greetings boston jim, & miscellaneous listers...
thanks for sharing your ideas. i always applaud anyones resistance to this
joint's tendancy to deify joni. let's allow her to be a human being, which,
sometimes, means being a jerk. we need to seperate the artist from the art!
but your recollections of the boston show are interesting to me, because i
was at that concert too jim and while i remember things a bit differently
than you, i discovered that my memory of the evening was unreliable in many
of the same ways as yours. i know for a fact, tho, that her first song of
the night was not song for sharon, because i will never forget the opening
chords of coyote, with which she began the concert. i got all choked up,
hearing those familiar chords, and i was suddenly sick at the thought that
the woman i was with, who had the remarkably poor judgement to later marry
me, might notice! but as EYE recalled, song for sharon was started about 3
songs into her opening set, and then the famous tantrum...and off the stage
she went. gone for almost an hour...then back to boos and hisses, and
wearing a different outfit...she then played MAYBE 4 or 5 more songs and,
when she had won us back and the concert was about to take off, she just up
and left - (i remember her backing off stage to the closing chords of
woodstock. no goodnight? just left and the lights came up and every one was
confused?) that's how i remember it.
but my pal and veteran list member, mark d., sent me a tape of that show, the
same tape to which bob refers, and i could not believe it! because in fact,
she DID perform almost an entire set before song for sharon was attempted.
and when she came back, after her 45-60 minute siesta, she did quite a few
more songs than i recall. (and this show was the only one. she never
performed in boston again, until the BSN tour of last summer...)
we can conclude one of two things. either her abrupt stalking off stage was
so upsetting to us joniphiles that it completely skewed our perceptions...or
joni's secret police confiscated all the tapes of the show and padded them
with numbers from other venues and then redistributed them to gullible types
like our pal, bob mueller.
as i later learned, joni was upset with the promoters of the show that night,
before she ever came on stage, over them not allowing her to hang some
banners she had painted as part of her set design. the promoters were
concerned that the banners would obscure the big miller high life sign that
stood in the back of the stage (one of the concert sponsors) and refused to
allow her to put them up. so she came on stage already pissed, and, probably
suffering from exhaustion and post polio syndrome and blah blah blah, and a
restless crowd was just the last straw. and she took it out on us. i bet we
have all been guilty of misdirected anger at least once in our lives. mea
culpa.
but i do think that ashara is right. just because someone acts like as
asshole, doesn't necessarily mean they are one. i don't know about you, but
i find that a comforting thought...so should paul ivess.
take care! ric
