He’s doing this again on his current tour.
About 10 years ago I saw a John Williams Conducts John Williams concert.
2 hours of John Williams music, not even 1 number from Star Wars. No Superman either.
WTF.
He probably couldn’t remember the words.
The Anti-Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement?
I saw him 30 years ago. The crowd was chanting “Alice! Alice!” Guthrie responded, “Do you want to hear Alice’s Restaurant?” The crowd went wild. Then he said, “Then buy the fucking album!” I was disappointed to say the least.
I can undrestand why some artists are not fond of playing certain songs, even when the audience is expecting them.
I went to an Eagles concert some years ago during their Hell Freezes Over Tour. They started with a rather rushed and pat version of Hotel California. At first I was disappointed in the formula performance, but I understaood why they started with their biggest hit - they simply wanted to get it out of the way. They knew that every break would be filled with shouts of “Hotel California!”, and that the crowd was expecting those famous chords to start up each time, so it made sense to start out hard with their most anticipated song, and then settle down to their planned performance.
I went with friends, and am not a big Eagles fan, but it was a great concert.
The Americana series I used to volunteer for had a rule that you couldn’t come in the main doors of the theater for the first three songs. The ushers had to stand outside and direct people to the side doors until the third song was over.
Then we had Arlo, and he opened up with “Alice’s Restaurant”.
From then on, the rule was “three songs or fifteen minutes”. This came to be known as the Alice Rule.
The same thing happened with John Mayall being constantly hounded to play “Room To Move”.
I saw him in ‘79 and he was trying to tune between songs and the request got loud, and he finally walked up to the mike: "Wha’? Whadja, come here t’hear an ol’ record?" And launched into a new record…
Get over it.