Sunday, January 28, 2024

Concert for Walden Woods, Foxboro Stadium, Foxborough, MA, 9-6-1993, Part 1: Elton John

Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, and philosopher. His 1854 book "Walden," about living a simple life in natural surroundings near Walden Pond, close to Concord, Massachusetts, has been highly influential. By the 1980s, a part of the forest around Walden Pond was protected as parkland, but a part of it was not, and housing developments were encroaching into the area.

Don Henley, the main leader singer for the Eagles, had been influenced by Thoreau's writings in college. He made it his cause to protect the Walden Pond area. In 1990, he founded the Walden Woods Project. Through a series of benefit concerts, this project was able to raise millions of dollars, which went to buying more of the land around the pond and converting it into more protected parkland.

If you want to know more, I suggest this Wikipedia page:

Walden Woods Project - Wikipedia

This is part of one of those series of concerts. I don't know much about the other ones, because I haven't found any quality recordings of them. But for whatever reason, an excellent bootleg exists of nearly this entire concert, which consisted of sets by Elton John, Melissa Etheridge, Sting, Aerosmith, and Don Henley. Probably, the concert was broadcast on a local radio station at the time.

Concord is not far from Boston, so this concert took place in Foxboro Stadium near Boston, a huge stadium where football and baseball games are played. I'm guessing there probably were 50 to 60,000 people at the concert.

The year prior to this concert, Elton John released the studio album "The One." So he played a few songs from that: "Simple Life," "The One," and "The Last Song." But mostly, he did his biggest hits.

This album is 52 minutes long.

01 The Bitch Is Back (Elton John)
02 Philadelphia Freedom (Elton John)
03 Levon (Elton John)
04 Simple Life (Elton John)
05 The One (Elton John)
06 The Last Song (Elton John)
07 Take Me to the Pilot (Elton John)
08 I Don't Wanna Go On with You like That (Elton John)
09 Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me (Elton John)
10 talk (Elton John)
11 Pinball Wizard (Elton John)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16216757/VA1993_CncrtfrWldnWdsFxbroStdmFxbrghMA__9-6-1993_01EltnJhn.zip.html

For the life of me, I couldn't find ANY photos from this entire concert, other than one poor black and white one of Don Henley. However, I did find some artwork from a T-shirt sold at the concert to help raise more money. So I used that as the basis for the covers of all five albums of this concert, with only some text changes between them. I had to widen the design to get a better fit with the square album cover space. As a result, the trees in the design are a lot wider than they were on the T-shirt.

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