We’re going to see John Fogerty tonight at the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City. My family isn’t as psyched as me. Creedence Clearwater Revival is one of my favorite bands of all time. But they were only together from 1967 to 1972, when I was less than nine years old. I became a fan later in life. My first real introduction to John Fogerty was when I was in college at Drexel University in West Philly. I lived in a dump at 33rd and Baring Street with two friends in 1985 and 1986. We lived in the bottom two bedroom one bath unit in this three story unit. The neighborhood was iffy. A black dude once came through the bedroom window with a knife on a Sunday afternoon. The MOVE standoff, which had happened a few years before and resulted in the death of a Phila policeman, occurred a block away from our humble abode.
Music always brings me back to a time in my life. John Fogerty released the album Centerfield in 1985. I was 22 years old. I realized that life was good. College is a great time in a guy’s life. I put in the time to keep a 3.7 GPA in accounting, while having plenty of time to play sports with my buddies, go to frat parties, and spend time at our college bars. We were all poor, but you could get drunk on $10 in those days. Our bar was called The Jailhouse. It was connected to Cavanaugh’s Bar. They were located between 31st and 32nd on Market Street. We lived on hot dogs and instant mash potatoes for most of the week, but on Thursdays Cavanaugh’s had an all you could eat buffet for $3 and $2.50 pitchers of beer. Let’s just say we got our money’s worth on Thursdays. Sadly, these bars were knocked down a few years after I graduated and replaced by a university building. You can see from the picture they had real character – also known as college dives.
Intra-mural sports was our main form of recreation in college. It’s a surreal time in a guy’s life. You have no money, no attachments, no real responsibility, and no real stress. You have your friends and a few hours per day of school work. My buddies: Paul, Mac, Jay, Bill, Mike, Peez, Rich, Joe, and few others all loved sports. We formed teams to play intra-mural football, basketball and softball. I was 170 pounds and could run full court games of b-ball for three hours with ease. Those were the days. Studying, music, drinking and not worrying about the future, not in any particular order. It was 1985. The internet was only used by scientist geeks. The Apple Mac had just come on the scene. Virtually no one owned a desktop PC. Laptops didn’t exist. Cell phones didn’t exist. Cable TV only had 100 stations with nothing worth watching. Young people interacted by sitting around and talking. We actually made eye contact and had to verbalize what were thinking.
It was 1985, Reagan’s Morning in America. I voted for the first time in 1984 and bought into the Republican storyline. In retrospect, I was clueless about the world, politics, finance, the Federal Reserve, women, and just about everything. Americans were convinced that the Soviet Union evil empire was still a threat to our security. In reality, they were on the verge of collapse. America had entered the delusionary debt boom that continues to this day. I didn’t care about any of these real world issues. I was living in a bubble. I loved sports, music and hanging with my friends. And that brings me to John Fogerty. Our Intra-mural softball team had a bunch of excellent ball players, with yours truly playing shortstop. Drexel is located between Walnut and Market from 32nd Street to 34th Street. Their ball fields were located at 45th & Market in the heart of the West Philly slums. Low income housing tenements towered over the ball fields. It was a beautiful setting for sports.
In college there are a lot of good athletes. We faced some good competition, but our team was stacked. Over the course of a few weeks we defeated every opponent. We reached the championship game and won a close tense game to be crowned intra-mural school champs. There were no fans to carry us off the field. The only people who knew we were champs were us. We did what all great champions do. We headed for The Jailhouse to celebrate our victory. Ten guys, a dark college bar, $2.50 pitchers of Schmidt’s, and a juke box. John Fogerty had been out of the public eye for about a decade. Then he roared back on the scene with his album Centerfield. The song lends itself to banging on tables and singing the lyrics at the top of your lungs while being very very drunk. The song has one of the best opening riffs of all time. You can’t get the chorus out of your head:
Oh, put me in, Coach – I’m ready to play today;
Put me in, Coach – I’m ready to play today;
Look at me, I can be Centerfield.
As the evening progressed, the empty pitchers piled up on the table. We probably played Centerfield on the jukebox 10 times. I do remember Mike Philips dancing on the top of our table while we sang the song. I also remember him falling off the table. I haven’t seen him since the day we graduated 27 years ago.
The Jailhouse didn’t put much money into maintenance or upgrading the décor. The tables were 50 years old and you sat on benches. The men’s room was upstairs. It consisted of a room length trough for dudes to piss in. On this particular night cigarette butts or some other object must have been blocking the drain. The trough was filled to the brim with piss. It was overflowing onto the floor. We were drunk and not particularly concerned about Jailhouse plumbing issues. We just pissed in the trough and returned to singing Centerfield. Later in the evening as we were running out of gas, I witnessed the consequences of an overflowing piss filled trough. As you recall, the bathroom was upstairs, directly over the tables below. It seems the piss leaked through the floor above and soaked the drop ceiling tiles below. I watched as a piss soaked tile came crashing down with a thump a couple tables over. It was a fitting end to a memorable evening. Of the ten guys in the Jailhouse that night, I only keep in touch with one. I long ago lost contact with them. Life has a way of creeping up on you. You meet the love of your life, have kids, and get tied up in your career. Before you know it, 28 years have passed, you’ve added 40 pounds, lost most of your hair, and you’ve turned into a cranky 50 year old anarchist blogger.
Every time I hear this song on the radio I’m transported back to a simpler, happy time in my life. No cares. No pressure. No responsibility. No worries. Just friends, fun and beer. It’s a melancholy feeling. I’m very happy with my life and my family but sometimes, like Eddie Money says – I wanna go back. In a few hours when Fogerty goes into the opening riff for Centerfield, I’ll close my eyes and get transported back to that night at The Jailhouse.
There are two other songs from that album that I like as much or more than Centerfield. I love listening to the sax in a rock song.
This one rose into the top 10.
Time is a funny thing. It slips away when you weren’t looking. Find some time to enjoy yourself today and remember the good times, with good friends, good (???) beer, at a good bar.
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say
Pink Floyd
So your a 50 year old anarchist blogger.At least now I know what you are.Explains a lot.CCR was one of my favorite bands growing up.Never got to see them or humble pie .For what its worth,i hope you have a good time and you can look on facebook for your friends .I have found two old friends that way.
Admin
Have a kick ass time. One of my favorite songs is Fortunate Son. My father doesn’t like rock and roll and I’ve been trying to explain that some of it is very anti establishment. He has always been anti establishment.
You graduated HS is 85? I assume 85-86 was your freshman year in college? I graduated 85 from a school in Hamburg Pa. Boarding academy.
I graduated HS in 1981.
Drexel had a 5 year co-op program where you worked six months and went to school six months. I was in this program so I could pay my own tuition.
Sounds fairly similar to me but I was three years earlier at Georgia Tech. The bar was the Stein Club, also no longer in existence. I keep in sporadic touch with a few of the guys via the Facebook NSA interface. Also in a similar bubble with similar outlook. Boy what we didn’t know…
Nostalgia for times gone by is bittersweet medicine we all take from time to time.
Have a good time at the concert Jimmy boy.
RE
I have very similar memories being one year older than you, those where the days. Have fun and thanks for the walk down memory lane.
Damn right, these are the good ole days, right now. Looking back in a few short years, you’ll see.
Admin
Have a great time. Saw Fogerty with my son front row. He puts on a great concert. Your family will have a great time. Enjoy and relax.
Bob.
After reading admins post I went to wikipedia to learn more about him and one sentence caught my eye as it epitomizes what used to be known as the American Dream:
“Fogerty’s first electric guitar was a Silvertone with a small five watt amplifier which he bought at Sears with $80 he had earned from his paper route.”
I_S
Great story. Simpler times. We were on top back in those days. I graduated in ’81 also.
Simply amazing how far we’ve fallen since Reagan. And there won’t be another conservative or republican president (ever again). Women and minorities. We gave it all away….
Hey JQ: that was a good article, and brought back a lot of memories of my intramural softball days in college…kudos to you!
Admin-I hope you & yours had a great time tonight. And thanks for the trip down memory lane. That was where my head was at already this evening, after taking care of some unpleasant personal business. I am drinking White Russians in my prize-winning Big Lebowski/The Dude halloween outfit, feeling sentimental and melancholy. Can’t go back. Class of ’81 rock on.
aWD
What you say is so sad but so true.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVdOQvx379Y
Juan-nice. But here is the classic:
http://www.musictory.de/musik/Carroll+O%27Connor/Those+Were+the+Days
I started college in Sept ’65. It was great but from day one we were looking over our shoulders at the draft. Actually it was a motivator, without the threat of going to Vietnam wif a M-16 I’d probably have ended up under I-95 sleeping in a cardboard box. I still did 8rs but it was in the cockpit of a jet. I learned to do something that could make me a living and was incredibly enjoyable. CCR kicks ass, have a wonderful time!
Reverse Engineer: very moving and profound. Bittersweet indeed.
“Creedence Clearwater Revival is one of my favorite bands of all time” ———— Admin
Same here, buddy. “Green River” was the very first album … and I do mean ‘album” — that I ever bought with my own money. I was 17 …… I’d buy it again today.
I envy you in a good way. Hoping you and your family have an AWESOME experience.
So much to say about last night’s concert, so I’ll break it into multiple comments.
This comment will address the audience at the concert. The Borgata venue is 30,000 square feet and fits 3,700 fans. The place was packed.
It was packed with 3,500 old geezer Boomers. Jimmy and Mike were the youngest people at the concert. Avalon & I felt young again.
There were many old hippies with gray ponytails. AWD would have had a field day with the plethora of obese Boomers who had to get up and pee three times during a two hour and fifteen minute concert.
I was praying that no one broke a hip or had a coronary during the concert. I thought it was humorous that the Borgata positioned security in front of the stage. The only thing that would make that crowd storm the stage is if you told them there was a free all you can eat buffet up there.
The one thing about Boomers is that they are prompt. They were in their seats 45 minutes before the concert was supposed to start. It must be all those years hitting the early bird specials at the local diners.
It was interesting watching some of these Boomers mentally transport themselves back to Woodstock when the CCR material was played. They were grooving and reliving their youth. It did bring a smile to my face as an old guy with a gray ponytail danced around in his own world. My kids got a kick out of him. By the end of the concert, everyone had been transported back to an earlier time. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
John Fogerty Rocks!!!
John Fogerty is an amazing musician and an amazing physical specimen. He is 68 years old and looks like he’s in his 40’s. He is dedicated to his craft. He practices his guitar playing 3 hours per day and runs 6 miles per day. He didn’t have an ounce of fat on him and he put on a non-stop energetic performance for 2 hours and 15 minutes. He played 30 songs that included multiple long guitar solos. Virtually every song was a classic. Even his new song – Mystic Highway – was a catchy tune with an awesome guitar solo. He owns 300 guitars and brings 25 on tour with him. He changed guitars after virtually every song. The screens up on stage portrayed scenes from his youth as a child and with CCR. They showed close-ups of his magic hands playing tunes we’ve heard for 40 years.
He is a very personable performer. He interjects short stories about his life and how and why certain songs were written. Green River was written about the area in Northern California where his family would spend their summers. Have You Ever Seen the Rain was written about the breakup of CCR. His story about his Woodstock experience was funny and touching.
It was the summer of 69. CCR was in their prime. He had been seeing signs up and down the East coast announcing a concert at Woodstock – Peace, Love and Rock & Roll. He was curious and eventually the promoter called him and asked if CCR would play. He wanted to know if they would get a prime spot. They told him that CCR would go on at 9:00 pm on Saturday. He agreed to perform. Just one little problem. The concert was being run by hippies who didn’t believe in punctuality. When CCR arrived they were told they would be following The Grateful Dead. This is when things really began to go bad. Everything was running behind and The Grateful Dead didn’t go on until 10:00 pm. They had been playing for an hour when everything went dark. You could hear Jerry Garcia saying “what happened man?” in the dark. It took the roadies another hour to figure out that something was unplugged. So, the Grateful Dead resumed playing at midnight and played for another 90 minutes.
CCR finally got to go on stage at 2:30 am. They started jamming and John looked out and saw 500,000 naked people who looked just like him, except they were all asleep. It was disconcerting for one of the best bands of the era to be playing to no one. Then John looked out and about a quarter mile from the stage he saw one guy with a lighter who yelled out to keep on rocking. He played the rest of their set for that one guy.
The experience led him to write this tune a week later.
The concert came to a rousing finale with a thoroughly anti-war vibe of Fortunate Son with Vietnam footage on the screens interspersed with footage of Iraq and Afghanistan. Fogerty is still anti-establishment. He’d fit in well on TBP.
The encore was the classic Bad Moon Rising with video of a full moon, boiling dark clouds and flashes of lightening. The song has as much meaning today as it did when they performed it at Woodstock in 1969.
“Music always brings me back to a time in my life.” ————– Admin
Indeed, it does! Smells do the same thing …. homebaked cookies, especially Sugar Cookies, takes me right back to being 10 years old. I can even see mom’s bright red embroidered apron.
Man In Nursing Home Reacts To Hearing Music From His Era
Fogerty is not considered a real nice fellla. Good musician, but not a nice guy. Very under rated gutarist.
The Woodstock story puts a pretty big slant on things – he was actually seriously pissed off by what happened. He is also one of the stupidest business people of all time – he signed away the rights to all the CCR songs in order to get out of the contract he had negotiated. And he has been pissed about it ever since.
Great music. Flawed human being.
Llpoh
Besides yourself, how many human beings are not flawed?
Are you a nice fella?
If a vendor or supplier was screwing you and not honoring the contract they signed with you, would you take legal action against that vendor or supplier?
Do you know the details of Fogerty’s dispute with his record company? Did record companies back in the 60’s and 70’s have a penchant for taking advantage of artists who weren’t really knowledgeable regarding legal contracts?
You should read the rest of the wiki page. His record company was taken over by another record company and he was able to resolve their issues immediately. He did let his dispute eat away at him and didn’t write or record anything from 1975 until 1985.
You are judging him based on his youthful indiscretions. He appears to have mellowed in his old age and let it go. People do change.
Not everyone can be perfect, like yourself.
Fogerty would not allow the Woodstock set to be used in the Woodstock film/album because he was so pissed off. It cost him a fortune. He defines shooting yourself in the foot.
Admin:
Those were the days my friend; CCR and Fortunate Son was song with RVN implications; however, the best song was “We have to get out of this place” Eric B and the Animals.
CCR is great if your into 3-chord bands!
Thunderbird is a trip, he had me thinking all night of his corkscrew description of time, he said you can jump to a lower or higher level on the screw, advancing or retreating in time. and this can happen when you regress 10 years minus one day and remember everything that happened yesterday. no need to go into a hypnotic trance like chris reeves.
my mom said in the 50’s people in Juarez cranked their radios up so that you could be walking down the street and hear Tonya la Negra singing romantic songs. by the time I was a teen in the sixties, the border blaster station XEROK was cranking out English songs, the most popular band being “Los Criidense”. It seems they were everywhere when you walked around town, everyone had their radios cranked up. Only old school people would crank their radio up for all the world to hear nowadays.
Admin- thanks for sharing your story from the old college ‘daze.’ Brought back memories for me as well, good and bad, mostly good. As you said a simpler, happier time. Thank goodness for music to remind of those times. (OSU Class of ’89)
bb not juan said:
“Only old school people would crank their radio up for all the world to hear nowadays.”
Well no shit Sherlock. Most modern music playing devices come with earbuds so “cranking it up” really serves no purpose.
I_S
Nice story again. Surrounded by delusional boomers? Aren’t we all.
Nice comment about Fogerty exercising and no body fat, and looking 25 years younger. And he has stamina no less. No pill for that, takes hard work, something obese boomers can’t handle. God’s trying to tell you something Quinny, it’s not too late.
Glory to God, some day the boomers will be gone….
[img?3eddc42[/img]
This piece is fun.
http://www.fakenation.info/please/baby-boomer-defense-mechanisms
I got a direct response from I-S, wow. let’s see, I meant that peeps in Juarez don’t crank up the radios to be heard out in the street. the whole point being that they let the world know they had a radio. (reminds me of steinbeck’s story of the woman who passed the vacuum cleaner everyday even though she didn’t have electricity in her home.) and I listen to my cell phone and wire phone with the speaker on, no earbuds. I was trying to keep to the nostalgia theme.
I feel perfectly capable of judging the whole of a man’s life based upon my 5 minute wiki research. Being a good businessman is all that is important in life. That’s why I admire Jack Welch and Jamie Dimon. They aren’t flawed like Fogerty.
Nice doppel. Did not need to search. I have followed ccr a long time. Fogerty was a jerk to his band. Maybe he has changed but more likely he is trying to rewrite history. Context is everything.
llpoh says:
“That’s why I admire Jack Welch and Jamie Dimon. They aren’t flawed like Fogerty.”
I rather spend a couple hours listening to artists talk or perform than listening to bankers go on and on about how much money they have.
Fogerty doing Elvis last night.
Avalon recorded Centerfield on her iGadget while I sat next to her mentally transporting myself back to the Jailhouse in 1985. One difference between today and 1985. It cost $6 for a cup of beer last night. It cost $2.50 for a pitcher of beer at the Jailhouse in 1985.
Fogerty is playing a guitar shaped like a baseball bat. He calls it Slugger.
Stiffed his second record company, too. And his band. He was young. Peoplecan change. Maybe he did.
I do not consider myself nice – honest yes nice no. More flaws than you can shake a stick at.
He signed a 14 record contract and refused to honor it. His second company helped get him released, and I think he owed them six. They coughed up a million to get him out from under, then he reneged on that contract, delivering one by memory. the nine years off had something to do with that. He was not honorable. I despise that.
That said, i have his records. Good music. Good guitarist. Context is everything.
Glad you had a good time.
What were the reasons CCR broke up?I have heard a lot of stories but don’t know if they are true.
By the way, nice misdirection re his contract. Nowhere have I ever seen it said or implied the record company was screwing him. Quite the contrary – he was getting rich. But he fucked over his band, they quit, and he could not or would not honor his contract solo, as they were a unique group. He never again reached the heights of ccr as it was a group effort, and tho he was most talented by far, he needed the others.
His ccr body of work is timeless. The rest not so much. Very good tho.
The other band members felt hard done by, got no writing credits, etc, and wanted more input. The recording contract was with Fogerty alone, signed without band input,apparently. Fogerty would not comply by giving them more input/credit. Last album was him doing his stuff, them doing theirs, and it flopped. Then they disbanded. As I understand it. He never reconciled with his brother.
Tom quit the band and the other two wanted more credit. Considering he wrote all the songs, sang all the songs, played lead guitar, and produced the albums, I wonder why he thought he should have more say. I don’t see how he screwed them. Most rock groups break up for some reason.
From Wiki:
Fogerty, as writer of the songs for the band (as well as lead singer and lead guitarist), felt that his musical opinions should count for more than those of the others, leading to resentments within the band. These internal rifts, and Tom’s feeling that he was being taken for granted, caused Tom to leave the group in January 1971. The two other group members, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford, wanted a greater role in the band’s future. Fogerty, in an attempt to keep things together, insisted Cook and Clifford share equal songwriting and vocal time on what would become the band’s final album, Mardi Gras, released in April 1972, which included the band’s last two singles, the 1971 hit “Sweet Hitch-Hiker”, and “Someday Never Comes”, which barely made it into the Billboard Top 20. Cook and Clifford told Fogerty that the fans would not accept “Mardi Gras” as a CCR LP, but he said, “My voice is a unique instrument, and I will not lend it to your songs.” He gave them an ultimatum: either they would do it or he would quit immediately. They accepted his ultimatum, but the album received poor reviews. It was a commercial success, however, peaking at #12 and achieving gold record status. It generated weaker sales than their previous albums. The group disbanded shortly afterwards.
Sounds about right. John was the star for sure.
Every story has two sides. The truth is usually somewhere in the middle.
More background from Wiki:
Fogerty is something of a perfectionist, often destroying unreleased material, but “bootleg” editions are known to exist of this material. Fogerty says that he was unable to write music during this period of his life, primarily due to stresses from ongoing financial and legal difficulties with Fantasy Records. Although Fogerty was signed to Asylum in North America, Fantasy continued to hold rights to his records for the rest of the world; unwilling to allow the label to continue to profit from any new material, he managed to terminate his contract with the record company by forgoing any future sales royalties on all of the music he produced with CCR, a deal which inevitably cost him millions of dollars, but which he says restored his peace of mind.
In 1990 Tom Fogerty died of AIDS (specifically from a tuberculosis infection) at the age of 48, having contracted HIV from blood transfusions for back ailments. John Fogerty has mentioned that the darkest moments in his life were when his brother took the record company’s side in their royalties dispute, and the fact that when his brother died, the two of them were not speaking to each other.[6] In the eulogy he delivered at Tom’s funeral, John said: “We wanted to grow up and be musicians. I guess we achieved half of that, becoming rock ‘n roll stars. We didn’t necessarily grow up.”
The sale of Fantasy Records to Concord Records in 2004 ended the 30-plus-year estrangement between Fogerty and his former label as the new owners took steps to restore royalty rights Fogerty gave up in order to be released from his contract with Fantasy in the mid-1970s. In September 2005, Fogerty returned to Fantasy Records. That was made possible when DreamWorks Records’ non-country music unit was absorbed by Geffen Records, which dropped Fogerty but continued to distribute his earlier solo albums.
I may be an ass, but it takes the thread in new and wonderful directions!
Jeezus, Llpoh knows how to ruin a wet dream.
Bringing up legal and contractual issues, lawsuits, brothers with AIDS? So much for a good time was had by all.
No one can piss the Admin off like me. It is my solemn duty. It keeps him sharp, on his toes, and ready for the real foes. It is just training for real battle.
Llpoh
You do have a knack for pissing me off. I think you did the same thing to my Roger Waters The Wall post.
Most rock stars have huge egos. That is part of what makes them stars.
Most business owners also have huge egos. Luckily, you don’t.
Awd/stuck – we are not here for fun! This is serious! Letting go is for pussies!
What I want to know is:
a) did he play an encore
b) did Avalon fawn for John Fogerty
c) how many beers did Admin actually drink at $6 a piece, or did he bring his own hooch
d) did admin or Avalon lose a large sum of money at the casino after the show.
I await the answers
AWD
a) His encore was Bad Moon Rising and Proud Mary
b) Avalon was up dancing by the end of the concert
c) Admin drank exactly ZERO $6 beers
d) Avalon lost $5 in a slot machine in about 30 seconds. We had the kids with us and they aren’t allowed in the gambling area.
AWD
The chicks who looked like that were out in the Casino eating at the Wolfgang Puck restaurant. I was amazed at the amount of people who must have thousands of disposable income to blow gambling. The number of Mercedes, BMWs, and Porsches in the parking garage was unbelievable. I guess some people have money.