NO LONGER NAIVE, BUT OPTIMISTIC
Reno-Tahoe-Review  
San Jose Mercury News, June 2, 1996

Thirty years ago John Denver replaced Chad Mitchell in the Chad Mitchell
Trio.  He'd been an American legend ever since.  Denver then was in his
early 20's and a boyish early 20's at that.  He's now 52.
Denver is happy he's 52, and no longer boyish. "I don't like being thought
of as a boy," he says.  "I hope to sustain the enthusiasm and optimism of
youth, but I'm not too naive anymore."

Denver's face is now lined with experience. Those who get close seats when
he sings June 29 in the Reno Hilton's outdoor ampitheater will see a
mature man.  Those further back will see someone who looks a bit more like
the legendary Denver who sang "Rocky Mountain High."

He looks younger in glasses:
In glasses, Denver still looks like the classic Denver. Out of glasses he
looks much older. "The glasses", he says, "kept people thinking of the
country boy, a person who's a little bit naive, overly optimistic, not
really credible perhaps - and that's not the way that I feel."

Denver has always taken a lively interest in improving the world, whether
regarding race relations or ecology. His father was in the Air Force, and
the family moved a lot.  "I had the opportunity to work a lot of different
jobs. I was on a wheat harvest in Texas, then up into Canada, and in a
lumber camp in the northwest," says Denver.  

"My music has always allowed me to make friends, and everywhere I went
people enjoyed the same kind of things. We talked about the same things.
People were the same.  As I became socially and politically aware -
primarily after I joined the Mitchell trio in the '60s - I began to
realize many things they were addressing in their songs were things I had
thought about without the perspective of being socially and poitically
aware."

Denver, as he eyes his mature years, wants to see a world to be at home
in.  "It will be the place that you have built and and lived in and grown
in. To the degree that we become more aware of the earth as our home, as
the home of the human family, that will be a very valuable thing."