TV: John Denver gets the TV movie once-over

By TIM WATKIN

In 1975, when John Denver topped no fewer than four Billboard charts and was America's biggest-selling recording artist, Newsday declared: "What Sinatra was to the 40s, Presley to the 50s and the Beatles to the 60s, Denver is to the 70s - a phenomenon."

In retrospect, this is an overstatement, but it's a reminder of just how significant and popular Denver was through that decade.

His worldwide popularity began with Leaving on a Jet Plane in 1970 and grew with crazy speed via the release of five albums before the end of 1973. The last of those was John Denver's Greatest Hits, RCA's biggest-selling album ever.

Go on, admit you know his songs: Country Roads, Calypso, Sunshine on my Shoulders, Annie's Song, Rocky Mountain High ...

While many 70s major artists have had their comebacks, makeovers or seen their songs reinterpreted by a new pop generation, Denver (birth name Deutschendorf) has remained tethered in that past.

Because of his earnest image, his hard-to-categorise folk/country/pop crossover music or a perceived lack of artistic demons, he is often ignored, his influence minimal.

So instead of a serious profile of the sort Hendrix or Dylan would receive, Denver gets a tele-movie: Take Me Home: The John Denver Story.

It's what TV movies are - a sentimental, once-over-lightly treatment that distorts a life into a series of significant moments.

You can't criticise a dog for being a dog, you might say, and Denver was guilty of slipping into sentiment himself at times. Further, the film did have the backing of Denver's children and first wife, Annie.

On the other hand, if the film's a dog you've got to call it a dog, and it has certainly upset Denver's family.

After it aired in the US, Ron Deutschendorf, Denver's brother, wrote to the LA Times labelling the film inaccurate and suggesting that Denver's manager, Hal Thau, had betrayed the family.

His letter ends: "The only good to come from this TV movie is a certain exposure of my brother's music in prime time."

In an accompanying note to fans, he says: "For him to be portrayed as some kind of dweeb, not the caring, intelligent, outspoken humanitarian and environmentalist he was, disgusts me beyond belief."

Of course, family memories are perilous things. Maybe Denver's relationship with his dad was better; maybe it was worse.

Certainly, the film plays with dates and makes up conversations for the sake of narrative.

However, almost every moment matches Denver's 1994 autobiography. Yes, he did meet Annie playing at a college party. Yes, he did take a chainsaw to the marital bed; the dining table, too.

Deutschendorf's concern seems to be the impression left by this linear series of moments of Denver as a weak victim of circumstance.

There's a focus on the 80s, when Denver was dumped by RCA and found himself a man out of his time. He continued to write, record and perform to huge crowds, but his failure to generate another hit and the repetitive and erratic nature of his later music is seen by some as kind of pathetic. It's an unfair conclusion.

The "me" decade and its celebration of the anti-hero weren't in tune with Denver. He was a musical purist, an environmental campaigner before such causes became trendy, who sang from the heart not the hip-pocket.

The dark side was there a temper, divorce, trouble with alcohol but he could never use it to raise his profile, a la Oasis. His vision, criticised as naive, was about encouraging the best of human nature "all that we can be, not what we are," as he sung in The Eagle and the Hawk.

In an odd way that made him an innovator, as his music dissected the light of humanity, rather than the dark explored by most who look beyond the love-pop song horizon.

It's curious to think how he would have been remembered if his plane had crashed in 1977, at the height of his powers, rather than 1997. As a Buddy Holly-like figure, perhaps.

He finished his autobiography with a song written after his father's death, including the lines: Though the singer is silent/ There still is the truth of the song.

The actor's miming is awful, but that's the best part of the film through it all are the songs.