John Fogerty started his Monday night show at Pier Six Pavilion with archival footage of the then-24-year-old Creedence Clearwater Revival leader singing "Born on the Bayou" in his distinctive howl. Then the 70-year-old man strode out into 2015, picking up the vocal in that remarkable voice that's seemingly unchanged. On a hot and humid night, the effect brought chills.
Fogerty's theme this summer is 1969, the year in which Creedence released three albums, unleashed some of their best-loved songs – "Proud Mary," "Fortunate Son," "Bad Moon Rising," "Down on the Corner" – and played Woodstock. The show started with a 15-minute film of Fogerty reminiscing about the era, with footage from protests and demonstrations, the Vietnam War and the moon landing. Between songs, he told stories about growing up, his guitars and playing Woodstock.
But it was that charismatic voice, familiar from two dozen hits and nearly 50 years of airplay, that was the star of the two-and-a-half-hour performance before the packed pavilion.
The show was at its best when Fogerty tore joyfully through his prodigious songbook, pummeling the crowd with his two- and three-minute blasts of pop genius: "Travelin' Band," "Up Around the Bend," "Sweet Hitch-Hiker," and on and on. He's one of the few artists who can fill an entire show with genuine hits; the setlist would have been familiar to even a casual listener of classic-rock radio.
It was a night for nostalgia. Fogerty wrote some of the great protest songs of the 1960s – "Fortunate Son," "Bad Moon Rising," "Who'll Stop the Rain," "Run Through the Jungle" – and the timelessness of the images and archetypes he used makes them broadly applicable to any era of strife. But the footage that played behind him was of Vietnam and its opponents, not of the long wars of the last decade and a half, the Black Lives Matter movement or any other issue occupying the country at the moment.
Musically, the only recent number was "Mystic Highway" from 2013 – and he said he'd been working on it for 30 years. Going backward, he then played a couple of songs from 1997's "Blue Moon Swamp," a couple from 1985's "Centerfield" and the rest was Creedence. Fogerty had much to say about the state of the world in 1969; one wonders what he has to say now.
As a guitarist, Fogerty has helped to develop several roots styles: blues, swamp rock, the twangy rockabilly licks known as chicken pickin'. In recent years, he has worked to expand his palette. He opened "Keep on Chooglin'" with some Eddie Van Halen-style dive-bombing, tapping shred (and on a made-in-Maryland Paul Reed Smith guitar). An entertaining departure for the moment, but it also fed the least successful element of the show: the overlong jams on "Keep on Chooglin'," "Ramble Tamble," "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" and others. For every minute of interesting interplay between Fogerty and his band on these passages, there were three of repetitive, generic blues rock soloing.
After each such digression, the return to the three-minute single – "Hey Tonight" after "Keep on Chooglin'," "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" after "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" – came as a relief.
Fogerty delivered a nice passage in the middle of the show, putting down his guitar to sit behind a piano and describe some of the music that excited him as a youngster in the Bay Area. He played credible excerpts from Jerry Lee Lewis' "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and Huey "Piano" Smith's "Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu" before launching an elegiac read of his own "As Long as I Can See the Light."
Other highlights included a singalong of Gary U.S. Bonds' "New Orleans," an especially gospelly "Midnight Special," and the throbbing swamp of "Green River" and "The Old Man Down the Road."
Setlist
Born on the Bayou
Travelin' Band
Suzy Q
Up Around the Bend
Who'll Stop the Rain
Lookin' Out My Back Door
Sweet Hitch-Hiker
Joy of My Life
Midnight Special
Keep on Chooglin'
Hey Tonight
New Orleans
Lodi
Green River
Mystic Highway
Hot Rod Heart
Ramble Tamble
Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On
Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu
As Long as I Can See the Light
I Heard it Through the Grapevine
Have You Ever Seen the Rain?
Down on the Corner
Centerfield
The Old Man Down the Road
Fortunate Son
Bad Moon Rising
Proud Mary