Just got back from lovely Costa Rica, and let me tell you this—they sure play a lot of Latin American music down there in Latin America. It was downright disturbing, at least to this Ugly American, who needs rock and roll to function but wasn’t hearing it anywhere.
Well, that’s not exactly true. As I was making my torturous way north on nerve-wracking Highway 1 over the mountains between capital city San Jose and the city of Liberia (four-and-a-half hours to go 133 miles!), turning the radio dial of my Chinese SUV from end to end and getting nothing but nothing, I pleaded to the God of the mountains to throw me some good old American rock and roll. And for my sins the God of the mountains, and I’m not making this up, gave me James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend.” Be careful what you pray for.
But things began to look up when I reached my destination, the beach town of Playas del Coco on the country’s Pacific coast. The second night there I happened upon a band of aging hippie gringos playing an enthusiastically inept version of John (pre-Mellencamp) Cougar’s “Hurts So Good” at an open air bar on the main strip. I love bad cover bands—butcher a song and I will love you forever. And things got even better—my new favorite coffeeshop—the only reason I go to exotic places is to sit in coffeehouses—played Creedence Clearwater Revival, a lot, along with plenty of live Elvis from the late sixties and early seventies.
Anyway, that steady diet of Creedence and cappuccinos may just have saved my life. It helped me to forget that I was a non-drinker in a drinking beach town who doesn’t fish, surf, snorkel, kayak, sunbathe, scuba dive, ride horses on the beach (I’m not crazy!), or go on tours into the wilds to be torn to pieces by adorable sloths (pacifists my ass!). Hell, I can’t even swim. It also helped me to forget that it was so hot that the ubiquitous vultures to be found walking the streets or talking romantic walks on the beach seemed to be looking not for carrion but for air conditioning.
Creedence Clearwater Revival were the quintessential American band. John Fogerty was writing American myths—like the Band, only more stripped down, and more apocalyptic as well. The irony of 2019’s Live at Woodstock is that Creedence Clearwater Revival didn’t truck in peace—they were peddling bad moons rising, bad juju, and rain falling from a clear blue sky. Fogerty was a prophet of doom and full of sound advice: don’t go out at night because it’s bound to take your life, and when you’re running through the jungle, don’t look back. The sloths could be gaining on you.
Live at Woodstock is an astoundingly good document—Creedence sounds rawer than they ever did on record, Fogerty’s foghorn voice is a force of nature, and when the band cuts loose they didn’t do what just about everybody else was doing at the time—namely slowing things to a halt to do a jive bit where the lead singer says things like “We’ve got to get together, brothers and sisters” and “Put your hands together” and “Eddie’s gonna play a half-hour drum solo now” and “Right on!” Instead they did the truly righteous thing and cooked, choogled, boogied, and took you on a REAL run through the jungle.
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s tenure was a short one (1968–72), but during that time they released an astounding fourteen consecutive top ten singles. I’ve always thought of them as the template for Tom Petty—they produced deceptively simple but utterly undeniable songs that sounded great on the radio while making no concessions whatsoever. Come Woodstock they’d released three of the seven studio albums in their discography, and you won’t hear any of the greats from 1969’s Willy and the Hand Jive or (their pinnacle) Cosmo’s Factory. On the positive side, you won’t hear anything from the two disappointing albums they went out on, 1970’s Pendulum or 1972’s Mardi Gras.
What you will hear are eleven high-voltage songs, four of them covers they more than made their own. They open with “Born on the Bayou,” the song that established them as the best swamp rockers in the biz. Why you’d never know they hailed from El Cerrito in the San Francisco Bay area and had never come close to French-kissing a gator. This version rocks harder, and is more bass and feedback friendly than the album version; the band chases down a hoodoo while Fogarty doesn’t so much growl as rumble. Funny how “Green River” sounds ominous despite its idyllic childhood subject matter. The riff has real menace, and Fogarty certainly doesn’t sound happy go lucky, as he does on, say, “Down on the Corner” or “Lookin’ Out My Back Door.” And the stinging guitar riffs he plays over the rumbling rhythm section don’t bring me back to my childhood.
CCR’s cover of Steve Cropper and Wilson Pickett’s “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do)” is R&B encased in swamp mud. Fogarty’s vocals are electrifying–in his own way he was as much a force of nature as Joplin and Cocker, and he’s all bayou and no bullshit on this one. The band funks it up, then there’s this very brief drum breakdown followed by a short but furious jam, with Fogerty playing a stinging solo before bringing it back around. Up next is dark horse “Bootleg,” a bare-bones boogie that chug-a-lugs along while Fogerty plays short stabbing flurry of notes over and over and sings, “Take you a glass of water/Make it against the law/See how good the water tastes/When you can’t have any at all.”
On the kick-ass “Commotion” Fogerty sides with the “goin’ to the country” hippie crowd and parts ways with the Velvet Underground by singing about how city living is a drag, although he doesn’t give you the idea he’s going to do something crazy like join a commune outside Woodstock to grow root vegetables. He’d probably retreat with his trusty baying hound dog to a shack on stilts on the bayou and go fishing. Musically the song cooks—Fogerty initiates things with some sizzling guitar, then the band lays some bass-heavy monster rock on ya. The damn song has heft, but the mighty bottom doesn’t slow the proceedings–this one’s an 18-wheeler heading downhill, with Fogerty’s guitar shooting sparks all the way.
Meanwhile, “Bad Moon Rising” is the catchiest damn song about biblical doom to ever almost (it peaked at No. 2) top the pop charts—Fogerty’s more tent show revivalist preacher than rock star, except he’s not promising salvation—just warning you to stay in the house and lock the doors, cuz some seriously dark shit is about to come down and Jesus ain’t going to help you.
Creedence make an abrupt shift from American apocalypse to American myth, Huckleberry Finn-style, on “Proud Mary.” Fogerty’s as anti-city as ever, but things are different on a big paddle-wheelin’ riverboat queen. Forget Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man; “people on the river are happy to give.” The big opening is an American myth in and of itself, and you can can practically feel the chop of the Mississippi River as the song makes its inexorable way south to the promised land.
The spooky slow midnight blues vamp of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” is spellbinding indeed; Fogerty’s voice could probably have been heard in New York City, and the band wastes no time in letting loose in a jam on which Fogerty goes feral on guitar, going from droning feedback to frenzied flurries of notes and in general saying fare-thee-well to the restraint that characterized most of their songs. The difference between Fogerty and the Band’s Robbie Robertson is this: Robertson, who could play like a demon, almost never did, either on record or live, while Fogerty was more gracious on both fronts. He wasn’t about to let Creedence’s characteristic restraint stop him from letting rip now and again.
CCR’s cover of Ray Charles’ cover of Nappy Brown’s 1957 R&B classic “Night Time Is the Right Time” could just be the highlight of the album. Fogerty sinks his teeth into the vocals, goes Foghorn Leghorn on ‘em even, while the band tosses in on backing vocals and Fogerty plays some truly vicious guitar. This baby is all rambunctious jump and shout, and just when you think things can’t get any tastier Fogerty launches into a guitar solo that is no-frills, push you down the road, brilliant.
And Creedence follows it up with the boogie rave-up “Keep on Chooglin’.” Any question of what big John means by “chooglin’” goes out the window when he proceeds to do just that, with a guitar solo that is part Louisiana hot sauce and part feedback storm, after which he picks up the harmonica and plays it rightways, sideways, and upside down over a beat as remorseless as Vietnam. The song’s an exercise in brutality, and demonstrates that Neil Young and Crazy Horse weren’t the only posse out there in love with noise for noise’s sake.
And talk about chooglin’, Creedence Clearwater Revival end their set with a long and cooking cover of Dale Hawkins’ 1957 rockabilly standard “Suzie Q.” It has a slinky groove, and over the course of its almost eleven minutes Fogerty engages in some truly over-the-top guitar play. There’s feedback galore, he doubles back on himself and tosses in some big power chords, and when he isn’t shredding or lighting things on fire the band is shoveling coal into the engine in the boiler room. This IS the finest foray into free-form mayhem this side of Crazy Horse, and it gives the lie to a complaint frequently leveled at the band—namely that, like the Band again, they tended to hew to note for note reproductions of their studio recordings when playing live.
Live at Woodstock captures a great American band at the height of their powers, and the pity is that some three years later the band would be history, the victim of Fogerty’s agreeing to let the other members write and sing some of their own songs. The result was 1972’s Mardi Gras, which—duh—suffered from the fact that Fogerty wrote and sang on less than half of its songs. And to make matters worse, Fogerty—after releasing a couple of solo albums—would cease to make music (legal hassles with Fantasy Records) for a decade, only to return with the execrable single that has him begging “put me in coach, I’m ready to play.” Not on my team, bucko.
But what really matters is the body of remarkable American music that Creedence Clearwater Revival bequeathed us. Like the Grateful Dead and the Band, CCR mythologized America, but unlike the Band, Creedence didn’t ignore the dark clouds on the horizon. There are even darker clouds on the horizon now, and a bad moon is definitely rising, which is one of the reasons I went to Costa Rica—I want out. You know the old saying: America, love it or leave it. Well, I suspect I’ll be leaving it. But I’m taking Creedence Clearwater Revival with me.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
