CAN CRITICS SPOIL HIS SUCCESS? HECK, NO by M. Howard Gelfand Staff Writer Minneapolis Tribune Arts & Entertainment Section May 11, 1975 ......John Denver took the last hit from the marijuana joint, and as he watched the roach die in the ashtray, he smiled. Outside the dressing room, the 17,000 adoring fans were screaming for more. But this was a knowing smile. "No" he said at last, "I am not happy. As Ionesco said, "I am merely pleased. One can never be happy...." Sheer fantasy, of course. John Denver, who once said he lives a perfect life, would bring a rare smile from his dyspeptic critics if only he would just brood a bit. Cut the crap about the flowers and the eagles and the baby kicking in the wife's belly and suffer like the rest of us. But not tonight. Tonight, a rainy night in late April, the St. Paul Civic Center is full and Denver is yelling "Faarrout!" and singing about sunshine and his Rocky Mountain High. And in the audience, entire families are smiling the beatific John Denver smile and lip-syncing along to such lyrics as "Sunshine on my shoulder makes me happy, sunshine in my eyes can make me cry." Entire families wearing John Denver wire-rims, even Dad with his graying hair struggling over his ears. But just now - the day after the concert - Denver looks out the window of his Hilton Hotel suite and sees not eagles but misty grayness. There will be no sunshine on his shoulder this day. It's just 3 PM but he's already read the predictably unfavorable review in the Minneapolis Star. He professes to feel nothing so much as whimsical tolerance toward reviews, but there's no doubt he cares. "Bland" - "I think that's the word the guy used. Well, I don't think it's that way. All those people - we're playing for a half-million people in 41 days. And I don't read anything about how there was magic happening for those people. How they were dancing, clapping at "Thank God I'm A Country Boy." They just editorialize about how innocuous the music is." Someone hands him the St. Paul Dispatch. "Ah see!" he cries in vindication." "Denver concert mostly simple, escapist fare." "It doesn't bother me any more" he insists. "It's a source of great amusement." Ha. Mostly, John Denver is amused in private these days. Critics need him more than he needs them, so he doesn't talk to them much any more. After the requisite lean years and an apprenticeship in the Chad Mitchell Trio, Denver's 31st year has brought commercial if not critical success. He has seven gold albums and an eighth on the way. He has filled the St. Paul Civic Center five times in the past year. The most recent two concerts, industry sources estimate, will earn him about $175,000. No wonder he looks amused as he smiles from the cover of the Rolling Stone which is rock music's ultimate ego trip. The Rolling Stone article was a rare exception to his ban on interviews. It was a question and answer format - "nobody getting in the way of the interview" as he puts it. And the questions were gentle. A request via his agents for an interview with the Tribune brings an unhesitating no. Finally, Denver is approached in person after a rehearsal. He consents at last to a half-hour phone interview. He used to live in Edina, after all. Met his wife at a concert in St. Peter, and though his roots are firmly planted in Aspen, Colorado, the Twin Cities were a three year layover on the journey to the cover of Rolling Stone. Interviewee John Denver is pleasant if not incisive - much like his music. For an hour and forty-five minutes the night before, he sang in his clear tenor about the things that touch everyone's lives. He sang his big hits such as "Country Roads", and"Rocky Mountain High" and "Sunshine on My Shoulder" - pretty songs made prettier by lush orchestration. A 20 piece orchestra, heavy on the stings, backs him up in addition to the traditional five-man guitar and drum group. He sees the orchestra as a way of enlightenment as well as entertainment. "A whole lot of people who never have heard an orchestra before are getting off on that kind of music," he says. "This isn't a concert hall - it's not a barn but it's not a concert hall - but there were times last night when the audience was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. And that's really" - here it comes again - "faarr out!" Far out, indeed, for a hall accustomed to screaming teenies and earth-shattering amplifiers. No one rushes the stage at a John Denver concert. "Every time we work some place for the first time the people are worried about security. We tell them, 'Listen, that doesn't happen with our audience.' And inevitably they say, 'We've never had an audience like that before.'" The audience must agree with Denver when he says: "It's not music you dance to. It's music you listen to. It creates images for people." Just in case the music doesn't create the appropriate images, Denver's shows include a slide and film presentation behind the stage. When he sings about eagles soaring there are pictures of eagles soaring. And there are lot of powder-puff clouds and kids playing in fields and mountain streams. Images everyone can relate to. "I seem to have a talent" he says "for putting things down that make people think, 'Wow. That's the way I feel.'" Except for the critics. "When you get to be successful there are people looking to cut the wind from your sails," he acknowledges. "When you're a positive person there are people who would like to find something sordid or crummy about you and I just refuse to be anything other than what I am." John Denver was an Army brat who started playing the guitar when he name was John Deutschendorf and he wanted his classmates in Alabama to accept him and now he's the most popular kid on the block. But he can't help feeling like the plain girl who is shunned by her plain friends after the braces come off her teeth and she blossoms into a woman. He's conscious of the comparisons: bland John Denver, nice guy but....well, he was reading the review in the St. Paul paper: "Muzak-like....almost hypnotic sameness.....monotony of the cliched lyrics." "Al right, I'm not Bob Dylan. I don't write songs like that," he says. "But I think 25 years from now people will be singing my songs even if they don't remember who wrote them. Can you remember that Duke Ellington wrote 'Mood Indigo'"? It doesn't bother me anymore. The people will be the judge. Those 17,000 people can't be wrong. Those critics weren't at the same concert I was at. It doesn't bother me anymore. All right. Maybe he has attained the perfect serenity of the eagle over Aspen. But maybe the criticism is getting to him just a bit. He sings two new songs at the concert that stray a bit from the Denver mold. One, called "I'm Sorry," is about a couple's break up. The narrator feels sorry for himself as John Denver never seems to. In the other, "Looking for Space" he actually confesses occasional despair. "People have started to have this preconception of me that I'm always happy" he says. "Generally that's true, but there are times when I'm depressed and the world gets me down and I wanted to make that clear to people. Like 'Looking for Space.' Every time the tide comes in, it also goes out. Every time the winter comes to Minnesota, spring comes afterwards. That's all I'm saying." And he quotes, with great fervor, the songs he had sung the night before: Sometimes I wish that I could fly away When I think I'm moving Suddenly things stand still I'm afraid 'cause I think they always will And I'm looking for space to find out who I am.... And sometimes I'm almost there Sometimes I fly like an eagle And sometimes I'm deep in despair. "And I know that's true for everybody." But it doesn't take long for him to move right along to "Thank God I'm A Country Boy." The beatific smile is back and he's yelling "Faarr out!" As the song says, he's got a fine wife and has an old fiddle and the sun's coming up and he's got cakes on the griddle. You bet he's smiling. Today is, after all, the first day of the rest of his life.