========================================= John Denver's new ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH Kansas City Star 10/14/95 ========================================= (Reprinted from the Hartford Courant) on Cover page...small picture with...."Back home again. John Denver's big star days may be over, but his audience is still growing. See 'Showtime', page 7." by Roger Catlin The Hartford Courant The weather in Aspen is perfect. "Glorious" says the man who named himself after another Colorado city to become the region's best-known booster since the mountains. And why shouldn't the former John Henry Deutschendorf have a sunny outlook at age 51? They're singing his songs again in Coors beer ads. His latest concert, a benefit for the Wildlife Conservation Society, is all over tv (it's still selling in the video stores, and the soundtrack is one of his strongest in years.) John Denver, somehow is hot again. "I don't know to what degree that's true," says Denver. "But it does mean a lot to have a new piece of product out - and to have a structure such as Sony and the Sony legacy people behind me. That's been missing for a lot of years." "Having a major international company behind his career 20 years ago (when he was on RCA) certainly helped, he says, "back when I was the biggest-selling recording artist in the world." Can you cast your mind back to that time? Back when the bespectacled former member of the Chad Mitchell Trio, who sold a song to Peter, Paul and Mary ("Leaving on a Jet Plane") introduced himself with the hit "Take Me Home, Country Roads" in 1971 and hung around the charts for another decade? For all of his songwriting ability, the familiarity of his voice and his presence on television as perhaps the most wholesome entertainer to issue the words "far out," he has struggled to get his music to a wide audience since the '80's. "Radio formats now are so constricted in a sense, it has to be such a more competitive area than it was 20 years ago" Denver says. "Any station that plays any of my songs now are golden-oldies stations. So it's harder than ever to get them to listen to new things." Indeed, even his current success with "The Wildlife Concert", a warm acoustic show recorded in front of an audience in New York was predicated on his playing mostly oldies. "If it was mine to do," Denver says, "the album would have been a little different." Still, broadcasts of "The Wildlife Concert" are doing for Denver what the "Live at the Acropolis" album did for Yanni: Denver has become a hot concert ticket. And he likes how he sounds now in concert. "I'm pleased to show the difference in the way I'm singing now than the way I was singing 15 years ago." Indeed, rather than gloss over such familiar songs as "Rocky Mountain High", he injects more passion into the slight crags that have grown in his voice - as if to emphasize that his course has not changed and his love for the land has only increased. The concert recorded for TV and CD release, of course, was on behalf of the Wildlife Conservation Society. As for the environmental movement today, "I think we're in a difficult place," Denver says. "It's as if the environment has gotten to be old hat for a lot of people, compared to the days when you couldn't pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about the environment. "And Congress is trying to turn around all the good work that's been done in the 20 years to protect endangered species and to keep clean air clean. And that's a real shame. "We have a generation of young people who for the first time don't think it's going to get better...it's important that we let them know there's a lot of positive things to do out there." Denver continues to write and play new songs, but says "We include most of the things people hope to hear at my concerts - things that are sung in every karaoke bar in the world." ......a large picture from the Wildlife Concert is beside the article. ======================================================================