The Tom Sawyer of Rock

"If people want to get stoned and trip out on acid or Jesus, that's their business. But if those things don't work, I've got something that will: love, appreciation and sincerity."

Can a performer who talks like that survive for even a minute in today's pop-music miasma of drugs, decadence and dowdy religiosity? If he is Singer-Composer John Denver, 29, the answer is yes. The possessor of long blond hair and a mellifluous, if reedy, tenor voice, the wearer of gold-rimmed glasses and neatly pressed shirts, Denver is the Tom Sawyer of rock--and he has acquired a vast following of Becky Thatchers and Aunt Pollys as well as a few Huck Finns.

Hardboiled rock critics do not exactly get mad at Denver--nobody does that--but he is so wholesome that they reach for mild epithets like "saccharine," "bland" and "decent mediocrity."

He says "Yes, sir" to hotel clerks, picks litter off the sidewalk, and neither drinks nor smokes. As for his music, says Mary Travers, late of Peter, Paul and Mary, the group that had a Top Ten hit in 1969 with Denver's Leaving on a Jet Plane: "His songs are simple and hopeful. He is a very personal, conversational singer, and he has a gee-whizzy kind of humor--which is refreshing."

Last week at the Blossom Music Center outside Cleveland, Denver drew more than 10,000 members of what one Blossom official called the "clean-shirt crowd." Although the audience ranged in age from twelve to 70, it was predominately a Middle American assemblage of young-marrieds. Part of the show was a color film of the Colorado Rockies, featuring occasional shots of Denver trotting in the wilds or swapping jokes with friends around a crackling campfire. Meanwhile, Denver stood at the stage apron and sang his own Rocky Mountain High:

I've seen it rainin' fire in the sky I know he'd be a poorer man If he never saw an eagle fly.

Some of the Colorado mountain folk live there because they have never known anything else. Denver lives there by choice, having seen most of the U.S. while growing up as the son of an Air Force lieutenant colonel. "I wanted to be accepted, so I worked on things that would make people like me," he says. Such as the guitar he bought at age 13, when he found himself alone once again at a new school in Montgomery, Ala.

Denver entered Texas Tech University as an architecture major, but spent much of his time playing folk or rhythm and blues at local clubs. After 2 1/2 years, he pulled out for the hootenanny life of Southern California, along the way changing his name from Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. In 1965 he joined the Chad Mitchell Trio, replacing Chad Mitchell himself, who was going out on his own. With acid rock on the rise, those were hard days for folk groups, and the Mitchell Trio was already $40,000 in the red. Long after Denver had turned solo in 1969 and signed with RCA, he was still helping to pay off that debt.

Denver has no such worries today. His last four LPs have been million-dollar sellers. Within the past year he has made six specials for BBC, lined up guest-acting stints in the U.S. on both the Owen Marshall and McCloud series, and has two specials in the works for ABC. Last week he taped a Bob Hope special for November airing.

Between bookings he lives with his wife Annie in a $150,000, split-level three-bedroom house on a wooded slope near Aspen. Folks coming to call on Denver sometimes have to track him down on nearby ski trails or golf courses or, at the very least, up on the roof in a glass-enclosed loft where he likes to watch eagles through a telescope. "There is no artifice to John," says Folk Singer Tom Paxton. "John is a Druid, a tree worshiper, an elf, a sprite." Just the man, perhaps, to take the curse off music that makes people feel good.

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