John Fogerty – Double fantasy
Yet, even after his reconciliation with the label that embroiled him in legal action (for thinly veiled attacks such as “Zanz Kant Danz” and “Mr. Greed”, and for allegedly plagiarizing his own “Run Through The Jungle” on “The Old Man Down The Road”), Fogerty’s resentment toward his former bandmates remains strong.
He refused to reunite with Creedence for the band’s 1993 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and tried unsuccessfully to prevent them from performing the music he wrote as Creedence Clearwater Revisited (which Cook and Clifford decided to launch when Fogerty was himself refusing to perform Creedence songs). In an open letter to fans, Cook and Clifford insisted that, in terms of live performance, Revisited was “better than any band we have ever played in.”
“There was a lot of betrayal, and I feel no need to make music with my former bandmates,” he says. “There were many, many issues that were put in motion, things that are yet unresolved. To some fans and certainly some businessmen a reunion would be attractive, but my brain says I’d be miserable.”
Though Fogerty as songwriter considers his work all of a piece, he doesn’t discount the contributions his bandmates made to the Creedence sound. “The basic core was a four-piece band playing together in a studio, and that was the charm of that music,” he says. “More important than our shortcomings was our strength as a band. We might be playing a simple thing, but that simple thing was life and death to us.”
In his speech inducting the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen (whose manager, Jon Landau, had written that scathing assessment of Mardi Gras), said that, “Creedence never got the respect they deserved….They committed the sin of being too popular when hipness was all. They played no-frills, American music for the people. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, they weren’t the hippest band in the world, just the best.”
I experienced a similar epiphany at a 1997 Austin performance. Most of the thousands of concerts I’ve attended blur in memory, but I could never forget one as thrilling and triumphant as John Fogerty’s at the Austin Music Hall. He and a powerhouse band reclaimed the Creedence classics that Fogerty had all but forsaken a quarter-century ago, opening with “Born On The Bayou”, following with “Green River”, closing two and a half hours later with “Fortunate Son”.
It wasn’t Creedence. It was better. Creedence sets of the late ’60s and early ’70s had typically lasted less than an hour — typical for the times. Though the rhythm section of Clifford and Cook had been integral to the music, the new band, powered by Kenny Aronoff, long the drummer for John Mellencamp and still with Fogerty through Revival, propelled the interplay in a manner that allowed Fogerty not merely to recall former glories, but to renew this music. And within the context of the classics, the solo material he cherry-picked for the set held its own. This wasn’t a blast from the past; this was confirmation that John Fogerty’s music was timeless, ageless, that there wasn’t a whiff of nostalgia emanating from it.
As much as the musical bedrock of Revival recalls Creedence, the strength of the album is the way it extends that all-American legacy. Except for Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and perhaps Paul Simon, there isn’t another rock artist who hit a creative peak in the 1960s from whom the audience can expect something more than an exercise in nostalgia. Paul McCartney? The Rolling Stones? The Who? Van Morrison? Who else is left? With rare exception, the best that we get from them now is a reminder of how great they were then.
The range and depth of Revival not only impress but surprise. It’s as if Fogerty has intuitively tapped into something at his artistic core rather than trying to retrace a musical blueprint. With Benmont Tench of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers providing the gospel bedrock that Julia, Maxine and Oren Waters reinforce with their harmonies, “River Is Waiting” sounds more like classic Paul Simon than classic Creedence, yet it ranks with the very best of Fogerty’s music.
Similarly, “Summer Of Love” finds Fogerty channeling the Eric Clapton of Cream (drawing particularly from “Sunshine Of Your Love” and “White Room”), evoking both a sound and an era that Creedence had never associated itself with at the time. An artist who works from calculation couldn’t have recorded this, but it’s recognizably the work of a guitarist who proceeds by tone, feel and instinct.
“Long Dark Night” reminds that there has been a political edge to Fogerty’s work since “Fortunate Son”, yet the specifics of the song show a frustration that is completely contemporary. As a participant in MoveOn’s “Rock the Vote” concerts in 2004, Fogerty’s opposition to the Bush regime predates many of the specifics mentioned in the song, which predicts that the fallout could last well beyond the next election.
“Tell me to stop when my political rant goes on too long, but I’m pretty passionate about my beliefs,” he says. “I thought ‘Long Dark Night’ was a pretty cool phrase, but without explaining who I was talking about, it would be too vague. It’s not one thing in my mind with this current administration, which as been breaking down freedoms and tenets of the Constitution as kind of a concerted plan. There’s Iraq, but there are plenty of more messes, and we’re going to be left to deal with the residue long after Bush is gone. And that’s the ‘Long Dark Night’.”
Yet “Gunslinger” employs the sort of metaphor favored by George Bush (a big fan of Fogerty’s “Centerfield”), with its evocation of the dead-or-alive moral code of the Old West. As with Creedence’s “Don’t Look Now (It Ain’t You Or Me)”, Fogerty maintains that there is plenty of blame to go around, and that the “gunslinger, somebody tough to tame this town,” might want to start with the Democrats in Congress who have given the authorization for continued involvement in Iraq.
“It’s no secret that I vote Democratic, but there’s been too much shutting up and going with the flow where they ought to stand up,” he says. “It isn’t just the people on the right. There’s plenty of blame to go around. I was strumming away and singing nonsense consonants, and all of a sudden, ‘I think we need a gunslinger’ popped into my head. I thought, wow, cool. ‘Somebody tough to tame this town.’ Because things are out of control. It’s like when your father comes home from work, and the two boys are fighting, and your father administers the word.”
With Revival, Fogerty’s music sounds as fresh as today’s headlines and as timeless as classic Creedence. Maybe the decades of trial and error, the retreats from the spotlight and public attention, have allowed him to reconnect with his best instincts when so many who have remained on the commercial grind have found themselves ground down. Of course, the commercial grind isn’t as arduous as it was in Creedence’s heyday, but Fogerty feels that if right now he had to turn around and record another album as inspired as Revival, he could.
“There were all those years when I basically didn’t have the muse,” he says. “But right now, I feel like I could do it all over again.”
ND senior editor Don McLeese saw Bo Diddley open for Creedence at a Chicago concert in the early 1970s.