Concert Memories

July 22, 1990, Chene Park, Detroit, MI

A major miscalculation by somebody. Chene Park is , and was, a visually charming and acoustically horrid city-owned venue on the edge of downtown Detroit, right on the river across from Canada. It has beena successful place to book upscale R&B or smooth jazz artists: Luther Vandross, Angela Bofill, Kenny G. and Anita Baker type performers. (Anita and her husband own the IHOP on the corner). Somehow both Poco and Heart were booked there in separate concerts. I don't know how the Wilson sisters drew but Poco attracted maybe 300 fans on a beautiful Sunday summer evening to an outdoor auditorium that held over 7000. Rusty looked out the expanse of empty seats sprinkled with the occasional boyd and joked that if he had known this would be the crowd size, then we could have simply held the show at this house. The band invited the audience members scattered up on the grassy hill to come on down and fillup the first couple of rows. The effect made for an intimate feeling show with a wildly enthusiastic audience tagged by Jim as "small but mighty." Jim had a few acidic cracks about Richie's absence (the man's in CHURCH...) that Rusty smoothed over. The show was a blast, very heavy on Jim and Rusty trading guitar runs. as noted on some other set lists from 1990, there was virtually no pre-Legacy Poco material: the only pre-Legend tune I recall was You Better Think Twice, along with a couple of Top 40 hits from LEGEND, Very heavy on the Meisner and Messina songbooks. The high point was Rusty appreciatively commenting, before starting Call It Love, how great it felt to have recently been on Jay Leno and touring nationally when a few years earlier nobody could have imagined Poco would be alive and flourishing in 1990.

Tony Wagoner