REVIEW
John Fogerty
When: Saturday
Where: Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre
John Fogerty focused on one specific “extraordinary year” for his Saturday night concert at Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre: 1969.
Not a bad idea. It’s a pretty substantial 12 months where rock ’n’ roll is concerned, especially for the one-time Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman. His former group released three iconic albums in 1969 — Bayou Country, Green River and Willy and the Poor Boys — on which some of CCR’s best songs were included.
Fogerty, 69, played vast majority of them on Saturday, including Proud Mary, Bad Moon Rising, Lodi, Down on the Corner and Fortunate Son. But as good as those songs have always been — and were on this night — Fogerty knows better than to rely on just the hits in 2014.
He can ease his way around a set-list by this point, no doubt, so he put a mix of rare gems, solo classics, cover songs, and B-side nuggets into play during a thrilling return to Victoria. It was, simply put, a genius move.
In what was his fourth local appearance in under a decade, Fogerty could have phoned it in.
And perhaps some of the songs, Centerfield being one, left him with little room to improvise. But with one of the most distinguished catalogues in rock music history, he had plenty of directions in which to turn on Saturday. As a result, his forays into the long forgotten past of CCR often uncovered some beacons of light amid the Top 40 gloss.
One of the best was Keep On Chooglin’, on which Fogerty dropped some substantial harmonica work. The tune from Bayou Country also featured some heavy lifting from drummer Kenny Aronoff, one of the best in the business and the unsung hero on this night. Simply put, his drumming was like a jackhammer.
There’s no point in trying to scoop any shine from Fogerty, so Aronoff didn’t even try.
This was a Saturday night, after all, which is peak hours of operation for Fogerty. He could do no wrong when settled comfortably into his office and delivered a raucous take — delivered from a satellite stage surrounded by over-zealous fans — on the Gary U.S. Bonds classic, New Orleans.
On paper, that tune is a longshot, with a high bathroom-break probability. But the execution was peerless and damn near perfect. Easily one of the highlights of the night.
Fogerty always worked in complete wholes, not individual pieces, which is why the albums the released under the CCR banner almost always were front-to-back masterpieces (I say almost always because the band’s final kick at the can, Mardi Gras, was so-so). With that depth of material as the wind beneath his wings, he put an emphatic foot forward in the best bands of the 1960s discussion with this concert, and his lesser-played highlights of the CCR catalogue — Ramble Tamble being one of who knows how many — served as his firepower in that argument on Saturday.
The Rolling Stones would have a hard time matching CCR in terms of depth of catalogue.
What’s more, here’s the worst-kept secret where Fogerty is concerned. When people think of the San Francisco native, they think of his voice, his songwriting or perhaps even his checkered shirts. His guitar playing, however, deserves the highest mention. Fogerty proved his worth as a top-tier shredder on Susie Q, which closed with a string-bending showcase that lasted for minutes. He did something similar on both Lodi, which was re-imagined into a bluesy jam, and the chug-a-lug classic Commotion.
Fans may tire of hearing some CCR classics at this late stage, but if you’re ever on the fence about a Fogerty concert, go forward without hesitation. If only for the deep cuts. They are things of fierce beauty.
The concert was sold out, with an attendance of 6,283.
