Rocky Mountain High: John Denver and the Valley Above
Near Aspen, Colorado
John Denver moved to Aspen in nineteen seventy, the same year Hunter Thompson was running for county sheriff, and for reasons that overlapped with Thompson's: the mountains, the valley, the sense that the Roaring Fork had not yet been entirely absorbed by money and development.
Denver was born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. in New Mexico and had taken his stage name from the Colorado capital. But it was Aspen and the surrounding peaks that shaped his most famous music. The song that would define his career began one night when he lay on his back near a mountain lake and watched the Perseid meteor shower cross overhead, an experience he later said could not be reduced to any simpler explanation. He worked on the song for nine months, an unusually long process for a writer known for working quickly, co-writing it with Mike Taylor.
Rocky Mountain High was released as a single in October of nineteen seventy-two. The single reached number nine on the American pop chart the following year. The State of Colorado designated it as an official state song in two thousand seven, a decade after Denver died in a plane crash over Monterey Bay in California in nineteen ninety-seven. Many radio stations banned the song over suspicions it promoted drug use, until Denver explained that the high he meant was the joy he found in the Rockies, not drugs.
