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JOHN FOGERTY - NEW YORK 1997

January 12, 2023 – 7:43 am

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JOHN FOGERTY
New York 1997 [no label, 2CD]
Live at the Hammerstein Ballroom, New York, NY; June 3, 1997. Very good soundboard.

Thanks to geoffgoold for sharing the show at The Traders’ Den.

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Jon Pareles, nytimes.com:

If anything in rock-and-roll is eternal, it’s the primeval twang of a rockabilly guitar. That’s the sound John Fogerty brought to the Hammerstein Ballroom on Monday night in a triumphant two-hour set that was part of his first tour in a decade. His guitar twang and his unmistakable voice - part back-country wail, part alley-cat yowl - carry rock’s heritage of juke joints and honky-tonks, of illicit good times and joyful miscegenation, of electricity coursing through the rural Southland and changing some things forever.

In the late 1960s, when Mr Fogerty put the rockabilly twang back in the Top 10, he was already a musical conservative. He called his band Creedence Clearwater Revival, suggesting a return to the true faith of basic rock-and-roll in an era of psychedelic excess. Some of his songs used time-tested blues imagery to comment on the present; others looked back to the steamboat era and an imagined childhood on the bayou. Nearly three decades later, as rock pulls further away from its roots, most rockabilly seems even more antiquated. Yet for Mr Fogerty, it hasn’t dated at all.

Mr Fogerty stopped playing his Creedence songs in the 1970s, when he lost the rights to them. But he has relented and, at the Hammerstein, he played many of them with gleeful fervor. Paced by the brawny backbeat of Kenny Aronoff on drums, Mr Fogerty matched his old vocal inflections with uncanny faithfulness, and played his signature guitar licks with all their original nerve. His guitar solos unfolded inexorably, in question-and-answer riffs and step-by-step ascents to moaning blue notes. Both songs and solos were pared down so that each phrase clawed forward with a succinct swagger.

He also played most of the songs from his new album, ”Blue Moon Swamp” (Warner Brothers), which leans slightly closer to country music than old Creedence. His obsessions haven’t changed. He loves vintage transportation like trains and big old Buicks. He captured two different kinds of momentum in the chugging ”Southern Streamline” and the droning, pulsing ”Hot Rod Heart.”

He is fascinated by the lore of the South; in the bluesy ”A Hundred and Ten in the Shade,” he evoked the drudgery of planting cotton, while the Fairfield Four, a venerable gospel group, sang deep, loamy harmonies. Among other people’s songs, Mr Fogerty likes tales of betrayal, from ”Before You Accuse Me” to ”I Put a Spell on You” to ”I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” None of his new songs, however, has the apocalyptic overtones of older material from ”Bad Moon Rising” to Mr Fogerty’s 1985 hit, ”The Old Man Down the Road.” Now he’s more earth-bound, enjoying the simpler pleasures of love and locomotion.

While many of Mr Fogerty’s newer songs sound like variations of Creedence songs, in tunes like ”Blueboy” his new riffs have as much rangy spunk as their predecessors. Only one song, ”Walking in a Hurricane,” sounded as if Mr Fogerty has tried to update himself, and it stuck out in a set devoted to lean, classic rock and roll. The music wasn’t nostalgic, just sure of its shape. As he was in the 1960s, Mr Fogerty is still unfashionable, and still indelible.

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Latest: John Fogerty Finally Acquires Rights to His Creedence Clearwater Revival Songs - click here

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Lineage:
SB Dat Master > CD > Soundforge Extraction > CD Wave Editor > Flac

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Disc 1
Track 101. Born On The Bayou 5:40
Track 102. Green River 4:17
Track 103. Lodi 2:03
Track 104. Lookin’ Out My Back Door 3:14
Track 105. Suzie Q 5:35
Track 106. I Put A Spell On You 6:14
Track 107. Bring It Down To Jelly Roll 3:04
Track 108. Southern Streamline 4:30
Track 109. Who’ll Stop The Rain 3:35
Track 110. Midnight Special 4:44
Track 111. A Hundred And Ten In The Shade 6:51
Track 112. Working On A Building 5:02
Track 113. Joy Of My Lfe 4:24
Track 114. Big Train From Memphis 3:37
63 mins

Disc 2
Track 201. Centerfield 4:42
Track 202. Down On The Corner 3:30
Track 203. Intros 1:34
Track 204. Swamp River Days 4:07
Track 205. Hot Rod Heart 4:21
Track 206. Before You Accuse Me 5:23
Track 207. Long As I Can See The Light 5:20
Track 208. Old Man Down The Road 4:50
Track 209. Blue Boy 5:37
Track 210. Walking In A Hurricane 4:52
Track 211. I Heard It Through The Grapevine 5:35
Track 212. Bad Moon Rising 2:27
Track 213. Fortunate Son 3:31
Track 214. Crowd 1:36
Track 215. Proud Mary 4:31
Track 216. Travelin’ Band 0:39
63 mins

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