Thanks for sharing that great story. I wasn't lucky enough to see Roger but I can assure you Roger wasn't drunk at the show you were at.
I always thought the lines from his songs 'the moon is high and so am I' and 'here I sit high getting ideas...' was just another way of saying happy or perhaps drunk, the truth is, Roger was probably high. Something I didn't even think happened at that time period. Afterall, Roger was super clean cut plus he was considered "country".
I'm a singer/songwriter too and I did a concert a few weeks back and a lady came up to me afterwards to share a story that she saw Roger in concert in Vegas and said the same thing - that he was drunk: again not drunk. His friends told me Roger never drunk. At that show she said she felt sad for him because the theatre was almost empty, he was forgetting words and the crowd was booing him. She told me he ended up singing a few of the hits and cut the show really short. She said it always stuck with her because just a few years earlier, Roger was the biggest thing.
I guess it depended when you saw Roger as to what your experience was. For 99% of the people I've met who saw him always say it was one of the best shows they've ever seen. For the bits of concerts I've seen/heard (on tape) where he was somewhat ripped, I thought he was even wittier and interesting because he would do really crazy things with his voice and his jokes were unreal. That's one of the reasons I find him so fascinating, he was talented on so many levels. I can honestly say I've never heard a bad performance from Roger live or from the studio. If I could be as good as Roger at his worst, I think people would actually know my music.
Again, thanks for sharing, looking forward to hearing more!
It's interesting to find out that Roger wasn't drunk. At the time, the late 60s, it was every parent's fear that their kids would listen to rock and roll and be lured into the drug culture.
Country music had a much more wholesome reputation. Although drinking was acceptable, drugs were not. Country fans were different from the hippies because the hippies did drugs. A natural enmity developed between the straight country fans and the drug-addled rock fans, as evidenced in these lyrics:
We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee;
We don't take our trips on LSD
We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin' right, and bein' free.
It's ironic that the country stars were as heavy into drugs as the rockers, without the country fans really being aware of it.