FOGERTY’S GREATNESS RISES ABOVE GLITCHES
Former CCR leader plays the best rock radio playlist ever with aplomb, writes Mike Bell
Sometimes you don’t need a hook.
Sometimes it can and should just speak for itself. Loudly. Clearly. Concisely. Unequivocally.
The last time the legendary John Fogerty rolled through Calgary it was on his One Extraordinary Year Tour in 2014.
The hook? It was to celebrate the year 1969, when the band he fronted back at the time, Creedence Clearwater Revival, released three irrefutably classic albums — Bayou Country, Green River and Willy and the Poor Boys — that helped secure them a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
It was a spectacular show, with songs from those albums and stories from that time powering the evening to a memorable conclusion.
This time through town, his Friday night show at the Saddledome? It was part of the Rollin’ On the River Tour.
Sure. Why not. It’s a reference to a CCR song, Proud Mary, from that same time and from that ’69 release Bayou Country, and would also later be the title of a hits album from the band.
And? Who the hell cares. It mattered not a whit, made not a difference, affected not at all the outcome, which was almost the same as that last time.
The reason is that he came supplied with most of those same remarkable songs, that same astounding musicianship and a deep, deep well of energy that made all who watched the 71-year-old Fogerty feel nothing short of awe.
Taking the stage to his five-piece backup band already getting in gear, the blue plaid-cladded Fogerty kicked off the night with the fitting Travelin’ Band and then proceeded to put on a show that, yes, concisely and unequivocally displayed how remarkable he and his gifts as a songwriter, guitarist and entertainer truly are. Loudly and clearly?
No. That was actually the biggest difference between then and now, with this particular evening with Fogerty and his band suffering from some utterly atrocious sound, at least from this point of view and for the first half of the show.
It improved almost an hour in, but were the songs not so familiar, it may have been something of a problem to even differentiate between them for that first act.
And the much fewer stories he told this time out were also barely audible, the bellowing dudes among the disappointing 5,000 or so fans far outshouting him and his muddy mic.
Still, his musicianship and that material somehow managed to overcome that. Greatness often does, has the ability to be heard above mediocrity, shine through the murk and muck.
The rest of the night saw him plunder that aforementioned past with aplomb, mowing his way expertly through Creedence tunes such as Green River, Born on the Bayou, Who’ll Stop the Rain, Lookin’ Out My Back Door, Run Through the Jungle, Midnight Special, Lodi, the rousing communal singalong Have You Ever Seen the Rain?, Down on the Corner, Fortunate Son, encore tunes Bad Moon Rising and, yes, Proud Mary … and if this sounds like the best classic rock radio playlist ever, yeah, yeah it is and was.
Fogerty belted the tunes out, played the living rickets out of his guitar — that’s not actually a phrase, but it is now — and his spectacular band backed him up and filled it right the hell out remarkably, as evidenced by a show-stopping version of I Heard It Through the Grapevine, the sensationally spacey, psych country-rock jam on Cosmo’s Factory number Ramble Tamble and a gnarly, nasty, bootfillin’ Keep On Chooglin’.
As for non-CCR stuff, yes, there was some of that, although you had to wait almost half an hour to hear Hot Rod Heart, which was followed a good 20 or more minutes later with a couple others from his Grammy-winning ’97 solo outing Blue Moon Swamp including a rump-stomping version of Southern Streamline, and, near the end of the evening, of course, ’84 Cooperstown hit Centerfield.
And his glorious cover of Gary U.S. Bonds’ New Orleans had so much freak, funk and mud on it that it was difficult not to think you were lungs deep in the thick of a Louisiana swamp. Ready to be caught. Reeled in. And gutted by greatness. There. There’s your hook. Not like you needed one.