In Search of Lost Time: My Encounter with “Colorado Blue” by Rusty Wier (1976)
It was the spring of 1977 in Helmond when the misty North Brabant dawns would linger over the canal until noon, and the wooden bridges still creaked with every bicycle tire. By that time, American country music had already put down roots in my heart and soul, even if it struggled to find much more than shallow gravel in Dutch soil. Back then, everyone around me was singing along to The Eagles or the outlaws from Texas, but I always found myself reaching deeper into the vinyl bins, hunting for the voices that sang to the sorrow and struggle just beneath the well-known hits.
One rainy afternoon in Winkelcentrum Elzas passed through my memory this morning like an old melody. I was supposed to be picking up a loaf of bread, but as usual, I was drawn to the tiny record shop tucked away beside the flower kiosk. Behind the glass, peeling with age, there stood a man with a beard and wire-rimmed glasses, a Dutchman who had once tried to become a roadie for Cuby + Blizzards, or so he claimed. He always kept a box under the counter—“for the true believers,” he winked.
That day, flipping through sleeves battered by too many hopes, I came across an album titled “Stoned, Slow, Rugged” by an artist unknown to me: Rusty Wier. The cover was faded, showing a bearded Texan on a wooden porch with a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, the Colorado Rockies somewhere in his distant gaze. I asked to borrow the shop’s battered headphones, and the world vanished. When the fourth track, “Colorado Blue,” began, for the next three minutes and fifty-one seconds, nothing existed but his haunting voice, the shimmer of steel guitar, and the world he carried from Austin straight to Helmond.
“I woke up this morning, with a feeling I can’t shake
Guess my mind drifts back to Boulder, for my heart was never fake
There’s a bluebird on my window, and a blue sky in my mind
Wish I could ride back to Colorado, just one more time.”
Most folks reading this have probably never heard “Colorado Blue,” and it never became a hit even back home in Texas. It was too slow, perhaps, too worn and knotted for radio. But that was the thing—Rusty was writing about the kind of longing you can’t play on the dancefloor. The song is a hymn to left-behind hopes and the landscapes that shape a man, an aching ode to youth and love that couldn’t quite outlast the winter.
I must have listened a dozen times before I paid the measly fifteen guilders, bread forgotten, and trudged home through the Helmond drizzle. That night, as the rain hissed on my attic window, I put the album on my cheap turntable and cracked a local Pilsner. The mournful cascade of the first verse filled my cramped, candlelit room, the needle tracing scars across the grooves of another man’s heartbreak.
“Wish I could tell you I found the meaning
That the city lights never burned my eyes
But here in the night, when the dreams come returning
Only Colorado blue ever makes me cry.”
The reason this song mattered, and still matters to me, is simple: Rusty Wier sang to the vast loneliness of exile, even self-imposed exile. In his voice, I heard my own unease, the same one that lingered after every gig at the local café, that ache when I watched freight trains vanish west across the Maas, bound for places I would only ever know by name. “Colorado Blue” was about Boulder, but it could have been about Helmond, Zwolle, or Amarillo, for all that—anywhere you felt you’d left something important behind.
There’s a moment in the bridge where the piano falls away, and just the voice and steel guitar carry the tune, as fragile as the hope he’s singing about. On the record, you can hear the trembling in Rusty’s throat, a crack that lets through all the miles and memories. I realized then that country music wasn’t really about the wild parties or the twang and cowboy boots—it was about how well a song could let the light shine through your broken places.
For years, I kept that record on rotation, bringing it out each spring when the fog clung to the fields and my heart got to wandering. It helped shape my writing, too. That year, I penned “Vierde Brug Terug” about a Helmond barfly who always pined for his first love. The critics in Eindhoven called it “overly sentimental,” but what is country for if not that?
Over the decades, I’ve played “Colorado Blue” for bar regulars, sweethearts, and newcomers beneath the shaky fluorescent lights of Helmond’s stages. Some dismissed it—“play something known!”—but some listened, really listened, and afterwards would ask about the voice on that old scratched record. Often, I’d just smile and tell them: “This is what longing sounds like.”
Looking back, I realize that time and distance are the great collaborators of country songwriters, more so than any fiddler or drummer. I never met Rusty Wier—he died in 2009, far from the Colorado blue he sang about. But through that song, he taught a boy in the Netherlands that music is not just a bridge over distant water, but a homecoming for those who have nowhere else to go.
So if you ever find a copy of “Stoned, Slow, Rugged”—or even better, if you hear “Colorado Blue” late at night as the mist starts to rise—remember the words:
“Though these flatlands stretch forever,
Still my soul feels mountain high,
If you ask me what I’m longing for,
I’ll just point to the blue Colorado sky.”
It’s not always the songs that blaze brightest that leave the deepest burn. Sometimes, it’s the ones that nearly fell between the cracks, the ones that speak softly of things we’re afraid to name. For me, “Colorado Blue” will always be such a song, a small, precious gem in the crown of country music.
With memories and respect,
Kroes den Bock