The 1970s File Feature
Colorado
Danny Holien's "Colorado" and the Short Life of Tumbleweed Records The story of Danny Holien's "Colorado" is inseparable from the story of Tumbleweed Records…
01 The Story
Danny Holien's "Colorado" and the Short Life of Tumbleweed Records
The story of Danny Holien's "Colorado" is inseparable from the story of Tumbleweed Records, the short-lived Denver-based independent label that released the single in 1972 and folded within two years of its founding. Both the song and the label represented a specific cultural moment: the attempt to transplant the communal, ecologically conscious values of late-1960s California counterculture into the Rocky Mountain region, and to build a viable commercial music enterprise around those values in the early 1970s.
Tumbleweed Records was founded in Denver in February 1971 by two music industry veterans, Larry Ray and Bill Szymczyk, who had previously worked together at ABC-Dunhill Records in Los Angeles. The two men left California following an earthquake and, as they later described it, a disillusionment with the music industry culture they had inhabited. They relocated to Denver and secured substantial financing from the Gulf and Western conglomerate, whose principals believed they were backing the next major wave of American counterculture music. The label signed a roster of idiosyncratic singer-songwriters and folk-rock acts, including Holien, Robb Kunkel, Pete McCabe, Arthur Gee, and Michael Stanley, while also recording more established artists including Albert Collins.
Danny Holien had roots in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, where he had fronted a garage band called the Shades before relocating and developing as a solo singer-songwriter. His work fit within the acoustic-leaning folk-rock tradition of the early 1970s, influenced by the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young model of politically engaged, harmony-rich songwriting. His self-titled solo album on Tumbleweed became the label's most commercially successful release, driven primarily by the single "Colorado."
"Colorado" was produced by Bill Szymczyk himself, a decision that connected the recording to an unusually distinguished production lineage. Szymczyk had already produced B.B. King's landmark crossover album Completely Well (1969), which included "The Thrill Is Gone," and had worked with the James Gang. His production career would subsequently reach extraordinary heights: he went on to produce the Eagles' most successful albums, including Hotel California (1976), making him one of the defining production figures of the decade. The Danny Holien album, recorded during this transitional period in Szymczyk's career, benefited from his developed sense of arrangement and sonic clarity.
The song "Colorado" was a protest track directed specifically at the proposal to host the 1972 Winter Olympics in Denver. The Olympic bid had become a flashpoint for the nascent environmental movement in the state, with opponents arguing that the development and infrastructure required by the Games would damage the natural landscape that defined Colorado's identity. Holien's song aligned with the opposition campaign, presenting a vision of the state's natural environment as something to be protected from commercial exploitation rather than showcased through an international sporting spectacle. Colorado voters ultimately rejected the Olympic bid in a November 1972 referendum, one of the first instances of a host city's citizens voting against an already-awarded Olympic Games.
"Colorado" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on September 9, 1972, at position 93 and climbed steadily through the following weeks, reaching its peak of 66 during the chart week of October 14, 1972. The eight-week chart run made it Tumbleweed's highest-charting release, a distinction that reflected both the song's topical relevance and the label's difficulty in sustaining commercial momentum for any of its acts. Within two years of the single's chart performance, Tumbleweed had collapsed, its combination of minimal promotion infrastructure, distribution difficulties, and insufficient follow-through on promising releases proving commercially fatal.
The recording was reissued in 2017 as part of a Light in the Attic Records anthology titled Sing It High, Sing It Low: Tumbleweed Records 1971-1973, which introduced the Tumbleweed catalog to a new generation of listeners interested in obscure American independent label history and early-1970s singer-songwriter recordings. The reissue placed "Colorado" in the context of the full Tumbleweed project, allowing its qualities as both a protest document and a piece of early-1970s folk-rock to be appreciated alongside the other recordings that defined the label's brief existence.
02 Song Meaning
Environmental Protest and the Rocky Mountain Imagination
"Colorado" belongs to a tradition of American protest songs that use the landscape of a specific place as the emotional and argumentative center of their case. Like Woody Guthrie's plains-and-mountains imagery or the Appalachian references that run through labor movement folk songs, Holien's song made the physical reality of Colorado's mountains, forests, and open land into the primary subject of political concern. The threat that organized the song's argument was a specific and contemporary one: the prospect that hosting the 1972 Winter Olympics would bring levels of development and infrastructure construction that would permanently alter the landscape the song celebrated.
The song's political context was the early environmental movement, still in its formative stages in 1972 but already generating significant grassroots opposition to large-scale development projects. The Olympics protest in Colorado was one of the movement's first major electoral successes: Colorado voters ultimately rejected the state's hosting of the Games in a November 1972 referendum, making Holien's song a piece of protest music that was vindicated by subsequent political events. This gives the recording an unusual historical status as a song whose argument was accepted by its immediate audience at the ballot box.
Producer Bill Szymczyk gave the track what has been described as a martial, fife-and-drum quality, a musical texture that connected it to a tradition of patriotic and protest song equally. The arrangement was direct and unadorned, suited to the documentary seriousness of the lyrical content. Comparisons were drawn at the time to CSNY-related topical songs like Neil Young's "Ohio" and "Chicago," recordings that used similar acoustic and rhythmic frameworks to address political urgency without sacrificing melodic accessibility.
The song's relationship to John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High," which was released later in 1972 and became a much more commercially successful Colorado anthem, is instructive. Denver's song celebrated the state's natural beauty in terms of personal transcendence and spiritual renewal, while Holien's treated the same landscape as a political resource requiring active defense. Both perspectives were genuine expressions of the period's ecological consciousness, but they proposed different relationships between the listener and the land: Denver's was contemplative and individual, while Holien's was civic and collective.
The song's rediscovery through the 2017 Light in the Attic anthology placed it in a new context of interest in obscure American independent label history and early-1970s political songwriting. Listeners encountering "Colorado" for the first time in the 2010s found a recording whose environmental concerns had not dated, even as the specific political moment it addressed had long since resolved. The durability of the song's core argument, that commercial development poses a genuine threat to the natural landscape and the communities that define themselves through their relationship to it, reflects the continuing relevance of the values it expressed in 1972.
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