Artist: John Denver
Date that it entered the Top 100: September 21, 1974
Peaked at No. 5 on: November 16, 1974, and remained there for two weeks.
Left the Top 100 on: December 28, 1974
Picture below taken in: August 1974 (around the time that I would have first heard Back Home Again)
Yes, at first glance, this is just a blurry, imperfectly colored, low-quality picture. At least that was my first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth impressions. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was last August when I scanned the negative and finally got to see this picture for the first time since taking it 33 years earlier (almost to the week). I had been given a once-in-a-childhood opportunity to go to the top of the tallest structure in several counties (the grain elevator) and take some pictures of the little town in which I lived.
And what did I do? Not only did I very foolishly take only one picture, but I took it with a cheap, defective camera, and I blurred it! Or maybe the shutter was defective. I don't know.
Of course, I can never go back and recapture this scene, because the past is gone, and too much of that scene is also gone, including my old home (that being the nearest building in the center foreground with my dad's blue 1971 Ford FWD pickup parked beside it; we lived in its downstairs living quarters from April 1972, to March 1975; it was torn down in the 1980s). The latter fact only made my regrets more pronounced.
Nonetheless, I wasn't about to throw this image away. No matter how flawed it might be, it still contains a lot of good memories, and disposing of good memories is a crime in my book. On the other hand, I have almost never shown off my flawed images in public either. So why am I doing it now? I'll try to explain.
Initially, for my own sake, I tried to repair as many of the hundreds of scratches and blemishes in this image as I could. Of course, in so doing, it was necessary to concentrate on every fuzzy detail. Naturally, concentrating so closely on the blurriness only increased my frustration. I was constantly punishing myself for what might have been, if only I had used used my 13-year-old head way back then and taken more than one picture. What had I been thinking wasting such a rare opportunity? Then for some strange reason, as I continued to do my repairs, my perfectionist standards began to weaken. I was beginning not to dislike the flaws as much as I once had. How could that be? Was I possibly starting to get used to it the way it is? Or was I rationalizing? Or was the surrealist in me being influenced by the spirit of some 19th-century impressionist painter? Whatever it was, the more I studied this image (and reminisced), the more I came to a particular conclusion: This is not really a snapshot of my little town in South Dakota in August 1974. Instead, it is a snapshot of my 33-year-old memory of my little town South Dakota, in August 1974. It's as simple as that, and it feels right.
Just study the specific details of this image for a while (the alley, the yard behind the hotel, the rolling hills in the background, etc.) at the largest size. If you have an open mind, you may see what I mean.
Musical Memory
On September 21, 1974, John Denver's Back Home Again entered the top 100. I was just learning to love music that year. One night when there was no school the next day, I fell asleep on the living-room floor (about 15 or 20 feet directly on the other side of my dad's pickup in the picture above). Occasionally, my parents would let me sleep there the whole night. In those days I used to listen to the radio every night in order to fall asleep (usually 1520 KOMA, Oklahoma City). I always kept the volume at about one decibel above inaudible. If it was any louder than that, it would eventually wake me up in the middle of the night in a most unpleasant way.
There were, however several songs in those days that frequently woke me up in a most pleasant way (but only if the volume was extremely low). One night when I was sleeping peacefully in a sleeping bag on the living-room floor, Back Home Again started playing. It must have been about 3 AM. It woke me up in that perfectly peaceful middle-of-the-night way that is impossible to describe. I lay there, three-fourths-asleep, and listened to the lyrics. Somehow, certain parts struck me as a perfect description of the life I was living at that time. Since I lived near Interstate 90, the particular lyrics that affected me most were, "There's a truck out on the four-lane a mile or more away..." and later, "There's a fire softly burnin', supper's on the stove..."
I lay there at age 13 and listened to that song and felt perfectly protected in my little world. It was a magically simple night that I have never forgotten.
