About ten years ago, maybe a little longer, I decided to start doing John Denver Tribute shows. I thought it would be nice to have something that looked like an authentic John Denver Shirt.   

I knew that Anna Zapp was John Denvers seamstress, so I contacted her to make a few shirts for me. She said that she no longer made clothing but would come out of retirement just for me.  I was so excited! She made quite a few shirts that I still wear on stage now and then. Anna's shirts were beautiful and she was a kind soul. We developed a small friendship.  

She shared this story about JD with me. John was kind of fussy about his clothes. He was always a pretty trim guy but back in the early 80's he was starting to hit middle age. He  was getting ready for one of his tours and Anna had made some pants for John. She sent John the pants but when he tried on his new pants,  they didn’t fit. He was really mad and gave Anna a very upset phone call and chewed her out for making his clothes the wrong size. Anna was pretty shaken up. She checked her measurements and everything seemed right.

Anna told John that she made them the same size as all the rest of his previous pants. That’s when Anna said to John, have you weighed yourself lately?   

John hung up the phone.  He called Anna back after a short time with a very sincere apology. Turns out JD had put on a few pounds.  Don't we all?

Anna continued to work for John for many years after that.  She expressed to me her deep sadness over the loss of her good friend John. 

Back in the 1970’s John Denver was on the hunt for a new lead player. His good friend Mike Taylor was leaving the band. Mike was the guy who wrote all the Iconic licks in Rocky Mountain High, along with a lot of the cool guitar parts in Johns music, like Late Winter Early Spring (When Everybody Goes To Mexico).   

John stumbled into a local guy by the name of Steve Weisberg. Steve had been working in bands around Aspen and hoped that someday John might ask him to play in the band.   

Then one day, Steve got the call. He was invited up to John’s house. They jammed for hours and John loved what Steve added to the music. Steve joined John on the road and in the studio for years.  

John liked Steve as a friend and wanted to give something of himself to him. John had invited Steve to his house. John went to the back room and came out with a guitar case. John opened It up and inside was his treasured Guild F50.  

He told Steve that he was going to give him the guitar. Steve was beside himself with excitement. He picked up the guitar and played a few chords. He then made the mistake of a lifetime. He told John that he loved the guitar and was going to put a wider neck on it.  John reached across the void, took the guitar back, and put it back in the case.   

Poor Steve was stunned. John didn’t want the guitar changed in any way and that was end of the gift to Steve. If there is a lesson here, I guess it is to accept a gift as it is given. It was a lesson that Steve would never forget.

One of the prizes of meeting someone famous is to get their autograph. Fans line up hundreds deep to get the autograph of a star. Signing sessions  was one of John Denver’s least favorite things to do. But despite his distaste for signing his name for people,  he was very dedicated to his fans and he would sit for long sessions of autographing.  

John expresses his real feelings about this topic in a song titled, Autograph. The lyrics go like this, “This is my autograph, here in the songs that I sing, here in my cry and my laugh, here in the love the I bring, to be always with you, and you always with me.“ 

Being at the stardom level of John Denver in the seventies must have been overwhelming at times. Because of John’s iconic looks there was no escaping his fans in public. John had a wicked sense of humor about some of his interactions with the public.  

One of the stories goes like this. John and a friend were having a meal at a restaurant when a group of folks at another table recognized him. One of the guys at the table approached John and asked if they could have a picture with him. John said that he wold accommodate them after his meal.  

The fan didn’t want to wait and pushed for the picture right away. John again said he would do it after the meal. The folks waited for John outside the restaurant and when John and his friend finished the meal he met them outside. 

The group handed John’s friend the camera and prepared for the picture. John whispered to his friend, when you take the picture, frame it so all the heads are cut off. 

Somewhere, somebody has a picture with John with only their bodies.  I can only imagine their surprise. I guess their autograph was John’s sense of humor.

John Denver was often a man ahead of his time.  He had a brilliant idea about sustainable living back in the late 70s.  He bought an old monastery and some acreage and turned it into the Windstar Foundation, a working model for sustainability.    

Windstar had a working power generating windmill, a sustainable watershed and John and his friends had an idea that could transform the world. He worked closely with a genius who became his friend, his mentor, and his brother. The Genius’s name was Buckminster Fuller. You may not recognize the name but you might recognize his work, the Bucky Ball and the geodesic dome, not to mention more than 30 published books.   

At one point during the heyday of the Windstar foundation. John and his team built a working scale geodesic dome for the purpose of creating a sustainable ecosystem. The idea of sustainable societies and environments was a driving force that propelled the Windstar Foundation. John even filmed a performance for TV in the geodesic dome.  

The surrounding community of Windstar was not quite ready for all that Windstar had to offer and a request was made to remove the Windmill and curtail some activities.  

 As music changed in the 80s, John’s career and record sales declined. The financial demands of Windstar were more than John could afford and eventually the Foundation was unable to support a staff. 

About 15 years after John died,  Windstar closed it’s doors for good (or bad) and sold the building. John had the wisdom to create a land conservancy to protect most fo the land. The Windstar Land Conservancy still owns the acreage located in Snowmass, Colorado. You can still visit and walk on the land that John’s dream was built on. 

Let’s back track a bit.  Shortly before John lost his friend Buckminster in 1983, he released the album, Seasons Of The Heart. It contained John’s Tribute to Buckminster Fuller called, What One Man Can Do.  John may not have realized it at the time, but the song was also about John himself.

This is a video from one of our recent concerts with John's song for Bucky. 

Back in the late 70s, I was going to college at the University of Wisconsin. It was a time when there were all kinds of self discovery seminars happening in America. I had a cousin named Carol who told me all about this really cool course that she took called Erhard Seminar Training, EST.  She told me I should go. I told her I didn’t have much cash back then, and she said, just go and I’ll help you. And so I went. It was one of the best 2 weekend experiences of my life, and it really broke down some walls and barriers for me. I won’t explain how important it was to me at the time, but it freed me up to express myself and my love for other people.  

Just about the same time that I had discovered EST,  John Denver had come off of his hugely successful Back Home Again album.  His next release was an album called Windsong. Being the fan that I was, I eagerly listened to it. It had some great songs on it, Fly Away, I’m Sorry, and Calypso. But much to my surprise, it had a couple of songs that I immediately recognized, even though I had never heard them before. There was a good reason for my knowing these songs. They were written from John Denver’s own experiences with EST. The songs that came out of his experience were, Love Is Everywhere and Looking for Space. WOW!  I totally got the message because I just got it from EST. I thought that was so cool.  I didn’t even know that JD had taken the course.

One of the euphemisms from EST was, “most people realize what’s so. But what most people don’t realize is so what.” For me, this embodied the premise of EST in that we can not let what is the current situation dictate what might be, and that things are only important because we choose them to be. And in this knowledge, we have the power to change our condition.  

John was so excited about these ideas that he ended up training directly with Werner Erhard. John went on to work with Werner and a guy named Dr. Robert Fuller, the author of a couple of books about human dignity. On a side note, Dr. Fuller was our personal guest at an event that was held in Aspen several years ago. Very cool guy! Robert Fuller, Werner Erhard, and JD put together an organization called the Hunger Project. It was aimed at ending world hunger and providing a pathway to dignity for the world population with the idea that when people are afforded dignity and hunger is removed as an obstacle, we can achieve peace. The organization is still in existence today, thp.org.  It’s nice to see that something that started 40 years ago by John and his friends is still doing good work today.  

To this day, I often think of the enlightenment that I got from EST, and I use it on a regular basis. It’s kind of my personal book for life. It changed my approach to relationships and problem solving forever. We still do the two songs that I mentioned earlier in our Tribute show. EST is still around, but it is now called The Forum. I don’t know what the new seminar is like today, but if you are interested, here is the link. http://www.landmarkworldwide.com/why-landmark/news/news-archives/the-return-of-werner-erhard

A little story from Steve Weinberg. Steve passed away a few years ago but during one of my conversations with him, he told me this story.   Steve was John Denver’s Dobro and guitar player during the 1970s. According to Steve, back  when he was playing with John, the band all rode in the tour bus. The band had finished a run of shows and was on the road to the next city. After long tours and being cooped up with each other for days on end you start looking for ways to entertain yourself. I’m guessing that’s what happen on this particular occasion.  John Denver was in a separate vehicle with his manager out in front of the bus. The guys in the bus decided that they would pull a little prank on John. So the driver hit the gas and passed up John and his manager. As they whizzed by, the guys dropped their pants and mooned John out the windows of the bus. They were feeling pretty proud of themselves for the prank.  The bus zoomed out ahead and put some distance between themselves and John’s car. A few miles down the road, John’s vehicle came flying up on the bus. Suddenly, the guys were all nervous and thought that John was mad. As the John's car passed the bus, the guys all broke out in laughter because there, hanging out the window of the car, was John’s butt! 

John Denver was certainly a good musician and a great singer but there was something more to him that drew people to him. He was one of those people that you just wanted to like. He had that floppy hair, big grin, and those cool granny glasses. But still, there was something even more than that.  He had a sincerity and vulnerability that came through both in his music and his interviews. John was one of those rare individuals that seem to understand the human condition and was able to express it with a voice that was both gentle and powerful, and a musical sense that was both complex and incredibly simple at the same time. Put all that together and you have a force of music that effected not just one generation but all the generations to follow. When we do our tribute shows, entire families turn out from 90 year old grannies to 5 year old kids, and they know the words to all the songs.  

John was the most popular entertainer in the world during the 1970s. Still today, if you visit China and go to a karaoke bar, you will likely hear someone sing Country Roads.  John even visited Russia and sang with Alexander Gradsky in their famous version of What Are We Making Weapons For. John became a voice for a generation, a generation searching for itself shortly after the Vietnam War. It was a time of self discovery and self improvement movement. John worked with Werner Erhard and EST (Erhard Seminar Training) to create the World Hunger Project. John also worked with Jaques Cousteau and dedicated the proceeds from his song Calypso to Jaques Cousteau's foundation. For many people there will never be anyone quite like John. His music and his ability to express what so many of us feel left an indelible mark on our heart.  Boulder Canyon and I feel quite honored to present his music. And though he is no longer with us, we hope that hearing his music live again will bring some of the joy back for his dedicated fans. 

In the coming blogs, we'll try to bring you some stories that you may not have heard about John. Stay tuned for some great new memories of John Denver.

Chris Collins

                                      John Denver and Buckminster Fuller                Photo Courtesy:  Nick DeWolf ( used by permission Nick DeWolf family)