The love song that ended in tears...

The world's most fashionable ski-slopes at Aspen, Colorado, were thronged with international enthusiasts and a heavy sprinkling of celebrities on a glorious sunny morning in April 1974, but the small bespectacled man on the crowded ski-lift swinging up a mountainside, seemed oblivious to everything but his own thoughts. In fact he was writing a song, jotting words and music on the back of the proverbial envelope. Ten minutes later it was done and as John Denver skied back down he hoped that the song would do what hours of discussion had patently failed to do: save the marriage to the woman he loved.

Sadly, Annie's Song, the hit that has become the fourth biggest earner in pop history and which would turn a struggling singer-songwriter into a millionaire, was destined to be a love song that ended in tears. John Denver was 30 and suffering a major crisis in his seven-year marriage when he wrote Annie's Song in an attempt to tell his wife just how much he loved her.

"We just weren't communicating and I knew that if I didn't make her understand how much she meant to me I would lose her."

Written in a last desperate effort to keep the woman he loved, Annie's Song put into words and music what John Denver felt about the college sweetheart he had married in 1967. "By the time I reached the top the song was done. I skied back, drove home and learned the song on the guitar."

It became Denver's first international number one and has since been recorded by over 200 singers and musicians, including top flautist James Galway, who took the song back to number one in 1978. Annie's Song transformed John Denver from a shy would-be architect into the biggest-selling singer in the world.

By the end of the 1970s he had five chart-toppers, 15 best-selling LPs, three houses, a private jet and a personal fortune estimated at around $1 billion. An unsettled and unhappy childhood in an Air Force family constantly on the move turned young John Denver into a loner who had problems making friends.

Dropping out of architecture school to join a blues band, he was playing one night in a Minnesota school when he remet 19-year-old Annie Martell, whom he had known as a child. Denver took a job in Minnesota in order to be near to the girl who had won his heart. When he proposed she turned him down. He persisted and they were eventually married in 1967.

But the marriage was stormy and despite Annie's Song the couple tried to save their marriage by attending group psychotherapy and meditation courses. Annie later remembered: "I just couldn't get through to him that I loved him totally and that love is unconditional."

Now Denver was deeply involved in environmental causes and was spending less time at home. And when he was there, he slept in a guest-house in the grounds of their Aspen home. Later he admitted: "The move was self-imposed but I still felt as if I had been banished into the wilderness."

A few months later, on their 15th wedding anniversary, they sat down to a celebration meal and realised that there was nothing to celebrate. Denver remembered: "I said that the marriage just wasn't working out. I told Annie: 'What you want from me is something I'm not able to give you. You'd better look elsewhere.' It was one of the most terrible moments of my life."

A few weeks later came an incident that made media headlines around the world. Returning home to discover that Annie had cut down some shrub oaks growing near the house, Denver was said to have flown into a rage and gone berserk in the house with a chainsaw. Annie claimed that he grabbed her by the throat and the proceeded to saw the corners off the kitchen table. Then he moved to the bedroom where he sawed the marital bed in half and chopped up the carpets.

"It was a symbolic gesture," Denver remarked as he drove away, never to return to the family home. Following the couple's divorce the press linked Denver with Henry Fonda's widow Shirlee. Then, while touring Australia, he met singer Cassandra Delaney, 26. They married two years later in 1988, but divorced in 1993. Up to now Denver's private life had had little effect on his phenomenal record career - an album of his greatest hits sold five million copies and stayed in the charts for more than three years.

But in 1993 the man whose public image had long been whiter than white was twice arrested for drunk driving and confessed an addiction for LSD. As a result, after 22 albums, Denver lost his contract with RCA.

Obsessed with planes, he owned and flew a Lear jet and in 1991 escaped unhurt when his 1931 biplane crash-landed in Arizona. "Planes are my life" he said. They were also the cause of his death. In 1998, John Denver, just 53, died when the light aircraft he was flying crashed into the sea off Los Angeles for reasons that have never been discovered. It later emerged that John Denver was not medically fit to fly and had no valid licence.

Today much of the estimated $5 million a year Denver record royalties go to environmental causes. "I've never had a dime from Annie's Song", says Annie Denver, now remarried. "More important than money is the fact that I know it was for me and that John truly wrote it from the heart."

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Muscat Press and Publishing House SAOC 2012

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Publication:	Times of Oman (Muscat, Oman)
Geographic Code:	1U8CO
Date:	Aug 9, 2012
Words:	957
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