In preparing this series, I have looked at a number of other people’s lists of Colorado Songs. Can you believe that none of them have included “On the Natural,” by Hoyt Axton?  I am putting it on my list to set that travesty to rights.

I previously mentioned this song in passing while discussing Chapter 9 of the Tao Te Ching, and I wrote a few things about Hoyt Axton in commenting on his song, “The Devil.”  To avoid redundancy, I will be brief here.

You probably know that for many years Hoyt battled the “demons of addiction” that came in the form of alcohol and cocaine.  In the late 1960s, when he got his first major record label contract, he was also experimenting with LSD.  That, or Columbia Records’ attempt to make his music relevant, seems to have influenced his 1969 album, My Griffin Is Gone.  Unlike most of his other work, the songs on this album are heavily produced and almost lushly orchestrated, resulting in a folk/country/psychedelic mélange.

That sounds like a strange combination, but the approach worked well on songs like the anti-war “Beelzebub’s Laughter,”  It was not so successful on some of the others.  The album was not a commercial success, and today it is usually referred to as “obscure.”  In his “Consumer Guide,”   Robert Christgau, of Village Voice fame, and the self-proclaimed “dean of American rock critics,” grades the album as a D+ and says, “Hoyt Axton, who can’t sing, has written two good songs, ‘The Pusher’ and ‘On the Natural.’ The latter is on this record, produced by Alex Hassilev, who can’t produce.”  Though I would disagree with the more smug portions of that smug assessment, it shows that My Griffin Is Gone was not well received.

Hoyt Axton was born on March 25, 1938, making him 31 years old when My Griffin Is Gone was released.  He was old enough and smart enough to understand that he needed to overcome his problems with substance abuse, and it was during this period – the late 1960s and early ’70s – that he wrote some of his best anti-drug songs.  Two of them are found on this album, “Snow Blind Friend” and “On the Natural.”  Here, we are looking at “On the Natural.”

Shortly before recording the album, Hoyt lived for a time in Crested Butte, Colorado.  It was a slower paced lifestyle than he was used to on the road or in California.  He seems to have realized that if one just catches his breath and looks around, Nature (especially in the Colorado mountains) is miraculous and a better and more lasting “high” than is possible with chemicals.  He tells us that in “On The Natural.”

In the liner notes to the album, Hoyt wrote,  “Someone once told me in a dream that truth was a great white bird. Here are some feathers I found.”  “On the Natural” is a feather from the Bird of Truth.

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The String Cheese Incident (“SCI”) is your typical Colorado bluegrass-Afro-Latin-Calypso-electronica fusion jam band.  The group started in 1993 when several musicians from Telluride and Crested Butte got together to do some jamming.  During

A Bluebird Sky
(Photo from Pintrest by @epidote1)

their early days, they played at various Western ski areas for lift tickets.  As their popularity increased, they moved to Boulder in 1996 and began playing for money.  Over the years, they have released several studio albums and some live albums, but they are mostly known for their tremendous performances.

Like other great jam bands such as the Grateful Dead and Phish and Widespread Panic, SCI has a very knowledgeable and devoted following.  A quick search will find several websites devoted to the band’s set lists, lyrics, upcoming shows and news.  As the years have passed, SCI has moved from playing small clubs to much larger venues such as multi-day performances at Red Rocks, Austin City Limits and the Bonnaroo Music Festival.  Leading into this coming New Year (2017), SCI will play for three nights at the 7,500 seat 1stBank Center in Broomfield, Colorado.

Like the Grateful Dead, R.E.M. and Pearl Jam, SCI has tried to develop its music without becoming a slave to the music industry.  Before releasing any albums, the band members formed their own record company, SCI Fidelity, which also records a number of other local groups.  SCI filed a complaint against Ticketmaster with the Federal Trade Commission and sued Ticketmaster when the FTC did not act.  That lawsuit was settled so that SCI now is entitled to additional tickets to be sold without the seemingly exorbitant Ticketmaster charges.  The band has actively worked to give back to the communities it visits by promoting “Green” shows and tours and contributing to various nonprofit organizations.

All of the band members are involved in writing songs, but this particular song – “Colorado Bluebird Sky” – was written by guitarist Bill “Hershey” Nershi and his wife, Jillian.  Nershi moved to Telluride, Colorado when he was 20 or 21 years old, in 1981 or ’82.  In 1993 he moved to Crested Butte for a short time, and that was where he met the other band members.  That is pretty much the story he tells in this song.

The song title hearkens back to the days when the band members were skiing and playing for lift tickets.  A “bluebird sky” is the clear, blue, cloudless sky that is often seen the morning after a snow storm.  It could be called, simply, a “blue sky,” but it is more than that.  It is a term that incorporates the happiness (“bluebird of …”) felt when the weather clears and a whole mountain of fresh powder awaits.

The YouTube video below is the version of the song on the 2014 album, Song in My Head; and it lasts for about six and a half minutes.  Since this is a jam band, however, you can find other renditions online.  If you would like to hear a version that is more than twice as long, just click here.

And the name of the band?  Where does that come from?  It seems it either relates to a broken mandolin string or a late night food fight or something else.  They have never tried very hard to explain it.

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Singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt (whose full name was John Townes Van Zandt) was an enigmatic, perhaps singularly talented individual.  He never had a hit song, and most people probably don’t even know his name.  Nevertheless, he was quite influential in the music business and his songs – the best known of which are “Pancho and Lefty” and “If I Needed You” – have been recorded by numerous artists, including Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, Joe Ely, Cowboy Junkies, Lyle Lovett and many others.  A documentary film about his life, entitled Be Here To Love Me was released in 2004, and he has been the subject of at least three full length biographies, perhaps the best being A Deeper Blue:  The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt (2008), by Robert Earl Hardy.  I can’t hope to give much insight into his life in this brief post, so let me simply tell you why this is a Colorado Song.

First, of course, the name of the song is “Colorado Girl,” which probably qualifies it for inclusion even though it comes from a quintessential Texas songwriter.

My maternal grandparents settled into Sulphur Springs, Texas, which is between Dallas and Texarkana, in the latter part of the 19th Century.  If you were to travel to the southwest for less than an hour from their house, you would be in Van Zandt County, which is nothing at all like Colorado.  The county was named for Townes’ great-great-grandfather, who had been the official diplomatic representative of the Republic of Texas to the United States, and who had died while he was running for governor.  His great-grandfather was one of the founders of Fort Worth.  His mother’s maiden name was Townes, and she was a direct descendant of John Charles Townes, for whom the main building of the University of Texas at Austin Law School was named.

With that pedigree, he might have spent his life in Texas and become quite influential in matters other than music.  However, his father was an attorney in the oil industry and his business required the family to move frequently.  In 1958, when Townes was 14 years old, they moved to Boulder, Colorado.  He attended school there for a short time, but because of his extremely high IQ he spent his last high school years at the exclusive Shattuck-St. Mary’s School in Fairbault, Minnesota, where the son of Senator and soon to be Vice President Hubert Humphrey was one of his classmates.  After graduating from Shattuck in 1962, he returned to Boulder to attend the University of Colorado. Continue reading →

The natural beauty and the interesting people of Colorado have inspired many wonderful songs through the years.  In this series of posts, we look at some of the best of these. The songs considered to date are:

A Mile High in Denver, by Jimmy Buffett
America the Beautiful
The Ballad of Alferd Packer, by Phil Ochs
Boulder Skies, by Pure Prairie League
Colorado, by Paper Bird
Colorado, by Rick Roberts
Colorado Bluebird Sky, by The String Cheese Incident
Colorado Girl, by Townes Van Zandt
Denver, by Willie Nelson
I-70 Westbound, by the Railbenders (new)
In My Colorado Home, by Sons of the San Joaquin
On the Natural, by Hoyt Axton
Rocky Mountain Breakdown, by Poco
Rocky Mountain High, by John Denver
Where the Columbines Grow

There are also a few Colorado songs that were discussed in posts before this series began, including:

Get Out of Denver, By Bob Seger
Colorado Christmas, by Steve Goodman

The fog on a London morning is not the same as the toxic haze of Beijing, and both are different from the the wide open vistas of Montana’s Big Sky Country.

Songs like Paul Simon’s “Under African Skies” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Ole Buttermilk Sky” evoke images of particular and distinct locales.

The sky that is seen from any place on Earth is determined and shaped by what is below it.  Its breadth may be framed by mountains or extend across an ocean to the horizon.  The color of the sky and the clouds it holds result from the dust and humidity of the land, and the clouds often form around geographic features like lakes or mountains.

The sky above is familiar to those below who have seen its ways.  They can predict the weather based on the color of the sunrise or sunset, and they can use the stars to guide them home.

In a real sense, any place on this planet is defined by the sky which is above it.  Therefore, it would seem that a song like Pure Prairie League’s “Boulder Skies” should tell us something about the City of Boulder.  But it doesn’t.

“Boulder Skies” is a pleasant song performed by talented musicians, and it is definitely a Colorado song; though I can’t say precisely what it is about – other than a brown-eyed “Colorado Canyon Girl.”  But was she real, or just a pie in the sky dream? Continue reading →