that guy at that moment in time. I mean, Jesus, everybody did when I was kid.  He was wholesome.  He fucking loved nature, was in Oh God, regularly hung out with the muppets, performed on PBS and just, gosh, represented everything great about America.  I've seen footage of motherfucking astronauts singing Take Me Home, Country Roads while in mother fucking space.

Eventually, however, everything changed.  My family stopped listening to him in the car, and his cassettes began gathering dust in my mother's cassette drawer.

At some point, I asked my mom if he had any new albums after noticing that he had been absent from our lives for a long time.  I don't remember what she said, exactly, but it was dark.  Something about his wife and that he was kind of a bad person.

As I sat down to write this entry, I actually started to get curious about why I have such an aversion to the guy based on some forgotten statement that my mother said in the mid '80s   It was a quick, passing comment, almost trivial, but it totally shut the door on him.  Like, just seeing his smiling, non-threatening face and strangely phallic haircut makes me uncomfortable.

 A quick check of his biography on Wikipedia jogged my memory:

Denver and Annie Martell divorced in 1982 and the ensuing property settlement caused Denver to become so enraged he nearly choked his ex-wife, then used a chainsaw to cut the marital bed in half.

Wow.

Upon relating that tidbit to my wife, she looked very confused and horrified, then un-ironically yelled "Goddammit John Denver!"

So, yeah.  I'm just going to stop writing about this topic now.

God dammit John Denver indeed.