by Steve Webb, The Knickerbocker News, June 23, 1980

John Denver is not a great artist. He is a great entertainer, of course, and in the personal context of his songs which affect listeners as art.

But Denver’s concert Saturday was surprising in that it offered something to the serious pop music listener. He should be thanked by the audiences for luring musicians out on the road who haven’t been there in three, four, six, even 20 years. Men like Glen Hardin and James Burton, from Elvis Presley’s 1969 comeback tour band and later work with Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris; Jim Horn, from Leon Russell’s original Shelter People and the George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, and Hal Blaine, session drummer on at least 1,000 records, whose work on such classics as “Be My Baby” and “Surf City” inspired Keith Moon to take up the drums.

The combined effect made Denver’s already crowd-pleasing ways a tad more serious musically. He worked with this band, and was inspired by Burton’s effectively fluid guitar riffs, Hardin’s ambient piano and Blaine’s solid rhythm work. The show was probably poorly paced — it seemed longer than the 2 1/2 hours it ran — but it included every number anyone would want to see, and there were a lot of individuals to please: 10,386, including what is an unofficial record of 726 persons sitting in lawn chairs on the lawn. These individuals would differ on the highlights, but some of them included a medley of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “Goodbye Again,” “I’d Rather Be a Cowboy” and a fusion of bluegrass and rockabilly on Paul McCartney’s “Mother Nature’s Son.”

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