Our Time with John Denver Winds Down

By the time we got to Phoenix—no musical pun intended—we were worn out and road weary. Some friends had journeyed from Aspen to meet us. They took one look at us and said, “You guys look terrible!”

John saw to it that we had three days in the sun at a resort in Scottsdale. He also threw in an afternoon at a go-cart track. Kent and I passed on that one, preferring the quiet poolside to the roar of engines and the thrill of competition. Photos indicate a good time was had by all.

Finally, on May 9, we arrived at the Forum in Los Angeles.

John Denver at the Forum

We were given a tour of the cavernous facility, including the alcove near the dressing rooms where we were told Bob Dylan had thrown up before his first concert there.

Vic recalled that after our first show, he and Kent decided to go out in back of the Forum to smoke a joint. They found an empty parking lot in back of the arena that had been roped off and that appeared empty. With their backs to the lot, they lit up and passed it around. Whereupon they heard a deep voice saying, “Do you smell marijuana? Couldn’t be. Nobody would be stupid enough to smoke a joint behind the Forum.” They turned around to watch two uniformed motorcycle policemen walking away. Thanking their lucky stars, as Vic puts it, they walked sheepishly back to the dressing room.

This was the 1970s, after all. While pot was not a major issue on the tour, and while its use was never overt, it certainly accompanied us on all our journeys, and that was true for virtually every musician I’ve ever met, except (I can only assume) the classical ones in my parents’ circle.

In fact, before the tour began, we had been warned that Jerry Weintraub, John’s executive manager and agent who appeared on the tour from time to time, had acquired a deep distrust of all drugs during his years of managing Elvis Presley. We had been told to “be really, really careful around Weintraub, or you’ll be on your way home in a heartbeat.”

Here’s an interesting quote from Wikipedia about Weintraub: “Before turning to films, Weintraub's largest entertainment success was as the personal manager of singer and actor John Denver, whom he signed in 1970. Denver and Weintraub's professional relationship ended acrimoniously. Denver would later write in his autobiography, Take Me Home, ‘I'd bend my principles to support something he wanted of me. And of course every time you bend your principles—whether because you don't want to worry about it, or because you're afraid to stand up for fear of what you might lose—you sell your soul to the devil.’”

Liberty was designed around a hometown crowd that knew us and our music. There were lots of instrument changes that allowed us to plan our set lists around the music’s flow, but that resulted in a lot of dead time. Weintraub and other management folks had us reorganize our shows to create more music and less shuffling around onstage.

We were being molded to reflect their idea of what would be commercially marketable, an idea no doubt honed and perfected during many years of successful management. We had been a successful opening act for the biggest selling act of 1975, and John himself had praised us for putting on the same energetic show in Dayton, Ohio as we had in New York City’s Nassau Coliseum.

I’m sure the “suits” had seen enough to start planning what they could do with us. Ironically, of course, the seeds of Liberty’s dissolution had been planted as well, though they would take another couple of years to germinate.

Three nights at the Forum in Los Angeles. And then, suddenly, it was over. Six weeks of wake up, dress for the show, board the bus to the arena, do a sound check, relax, do the show(s), board the bus to the airport, climb aboard the Starship, eat dinner from the buffet, bus to the hotel, go to bed, wake up and do it again, with one day off a week. I was, and remain, truly grateful for the experience of “big time road.” I rode the train home to Aspen and another beautiful summer in the Rocky Mountains.