The idea of a
Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band formed by ex-
CCR members
Stu Cook and
Doug Clifford is either the biggest obscenity in '60s rock revivals, or the only fully musically just and honest cover band phenomenon there is.
To people who take rock & roll seriously, the existence of
Creedence Clearwater Revisited is probably an abomination -- the equivalent of
Paul and
Ringo going back on the road leading a
Beatles cover band, complete with replacements for
John and
George. But before anyone tunes out on this, bassist
Stu Cook and drummer
Doug "Cosmo" Clifford have as much right to capitalize on the
Creedence Clearwater Revival repertory as anyone other than
John Fogerty -- yes, he wrote the stuff, but they were the rhythm section, and as good a rhythm section as any American white rock & roll band of the '60s ever had, on songs where the beat, not to mention the textures of the bass and the drums, counted for a lot. And they were with
Fogerty and his brother
Tom from the beginning, playing lots of thankless gigs for short-end money before lightning struck in 1968. And since
Fogerty kept this repertory at more than arm's length for more than 25 years after their breakup, and the songs were more popular than ever, it was almost inevitable that a
CCR cover band would emerge. The unexpected aspect is that it was done by former
CCR members.
Following the breakup of
CCR in 1972,
Cook and
Clifford, who'd been friends since junior high, formed a production company together.
Clifford later joined the latter-day
Sir Douglas Quintet, while
Cook joined a group of ex-members of
the Doobie Brothers in forming the country-rock outfit Southern Pacific. They kept fairly low profiles as working musicians, although they were still busier musically than
Fogerty, who, for a variety of personal reasons, didn't really re-emerge in the public eye until the end of the 1980s.
Creedence Clearwater Revisited was initially supposed to be a short-run project, conceived in 1995 --
Elliot Easton, formerly of
the Cars, played lead guitar, and
John Tristao handled the vocals. They were only supposed to play private parties, but soon the band was getting 100 gigs a year.
Suffice it to say that these guys are singularly unlikely to ever be a major creative force (or even part of one) in rock music the way they were 30 years ago, and the chance of anything new or fresh issuing forth from them is practically nil. But that's also true of
Chuck Berry and a lot of other names bigger than
Cook or
Clifford, and
CCRevisited does put on a good show, and crowds looking for good-time rock & roll music enjoy them, the same way that
Rob Grill & the Grass Roots or whatever version of "
Herman's Hermits"
Peter Noone is fronting can pull 15,000 to an outdoor venue on a decent summer night. At least
CCRevisited doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is, even if they're not too much more than a flesh-and-blood jukebox.
Of course, the eerie backdrop to their presence is the fact that
Fogerty (who cut a great blues-rock album in 1997) finally overcame his reticence about his old songs and issued his own live album, at virtually the same time that
CCRevisited got its double live CD out. So fans once limited to a choice of original
CCR recordings are now faced with
Fogerty's own new versions of his old hits, and new live versions of those same hits by this band. Anyone under 25 without a lot of background in music will probably need a program to sort through it all. ~ Bruce Eder