John Fogerty: Bad Moon Rises on a Late Summer Eve

SARATOGA SPRINGS - John Fogerty may have written the songs of your father's generation of rock 'n' roll, but from the opening volley of 'Travelin' Band' to the slash-and-burn encores 'Bad Moon Rising' and 'Proud Mary,' the 61-year-old rocker performed with a jubilant intensity at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Sunday night that would shame performers one-third his age.

Most of the tunes in Fogerty's two-hour set were culled from his songwriting days as the leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival. There is a certain timelessness in his lyrical themes however, that ensured this was no oldies revue.

Backed by a five-man band, there was ferocity in the anthem-like 'Fortunate Son,' a gritty swamp boogie to 'Born on the Bayou.' Fogerty strapped on an acoustic guitar to spin meteorological metaphors in 'Who'll Stop the Rain' and 'Have You Ever Seen Rain,' then slung back on his electric resonator to launch into a series of hits that included 'Down On The Corner,' 'Lodi,' and 'Up Around the Bend.'

Fogerty is of the so-called Woodstock Generation - CCR performed on the second day of the 1969 festival - and he alluded to it in distant terms. 'Woodstock. Isn't that around here somewhere?' he asked, then recalled his memories of playing in what he called a muddy cow patch in front of a lot of naked people.

He briefly dipped into his 1980s songbook, most notably with the crowd pleasing version of 'Centerfield,' which Fogerty performed on a guitar molded into the shape of a baseball bat.

There were renditions of the popular cover songs 'I Heard it Through the Grapevine,' and 'The Midnight Special,' but the evening's most memorable moment came with a recently-penned tune called 'Déjà Vu.'

'I can see many of you are too young to remember Vietnam,' announced Fogerty, surveying the crowd of more than 10,000.

'See, I was in the Army myself in those days and I could see the way politicians manipulated people. I hate to say it, but we're going through the same damn thing all over again,' he said, introducing the melancholy ballad. Then he strummed his guitar, alone on the stark stage as a video screen played images of a country burying the flag-draped coffins of its young and those of a generation later, etching the names of its dead from the Memorial Wall.

Fogerty was joined by Willie Nelson for a duet on the Hank Williams tune 'Jambalaya.' Nelson performed an hour long set of his own earlier in the evening. Wearing a bandana and with his long braided hair slung across his torso, Nelson noodled on his guitar through the hits 'On The Road Again,' 'Always on My Mind,' and performed one particularly polka-like toe-tapping version of 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken' that sounded as if it would find a happy home in VFW halls across the country.

by Thomas Dimopoulos
"Fogerty Rocks SPAC," The Saratogian, Aug. 8, 2006