The Old Man Down The Road
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John Fogerty fronted the best American band of the 1960's. (You could make a really good case for Sly and the Family Stone, but otherwise, there's not really any serious competition. The Band? When you can't fill a greatest hits album with good songs, you're in trouble. The Byrds? Cloying! The Grateful Dead? Are you high? Actually, I suppose if you think the Dead are the best American band of the 60's, it's very likely that you actually are high, or that you soon will be. Enjoy!)This being the case, it's difficult to judge a new John Fogerty album without measuring it against his amazing body of work with CCR. That would be pretty unfair, but here's John pretty much daring us to do that by calling his new album "Revival."Revival is not as good as Willy and the Poor Boys, but it is a damn good record. A surprisingly good record. What's especially gratifying about this is that Fogerty hasn't followed the blueprint for how a legendary artist makes a stab at relevance: get a bunch of younger guest stars with more fans and less talent than you, mix until platinum. Instead, he's just come out alone and made a John Fogerty record.It starts inauspiciously with a rather tepid song called "Don't You Wish It Was True." Aha, I thought upon hearing this. Like so many of his peers, Fogerty is content to slide into a comfortable senescence and release pleasant, forgettable music from time to time. (Well, Van Morrison has slid into grumpy senescence, but you know what I mean.)Fortunately, the rest of the record dispels this impression pretty quickly. Fogerty uncorks some top-notch country songs: "River is Waiting" is the kind of beautiful song we shouldn't be surprised to hear from the guy who gave us "Lodi" and "Wrote a Song For Everyone." Even "Broken Down Cowboy" is a fantastic song, and I am predisposed to hate songs comparing singers to cowboys, having been damaged in my youth by "Desperado" and "Wanted Dead or Alive." I guess I shouldn't be surprised to find angry, rockin' commentary on the current political situation from the guy who wrote "Fortunate Son" (still great, still relevant), but it's a bracing surprise to hear the anti-war, anti-Bush songs "Long Dark Night" (kind of a companion to "Bad Moon Rising") and "I Can't Take it No More." Even "Gunslinger" is a pretty obvious allegory as Fogerty imagines himself in an old west town longing for somebody to show up and set things right.What shocked me about this is not that Fogerty is writing songs like this, it's that he's one of the only people doing it. Where the hell are the younger musicians? Well, that's probably another post, but for right now, Fogerty is back and he's pissed, and it sounds great.You can sing blues and country songs pretty much forever, but a lot of older performers have trouble rocking convincingly. No trouble here. "Longshot" and "Somebody Help Me" and "I Can't Take it No More" all cook like classic Creedence.Revival isn't the complete career reinvention that American Recordings was for Johnny Cash, but it's similarly stunning. Here's a guy that I and probably many other people had long written off coming back strong to remind us that he's not only still here, he's still damn good at what he does.
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