John Denver - His Guitar and His Music: The Apollo Theatre, London, Britain, 10-26-1982

If you've been following this blog, you may have noticed I've been putting an emphasis on posting BBC material recently. This is a BBC performance too, though less obviously so than the radio session type of recording. As I've mentioned previously, I'm not a huge John Denver fan. Most of his songs don't cut the mustard for me, but he's written some true classics too. One issue I have with him is production. In my opinion, his music tended to be overproduced, especially with the use of strings, whereas I think he shines best in the solo acoustic format. So I went looking for the best solo acoustic concert he did, and came up with this bootleg. It contains pretty much all of his big hits, some nice covers, and some choice lesser known songs. If you're like me and enjoy the solo acoustic format, I suspect this is the best live recording of him out there.

Unfortunately, Denver didn't perform concerts in the solo acoustic format very much. As far as I could tell, he did shows in that format prior to hitting it big in 1971, probably because he didn't have the money to pay for a band. Then he tended to play with a band all the time, sometimes with an orchestra, except for some semi-acoustic concerts in the late 1990s. One exception I found to this is a series of solo acoustic shows he did in 1982. Unfortunately, none of them were recorded for a live album. 

But he did one of the shows in Britain which was recorded by the BBC and played as a TV special there with the name "His Guitar and His Music." I didn't find any audio bootlegs of this concert, just the video footage. So I converted the video to audio and broke it up into mp3 tracks. The sound quality is great, as it usually is with BBC recordings. This sounds just as good as you'd expect from an official live album, with no flaws.

Denver was a chatty performer. He liked to tell interesting and often humorous anecdotes between songs. This concert has plenty of that. The total length of the concert is an hour and 32 minutes. Twenty minutes of that consists of banter between songs.

01 Rocky Mountain High (John Denver)
02 Sunshine on My Shoulders (John Denver)
03 talk (John Denver)
04 Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio (John Denver)
05 talk (John Denver)
06 It's a Sin to Tell a Lie (John Denver)
07 talk (John Denver)
08 The Bells of Rhymney (John Denver)
09 talk (John Denver)
10 Durango Mountain Caballero (John Denver)
11 talk (John Denver)
12 The Thought of You (John Denver)
13 talk (John Denver)
14 Rhymes and Reasons (John Denver)
15 talk (John Denver)
16 The Eagle and the Hawk (John Denver)
17 Take Me Home, Country Roads (John Denver)
18 Grandma's Feather Bed (John Denver)
19 talk (John Denver)
20 Seasons of the Heart (John Denver)
21 talk (John Denver)
22 The Ambulance Down in the Valley (John Denver)
23 Jimmy Newman (John Denver)
24 The Peace Poem (John Denver)
25 Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream (John Denver)
26 talk (John Denver)
27 I Want to Live (John Denver)
28 talk (John Denver)
29 Heart to Heart (John Denver)
30 Annie's Song (John Denver)
31 Calypso (John Denver)
32 talk (John Denver)
33 Perhaps Love (John Denver)
34 talk (John Denver)
35 This Old Guitar (John Denver)

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I could have used a screenshot from the video of this concert for the cover art. But the video wasn't that sharp. So instead I chose a photo of him in concert in Chicago in 1982.