Something very new and beautiful came into my life oh, it must have been about three years ago, and since then it’s put me through so many mellow changes that I just had to share it with you. If you think that’s the first sentence of some kinda setpiece Marin County consciousness parody, you’re dead wrong, Jake. I love John Denver, just as I love this great land of ours, and I make no bones about it even though I keep calling up my friends all over the country and raving to ’em about John’s art and beamy beatified visage, and they poopooh the pressed duck with “Yeah, sure, okay Lester...” They think I’m putting them on, trying to be camp or something, but I’m not at all. I’m in love and here’s how it happened:

It started vaguely. There was a local AM station that prided itself on playing “progressive” album cuts all goddam day, imitation FM on the AM, and even though I’d always perferred the Top 40 to the hip pretensions of FM I was listening to it more and more because with the idiomatic mergers of the 70s it seemed to matter less and less and I was just beginning to get into MOR muzak and folkie mocha and all the other wimpfronds I wallow in these apres midis.