✔️ 2022-09-29 22:37:00 – Paris/France.
“What did you think of the Parisians? “, they ask him in Paris, of course, for John Fogerty. It is unclear whether the female voice speaking it is that of a French television journalist, a casual fan, or an accompanying team girl. Splashback Clearwater Revival on their first and only European tour in that year 1970 during which they hit the pinnacle of pop only to collapse almost immediately. But Fogerty is not Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, let alone Bob Dylan or John Lennon. Although the songs he signs are at the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, he is neither a sex symbol nor an ideologue but a anti hero guitar as well as a working-class rock and roll hero. And with a half-smile, which is less disdain than shyness, he barely answers: "I haven't left my room." Neither in Stockholm, Berlin or Rotterdam nor here in Paris. But I like water.
The answer says much more than that. Fogerty is not for groupies or to party; it's not part of the mandate of sex, drugs and rock and roll or the lysergic "turn on, listen, drop out". He is a former reservist from Vietnam who was late for summer of love but he worked fast and hard to define a style and perhaps position himself as the latest thing in the 60s. This "I didn't leave my room" is at the center of what he reveals the premiere, more than fifty years after it was shot, of the concert that Creedence Clearwater Revival gave at the Royal Albert Hall in London on April 14, 1970. Four days later, Paul McCartney announced his departure from the Beatles with a statement and precipitated not only the end of the group but of an entire era. Travelin' Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall, from this month Netflix, not only offers the possibility of seeing forty minutes of Creedence live with remarkable audio quality for the time (post-production aside) but also shows travel footage made by the same group during their visit to Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Rotterdam, Paris and London. Narrated in the glassy voice-over of Jeff Bridges, the film includes flashbacks to the band's formation in El Cerrito, Calif., appearances on massive TV shows like Ed Sullivan and Andy Williams, but also the Woodstock set. The story of the most hostile product of the counterculture, to which they were linked but whose doxa they denied like the mountain people (pejorative name given to peasants in America) on the run in New York's Greenwich Village; Portobello Road (London) or Frisco's Haight-Ashbury.
In his description in stopped of Creedence's history and style, Bridges shines a light on the band's legendary working-class saga that was the polar opposite of pop aristocracy. This refers to the fact that the name of the bunker where Fogerty composed and Creedence repeated piece by piece until completing the feat of releasing three LPs and five top 5 singles in 1969 is called The Factory, mirroring a class worker far away from the worries of the hippie. What's curious is that Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground also rehearsed across the country in Andy Warhol's Factory, which was a parody or perversion of American Fordism. But the coincidence ends there: Lou Reed's (bad) trip ("Who likes the sun/Who likes the flowers"?) has nothing to do with Fogerty's imaginary projection of "Bayou Country", an exile sleeping California mind dialing compass pointing south (karma of living south).
In a Royal Albert Hall out of printthe Creedences are seen in the same line, as at the factory, from the beginning with "Travelin Band" (although in the setlist of the show it was the third theme) until the closing with "Keep on Chooglin", which stretches into a contained jam, pure Tantra and ostine. Throughout the show, Fogerty barely addresses the audience and what lingers is the slapping of his left Texas boot against the stage. As if reaffirming the intellectual property of rock and roll (made in usa) in the city that the Beatles had transformed into a pop metropolis and on a stage whose classical prestige had previously yielded to the Rolling Stones, Hendrix, Cream, Led Zeppelin or even the Fab Four, when they were still able to perform live. All the imagery of American consumer society that spurred British pop culture and rock's evolution from dance music to counter-cultural soundtrack becomes in this concert a response to the British invasion: a slap of moderate barbarism.
Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall in London
Sonar, another revealing key of this film which would have upset the nightlife of the rock-cinema of Buenos Aires of the Seventies (by Woodstock un the song is the same). At the Royal Albert Hall, Creedence sounds like in the studio because, against the grain, his albums are a reaction to the artifice of the console and the aquarium as metaverses of lysergic visions. Just as they star in this movie, the Fogerty Brothers (who have so much in common with the Davies and the Gallaghers) and company sound better than the last we saw of the Beatles live or the Stones, whose act went before for hypnotic seduction. of representation.
Rustic for a 1969 when Hendrix had pushed things too far and even Iggy Pop's Stooges had more artistic aspirations, Fogerty's Creedence was also not reactionary (review the lyrics of "Fortunate Son", the best anti song -Vietnam by far) nor retro . They are the end of back to basics (as said by bassist Stu Cook, the best declarer of the four) that the Beatles and the Stones had consumed with The white album Yes Beggar's Banquet, the release of psychedelic empacho. Yes this wings transformed into a modern Greek tragedy which is come back It allows us to spy on the strategy of Lennon and Macca to save the little that remained of the group by going back "to the principles" what there is, here it is pure principle, root.
Creedence had never left the United States and their first European tour was an easily recognized shock.
Beaucoup reverberation on guitar to capture the mist of the Mississippi, the rescue of Dale Hawkins, Little Richard and Screamin Jay Hawkins and rock and roll as dance. Not in vain, in his parsimony, Fogerty instructed the Londoners“They also know how to dance. But it's not an act of nostalgia school, because Creedence doesn't sound and look (anyway, there's no spectacle: smoke, strobe lights, nothing) like 1957. It's Pato's dream, that of the butchery of Moris, which comes true. Creedence is too real compared to the daydream that was coming to an end and it is what feels like it with an intensity (Neil Young would find the synthesis between Hendrix and CCR with Crazy Horse in the 70s) that surreptitiously advances until that it reaches the public out of their seats. It is not at all the denial of the time but maybe yes, its less considered criticism.
These forty minutes played in a historic April 1970 are, finally, the development of this "no" by Fogerty, a rock and roll worker who does not have time to admire the glamor you Parisiennes: from home (the hotel room) to work (the show) and from work to home, on demand. Perhaps for this reason this music had a global impact but particular emphasis on the middle and working classes of Argentina, with a persistence that ranged from suburban rockeries (unrelated to progressive mannerism or punk nihilism ) to football fans (“Bad Moon Rising”/“Brazil, tell me how you feel”).
SOURCE: Reviews News
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