“We did the arrangements of songs like ‘Southern Streamline’, but they didn’t sound like they do now,” he said. “They just weren’t kicking me in the rear-end like I knew they should. But the problem was only partly the other musicians. The other part was myself. It all came down to a promise I made with myself when I was 14 — that I’d grow up and be a really good musician and make great records like Elvis and Chet Atkins and Duane Eddy and James Burton. Then, when success happened with CCR, I got lazy and didn’t progress, and now it was 1992 and I’d promised to be like these other people and I wasn’t. So how could I expect others to be in my band and be that good, when I wasn’t? But it’s only in the last six months that I’ve begun to realize this.”
Fogerty eventually found musicians he was more in tune with, while he himself played guitars, Irish bouzouki, Farfisa organ, tambourine, lap steel, electric sitar, mandolin, and, most significantly, dobro, which he learned to play for the song “A Hundred And Ten In The Shade,” a cottonfield holler accompanied vocally by venerable black gospel quartet the Fairfield Four. “I wrote it shortly after I started recording,” Fogerty recalled, “but I thought it needed a bottleneck guitar, so I feverishly practiced bottleneck guitar for a year every morning before the sessions. Then I got good enough, but realized that wasn’t the sound I had in my mind after all! That sound was the dobro. So I had to learn to play the dobro — and that became the whole key to everything.”
Ironically, Fogerty is holding a dobro on the cover of CCR’s 1969 album Green River, and he actually played a tiny dobro lick on “Looking Out My Back Door” before setting the instrument down for the next quarter-century. Then, in 1993, he attended a vintage guitar show and bought a dobro after hearing it played and realizing its sound was the one he wanted on “A Hundred And Ten In The Shade.” “I became obsessed to where it became my mistress for the next three years; just ask my wife!” Fogerty admitted. “But I got better and better, to where it became my personal vehicle to another universe and dimension, and in the course of my dobro-ing, I discovered other great players like Josh Graves and Brother Oswald, and even rediscovered Merle Haggard, whose Jimmie Rodgers album James Burton played dobro on.
“So the dobro actually kicked open the doors to my becoming the guy I promised myself I would be. I started practicing dobro six to eight hours a day, and after two years I started to get good. But it also put me on the track of getting my guitar playing together, because after I saw what I could do with a dobro, I figured, why not do it with the guitar and finally pick up my 14-year-old gauntlet. So I spent a lot of time playing, and I hope this record is testament to it.”
Indeed, the playing on Blue Moon Swamp sounds great — though sound is but one of four concerns for Fogerty in making a record. “A great rock record must have four great things,” he declared. “They are, in order: a great title, like ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ or ‘Bad Moon Rising’; great sound; a great song; and a great guitar lick.”
Fogerty has always been a “very guitar riff-oriented fellow,” he confesses, and great guitar licks expectedly abound on Blue Moon Swamp. “Southern Streamline,” for instance, mixes Fogerty’s rock guitar licks with lap steel turns right out of Bob Wills. The guitar work on “Blueboy” seems to return the “Proud Mary” favor to Ike Turner, though Fogerty also admittedly salutes Pop Staples’ stylings and especially Slim Harpo’s chicken-scratchiness. The bottleneck licks on “Bring It Down To Jelly Roll” are immediate classics, while “Blue Moon Nights,” a beautifully played country tune, features both an old Johnny Cash bass rhythm and the Chet Atkins picking that again takes Fogerty back to his pledge as a 14-year-old.
But his ever-outstanding musicianship is predictable; the surprise is his expanded vocal command. Sure, he still sings blacker than Jagger, maybe even Burdon, but his voice now seems more shaded, romantically, on the Appalachian/Celtic-flavored “Joy Of My Life,” the first love song he’s ever written. And on the midtempo, self-affirming rocker “Hot Rod Heart,” his singing is almost sweetly sentimental — though even here he can’t restrain his unbridled rock ‘n’ roll joy after the final chorus, when he tries to say something intelligible and instead dissolves into “dooba dabba, dooba dabba, hey hey!” In other words, there’s still plenty of Creedence in these here tracks.
“Swamp River Days,” Fogerty noted, is probably the album’s “most Creedence-y sounding song, because it brings out the swamp-rock side of me that became Creedence. Of course, it all sounds ‘Creedence-y’ to a certain extent, because it’s me writing the songs. But if every song related directly to a Creedence Clearwater Revival song, I’d feel pretty bad, because that would mean I’m not going anywhere.
“But I’ve gone way beyond that level in finding the depth of myself — soul deep, right dead on that center spot. I don’t think the guy in Creedence 25 years ago was capable of doing the guitar solo in ‘Blueboy’, or singing with the control I have now, instead of being rushed with CCR and doing only two or three takes and then choosing one for radio. With both my voice and guitar playing, I’ve now had the time to see what I can really do.”
Fogerty doesn’t mean to slight his past accomplishments. He made piece with his CCR legacy on July 4, 1987, when he played for a Vietnam veterans’ “welcome home” benefit and realized he was only hurting his fans by not playing the Creedence hits. He has since played them again at benefit appearances, including a thrilling 90-minute show in 1994 at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, at which Ike Turner was spotted teaching his new Tina-less Ikettes the right dance steps.
Fogerty is now looking forward to his first full concert tour in many years and has so far signed up guitarists Greg Leisz and Johnny Lee Schell, along with Blue Moon Swamp participants Bob Glaub on bass and Kenny Aronoff on drums. Meanwhile, he’s well aware of the impact he’s had on modern-day players such as Bob Woodruff, whose cover of Fogerty’s “Almost Saturday Night” leads off his new album Desire Road and is its first single.
“I’m a fan, too, and I’m much more like the young guys who like me than they’d probably think,” said Fogerty, who cited Mercury Nashville signee Brent Mason as a current favorite and added that he was looking forward to listening to his recently obtained copy of BR5-49’s new disc. “I dig cool stuff and reject big-money formulas just like anybody else that’s got a brain.”
But on the eve of the relaese of Blue Moon Swamp, Fogerty is also aware that his fans have always held him in a special place — a place where he now feels comfortable.
“In terms of consistent product over the years, I know I haven’t had the normal storyline career like Eric Clapton or Sting — or even Barry Manilow!” he said. “Mine’s been more zig-zag, but the outside world doesn’t understand the extent to which my legal problems affected me. Now I think I have a record that shows my fans that I’ve arrived at the place they’ve always wanted me to be in. I feel like a long time ago, when the world first heard about me, I made a pact with my fans not to be a big mess — to do my best and not bleed over them, show my wounds, or make a terrible record and expect them to go for it. That’s why there have been so few records, because I can’t put out records when I’m not feeling right about it. And my fans expect something of me, a certain level of quality and effort.
“I don’t know if I’d say I was hard on myself, just particular — very particular. Very particular and demanding, and, in the case of this record, I’ve never shown more of myself in my life. So it was very important to do a good job, because I’m relying on it to show everyone where I am in my life and career — that it’s okay even at my age to learn new things and get better instead of closing all the doors.”
