During its brief career, Creedence Clearwater Revival lent new life to the proposition that rock & roll – real rock & roll – would never die. Creedence's music, for the most part written by John Fogerty, who also served as the group's guitarist and like-a-hurricane vocalist, was constructed from some of rock's most venerable stylistic elements – Delta blues, Louisiana swamp rock, Memphis rockabilly – and yet it burned with a fire all its own. Now, after a ten-year absence, Fogerty has returned with Centerfield, a near-seamless extension of the Creedence sound and a record that's likely to convert a whole new generation of true believers.
no more interested in assembling a new group now than he was in 1973, when he concocted a one-man overdub band called the Blue Ridge Rangers for the first of his two post-Creedence solo albums. On
Centerfield he once again plays every instrument himself, and the execution is flawless. As ever, Fogerty deploys rock's most primal idioms – Sun-sound rockabilly, Dale Hawkins-style swamp-funk and of course the classic three-chord chug – in a distinct and timeless musical language that is wonderfully unpretentious and, despite its obvious models, utterly convincing. (Compared to Fogerty, a gifted but once-removed traditionalist such as Dave Edmunds sounds mannered, and even a roots-booster as deep-dyed as Bruce Springsteen begins to seem somewhat arty.)
Centerfield leads off with a terrific one-two punch. "The Old Man Down the Road," with its tart gumbo guitar riff and writhing rhythms, could pass as a previously undiscovered nugget from the classic Creedence canon; and the terrific, yodel-tinged "Rock and Roll Girls," which follows hot on its grooves, is a rather spectacular demonstration of what still can be done with three shitty chords and a blatzing sax.
This double-barreled opening salvo sets a pattern for the rest of the album. With one bizarre exception, the remaining seven songs generally find Fogerty either quoting himself or unabashedly evoking more arcane forebears. The stirring "Searchlight," for example, is a characteristic choogler that recalls Creedence's 1969 hit, "Born on the Bayou"; and "I Saw It on T.V.," with its countryish lilt, bears some resemblance to the old band's "Who'll Stop the Rain." "Big Train (from Memphis)," meanwhile, is the most straightforward homage, a note-perfect re-creation of the spare, echoey Sun Records rockabilly sound that laments the passing both of Elvis Presley and of rock's original, unaffected power ("Now it's gone, gone, gone," Fogerty sings).
Other influences are more playfully evoked. In the album's lyrically striking title track, Fogerty grafts a clattering guitar riff derived from Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba" onto a Chuck Berry-styled rockout that celebrates a Fifties kid's love of baseball (the "brown-eyed handsome man" here is Willie Mays) and his equall
