Music Album Review: 'An Evening with John Denver'
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| © 1975, 2001 Sony Legacy |
Originally released on vinyl LP and cassette and in various countries (including Netherlands, Japan, and Spain) as well as in the United States, An Evening with John Denver was a significant recording for Denver, who was not quite 31 years old at the time yet was as popular as Frank Sinatra had been in the 1940s and 1950s. He'd started his studio recording career only a few years before under Okun's tutelage, and this was his first live recording - a fact that he announces to the audience when he tells them that "this is being recorded for an RCA album."
And if the 23 tracks of the original version of An Evening with John Denver are a faithful, unaltered record of the various concerts Denver performed in August and October of 1974, it seems that the singer and his backup crew were energized by the presence of an audience, and vice versa. The synergy between Denver and his fans, many of whom had probably seen him "live" before, is reflected in the final recording.
Many years later, in 2001, Sony (which had absorbed RCA in a series of buyouts) released. through its Legacy label, a remastered and enhanced 2-CD reissue of An Evening with John Denver that presented the original 23 tracks recorded at the Universal Amphitheater, as well as six more songs taped in August of 1973 at the concert in Red Rocks, Colorado. In all, the digitally remastered CD contains 29 tracks, most of them written by Denver himself, although there were also "covers" of songs by John Lennon & Paul McCartney, Randy Sparks, Michael Martin Murphey, Owen Castleman, Tom Paxton, Mike Taylor & Dick Kniss, Jim Connor, Bill Danoff, and Taffy Nivert.
Tracklist
(Disc/track, Composer, duration)
1-1 The Music Is You
Written by – John Denver 1:02
1-2 Farewell Andromeda (Welcome to My Morning)
Written by – John Denver 5:45
1-3 Mother Nature's Son
Written by – John Lennon and Paul McCartney 2:26
1-4 Summer
Lyrics and Music by – John Denver
Written by – Dick Kniss, Mike Taylor 3:02
1-5 Today
Lyrics and Music by – Randy Sparks 6:23
1-6 Toledo
Lyrics and Music by – Randy Sparks 2:30
1-7 Matthew
Written by – John Denver 3:51
1-8 Rocky Mountain Suite (Cold Nights In Canada)
Written by – John Denver 3:15
1-9 Sweet Surrender
Written by – John Denver 5:02
1-10 Grandma's Feather Bed
Written by – Jim Connor 2:35
1-11 Annie's Song
Written by – John Denver 3:35
1-12 The Eagle And The Hawk
Lyrics by – John Denver
Music by – Mike Taylor 2:20
1-13 My Sweet Lady
Written by – John Denver 4:55
1-14 Annie's Other Song
Written by – John Denver 3:05
1-15 Boy From The Country
Written by – Michael Murphey, Owens B. Castleman 5:00
1-16 Rhymes & Reasons
Written by – John Denver 3:14
1-17 Forest Lawn
Written by – Tom Paxton 3:04
2-1 Pickin' The Sun Down
Written by – John Martin Sommers, Steve Weisberg 2:17
2-2 Thank God I'm a Country Boy
Written by – John Martin Sommers 3:40
2-3 Take Me Home, Country Roads
Written by – Bill Danoff, John Denver, Taffy Nivert 3:17
2-4 Poems, Prayers And Promises
Written by – John Denver 4:40
2-5 Rocky Mountain High
Lyrics and Music by – John Denver
Music by – Mike Taylor 3:04
2-6 This Old Guitar
Written by – John Denver 4:47
Bonus Tracks:
2-7 Intro / Saturday Night In Toledo, Ohio
Written by– Randy Sparks 2:50
2-8 Follow Me / Leaving On A Jet Plane
Written by – John Denver 4:47
2-9 The City of New Orleans
Written by – Steve Goodman 4:30
2-10 Zachary & Jennifer / For Baby (For Bobbie)
Written by – John Denver 4:24
2-11 I'd Rather Be a Cowboy (Lady's Chains)
Written by – John Denver 4:28
2-12 Amsterdam
Written by – Eric Blau, Jacques Brel, Mort Shuman 4:09
My Take
When the original LP of An Evening with John Denver was released in February of 1975, I wasn't a fan of John Denver or his music. I didn't hate either the man or his art, mind you; I remember hearing a few of his songs being played on the radio by "middle-of-the-road" (MOR) and easy listening stations in Miami when I was 11 and 12 and liking some (Leaving on a Jet Plane and Take Me Home, Country Roads were the ones I remember liking the most then). However, my mom only listened to the radio in her car, and I wouldn't have my own radio till I was 13 when Mom gave me a radio-alarm clock to make sure I woke up on time during the school year and didn't miss the school bus.
Growing up in Miami in the early days of the disco craze also didn't help much; most of my contemporaries either liked rock or disco and thought folk/Western singers like John Denver were for nerds. The only person I knew who really liked the music in Denver's MOR/country/folk niche was my half-sister, and by 1975 she had moved out of our house in Westchester.
As a result, I did not hear the original 23-track LP version of An Evening with John Denver in the mid- to late 1970s. I only heard his really, really big hits from time to time, although I did perform Take Me Home, Country Roads when I was a member of my elementary school's then-brand-new choir in sixth grade.
And because I wasn't more than a casual fan of Denver's until I was in my mid-50s, I never got to see him live in concert. (I've seen the Beach Boys, Three Dog Night, Christopher Cross, and Billy Joel in several venues here in Florida, but never went to a John Denver concert; his death in October of 1997 precluded any possibility of rectifying this oversight, sadly.)
I recently purchased An Evening with John Denver for two reasons. First, I want to have at least one "live" album that was recorded in the 1970s, before he started changing his vocal performing style, a trend that started when he worked with Placido Domingo on Perhaps Love in 1981 and continued as he got older and his singing reflected the changes in his life, including his reconciliation with his dad (who taught Denver to fly airplanes), his divorce from Annie Denver, and just growing wiser as he reached his 40s and early 50s.
Second, since I never attended a John Denver concert, I wanted a record based on that experience to go with my DVD of John Denver: The Wildlife Concert. I could have just as easily purchased The Wildlife Concert 2-CD, but as I said before, that recording was made when John's style was more polished and his voice was more mature and less, well, youthful.
I have listened to this 2-CD album, which was reissued and remastered by Sony Legacy almost 20 years ago, for a few days now, and all I can say is John Denver's catchphrase from the 1970s, "Far out!" The man really pulled all the stops in his live performances, and this record is one that will put the listener in the best of moods while playing such songs as Jim Connor's Grandma's Feather Bed, The Beatles' Mother Nature's Son, the Danoff-Nivert-Denver megahit Take Me Home, Country Road, and many of Denver's own compositions of the time, including Rocky Mountain High, I'd Rather Be a Cowboy, This Old Guitar, and Poems, Prayers, and Promises.
This is a must-have album for even the most casual of fans; studio albums are fine but they are processed and edited so that they sound perfect over the airwaves or on your preferred home media. Live recordings, even those that the artist knows are being made during a concert, have a spark of spontaneity that comes from the performing being "in the moment" and reading the audience and the give and take that results from such an interaction.
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