JOHN DENVER IS READY TO HAVE 'A SIGNIFICANT VOICE AGAIN'
Rocky Mountain News (RM) - WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 27, 1993
By: ED MASLEY PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS 
SERVICE
Edition: FINAL  Section: ENTERTAINMENT/WEEKEND/SPOTLIGHT  
Page: 14D


TEXT:
He wrote his first song at a Presbyterian church camp.

   Peter,  Paul & Mary might never have topped the charts if 
he hadn't fed them Leaving on a Jet Plane.

   At  a  time  when  everyone  from Billy Joel to Linda 
Ronstadt was trying to figure  out how to work a safety pin, 
John Denver responded to the Sex Pistols' Great  Rock  'N'  
Roll  Swindle by rounding up the Muppets and laying down some
Christmas songs.

   Clearly, it's going to take more than one drunken-driving 
incident to change this  guy's  image.  He  cares about the 
environment. He cares about hunger. He lives  by  a stream and 
says "golly" and "gee," though sadly enough, never in a
row.  Denver  says  that as a shy child, his best friends were 
the outdoors and his guitar.

   "Consequently,  when  I  began  to try to express myself by 
writing songs, I used images from nature."

   Thanks  to subsequent such nature-boy anthems as Take Me 
Home Country Roads, Sunshine  on  My  Shoulders  and Calypso, 
a song dedicated to Jacques Cousteau, Denver went on to become 
the most successful nice guy of the Me Decade.

   Born  Henry  John Deutschendorf, the 49-year-old songwriter 
adopted the name of  his  favorite  Rocky  Mountain  city  
while  playing the mid-'60s L.A. folk circuit.  His  first  
big  break  was a three-year stint with the Chad Mitchell
Trio, in which Denver, oddly enough, replaced Chad Mitchell.

   "When I was with the trio, Joe Frazier would show up late 
and I'd go out and entertain  the  audience  myself until Joe 
got there," he recalls. "And I got a real  nice  reaction, so 
this one particular year, I decided to record an album
of  my  own,  which I did as a Christmas gift." Fortunately, 
Peter, Paul & Mary were  among  the 250 friends on Denver's 
Christmas card list that year, because it was that album that 
introduced the group to Leaving on a Jet Plane.

   Denver  signed with RCA in '68, Peter, Paul & Mary took Jet 
Plane to the top of the charts the following year, and the 
rest, as they say, is history.

   Once  a  member of the Presidential Commission on World and 
Domestic Hunger, Denver  remains  active  in the Windstar 
Foundation, an environmental education and research center he 
co-founded in 1976. And while nobody invited him to play
Live  Aid, the Hunger Project did send him on a fact-finding 
trip to Africa the previous year.

   Young  metalheads  would  do  well  to  remember that it 
was John Denver who fought  the  Parents  Music  Resource  
Center  on Capitol Hill, while peaceniks should admire his 
1986 duet with Soviet singer Alexandre Gradsky. Titled Let Us
Begin (What Are We Making Weapons For?), the song is featured 
on One World, the last  record John Denver would make for RCA 
and its new parent company, General Electric, a top military 
contractor.

   In this pessimistic decade, Denver has turned optimistic.

   "I  think  that  music  and  what's  going  on in the 
world, what people are concerned  about,  is all gonna come 
back to where I'm gonna have a significant voice  again,  and  
I'm  excited  by  that," he says. "I think there's enormous
opportunity out there for me."


CAPTION:
PHOTO

   Nice guy John Denver is posed for a resurgence. FILE: 
DENVER, JOHN

        Copyright 1993 Rocky Mountain News