Ghost Town (1988)

 

John Denver’s Rocky Mountain Christmas (1975)

    One cannot accuse John Denver of being coy about his love of life in the Rocky Mountains. I know we’re supposed to look at the song ‘Rocky Mountain High’ with a bit of a knowing giggle but after watching this special I absolutely believe him when he said it had nothing at all to do with drugs and everything to do with how happy living there made him. Man was made for those mountains.

    This is a Christmas special largely as a technical matter: it was marketed and aired as a Christmas special, it has some Christmas songs in it, there’s tons of snow, and I don’t doubt that John Denver was himself a quietly but deeply religious man. But the key part of the show’s title is ‘Rocky Mountain’ and I can’t help but feel he was approached to do a Christmas special and ticked all the boxes he was contractually obligated to while functionally turning in a love letter to his favorite spot on Earth.

    A brief aside before addressing the episode itself: I will not in any way be discussing ‘John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together,’ or for that matter ‘Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.’ They are their own things and shouldn’t be included in what I’m looking at this month. It’d also just be a list of things I liked about them and that’s hardly entertaining.

    The special first aired on December 10^th, 1975 on ABC. It was directed by Bill Davis, a staple of previous variety shows, and written by a panel of similar variety show veterans as well as the two writers behind ‘Deadly Fathoms,’ a 1973 documentary about abandoned warships in the Bikini Atoll, which, ok. The first way this special differentiates itself from the others I’ve looked at is it was all very much shot outside of a studio and on-site in the Rocky Mountains. The closest we get to a traditional set is a kind of eco-bubble, a climate-controlled dome plunked down in a clearing to allow public performances while still being, for all intents and purposes, outside.

Ok, kinda neat for 1975.

    For all the praise I’ve already heaped on him John Denver still gotta eat so this special is very much a tie-in to the Christmas album he released that year of the same name. A number of the same songs are in both the special and the album, although thankfully we are spared a performance of ‘Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk this Christmas),’ a title that feels like a dark joke but is played very straight.

    We open with a shot of butterflies (a recurring theme throughout the special, I guess butterflies in the winter was some imagery they wanted to stress) before cutting to John Denver in his eco-bubble performing the opening track from his Christmas album, ‘Aspenglow,’ a spare, pretty little number about, well, Aspen, Colorado. It contains some imagery about their winter festival but really it’s just a nice melody for its own sake and gets out of its own way. Throw in some footage of some skiing, some huskies, kids playing in the snow, and at this point even I kinda want to go there, even if all the air is gone by the time you get that high.

    The crowd applauds and John Denver give a pretty loose introduction to the special, explaining the bubble and getting a butterfly to land on his hand to his apparently genuine delight. He also lists off his guests, of which there aren’t many, consisting of Olivia Newton-John in her pre-’Grease’ prime, Steve Martin when he was still mainly known for his stand-up and Saturday Night Live hosting duties, and Valerie Harper, at the time starring in ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ spin-off ‘Rhoda.’ The only comparable special I’ve looked at so far where all the guests still seem to be even somewhat relevant today is Johnny Cash’s, still my personal gold standard.

    We come back from commercial to a time-lapse shot of a mountainside becoming covered in snow before a John Denver in full-on wholesome freakout mode plunks himself down in the middle of the scene in full ski getup and enthuses about being first down the mountain. We then watch him ski, which goes on for ... a while. He does including footage of him absolutely eating it, so at least he’s honest.

Dude just likes to ski.

    Back to the bubble for a duet with Valerie Harper for a song I cannot identify (I am not that familiar with the extended works of Mr. John Denver). We then transition to shots of a ranch which is reason enough to play ‘Christmas for Cowboys’ over the top of the footage. It’s another fairly pretty song.

    The next transition is an interesting one. It’s to a small ‘freeform’ school, which is described as wonderful and innovative and let’s just say the last forty-five years of homeschooling initiatives and concerns over school resources has rendered this discussion more complicated than it’s presented here. They also make sleds from salvaged barrel staves and shove kids down steep hills, so, y’know, the 70’s.

    More commercials, then it’s John Denver and Harper ice-skating with odd editing and some attempts at humor. He falls down again, which is kinda funny. Back to the bubble and now it’s Steve Martin going to town on a banjo with a butterfly perched right on his nose. John Denver starts to introduce him and is just bulldozed right over by Martin’s faux straight-man act. Martin then proceeds to perform ‘Grandmother’s Song.’ This is about all we get of Steve Martin, though I suspect the parts we see in the eco-bubble are just excepts from a larger whole because he’s frequently in the background in later shots playing along with the band.

He never references the butterfly as he is a professional.

    The next section is just Olivia Newton-John on horseback lip-syncing along to ‘Let it Shine.’ Everyone forgets she was a pretty big country star in the 70’s before the rest of her career happened.

    The next section has John Denver messing around with a fairly grown bear cub which I’m pretty sure was stupid even back in 1975. Somewhere in Germany Werner Herzog looked up from his prep-work on ‘Heart of Glass’ upon hearing a strange call.

Um, don't do this.

    Even specials I like will end up having a useless section and for this one it’s a four-minute comedy bit where John Denver and Valerie Harper spot each other on the side of a mountain skiing by themselves and as they trudge toward each other go through an entire life together before bitterly breaking up before they even speak. It is, as they say, a long walk.

    It’s now night at the eco-bubble. A be-tuxedoed John Denver, a pianist, and what seems to be a string quartet run through a stately rendition of ‘Coventry Carol.’ This segues into Valerie Harper giving an odd monologue about sugarplums and seasonal disgruntlement. It’s random and disjointed and about a half-step away from being a Tim and Eric sketch. We’re then treated to a very graphic look at spawning river trout, egg fertilization and all. Not traditional Christmas imagery but I’ll go with it. I think John Denver just really liked river trout.

This is the singing part, not the spawning trout part.

    Back to the bubble and John Denver duets with Olivia Newton-John on ‘Fly Away.’ Again, a very pretty song. Just like Cash I’m not in any immediate rush to go buy these albums but I am impressed with a musical figure I’d not previously made any attempt to familiarize myself with. I can absolutely see the appeal of these pretty little acoustic guitar songs. This then turns into ‘Jingle Bells’ and we’re starting to edge into closing-medley time and I’m getting nervous. Sure enough next up is ‘Friends with You’ and since all three guest stars are on stage at the same time the medley is now inevitable. They at least run through the standards pretty fast and with a decent amount of energy. John Denver makes an aside about ‘Silent Night’ having been written on a guitar so I guess Crosby wasn’t lying to us before. The special ends with John Denver giving a quiet little speech about his religious upbringing and how he was growing increasingly disillusioned with the materialism of the season until his son was born which gave him a new perspective on the season and inspired the next song he performs, ‘A Baby Just Like You.’ He then ends the special with a smile and a simple “Merry Christmas, everybody.”

Just a very nice moment.

    Of all of the specials I’ve seen this was the loosest in terms of production and performances, which only makes sense. They clearly shot a bunch of footage and stitched it together to resemble the kind of Christmas variety special the network had ordered. Based on the edit there were way more performances in that eco-bubble then what we saw and more bits and pieces of footage shot all over the mountains. Some of the odd almost aside-like pieces were likely trimmed from longer bits.

    Although it seems fairly unjustifiable the only special I can really compare this to is that of Johnny Cash, just in terms of authenticity. They are two very differently structured pieces of television, Cash’s very much a staged performance in a controlled environment by a troubled soul and John Denver’s very much in the vein of shooting a bunch of stuff and seeing what happened by someone who seems to have been just a genuinely nice guy. But you could tell that they both meant what they said and took their craft seriously. Como and Crosby were certainly professional entertainers but these two were goddamn artists and that just shines right through. There are other John Denver specials just like there are other Cash specials but I don’t think I need to cast any kind of critical eye on them, if I watch them it’ll be on my own time.