Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Trieste / Piazza Unita d'Italia / Italy
Concert date: 09.07.2014
Attendance: 5000
Ticket price: €32.20 / €60.20
Trieste and its surroundings kept their packed concert season rolling last Wednesday with a visit from one of the most revered American songwriters in rock history – John Fogerty, former frontman of Creedence Clearwater Revival and a long-time successful solo artist, rolled into the city’s main square.
John Fogerty’s story is a fascinating one. The man left an indelible mark on music history as the creative alpha and omega of Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band that was active for just a few years, even though on his solo path, which he took after the group fell apart in the early seventies, he tried to shake off the shadow of his successful past. For years and years he flat-out ignored the CCR legacy at his shows, and one of the reasons was a feud with his older brother Tom, with whom he only made up at Tom’s funeral in 1990. Over the last two decades, the headstrong John Fogerty gradually started playing the cult CCR songs live, and on the current European tour he’s gone so far that the setlist consists exclusively of their material. So Trieste witnessed a tour that half of Fogerty’s career’s worth of listeners could only have dreamed about, and a sort of logical continuation of last year’s new studio album »Wrote A Song for Everyone« (review here), on which the 68-year-old musician re-recorded a handful of selected CCR songs.
Piazza Unita d’Italia, the main venue for Trieste’s bigger concerts, was fenced off this time, so passersby were denied the visual side of the show, which on this particular square is more the exception than the rule. Seats were set up across the square, but they only partly served their purpose, since the high-spirited crowd rushed to the space in front of the stage at the very first notes of opener Hey Tonight and watched one of their musical idols on their feet.
John Fogerty is a big traditionalist. You can see it at every turn. The stage set is modest, fitting the singer-songwriter spirit of his musical mission. The man himself radiates simplicity through his choice of unflashy clothing – in Trieste he was wearing a red plaid shirt, which, paired with its blue sibling, has long been the inseparable companion of Fogerty’s meager wardrobe.
The show kicked off with the hits Hey Tonight, Green River and Who’ll Stop The Rain. Fogerty wrote the latter on the night he came back from the legendary Woodstock in 1969, full of great impressions, where Creedence Clearwater Revival shared the stage that day with Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin. The performance of the song was spiced up by a video presentation of that event, with thousands of flower children dancing carefree. The mental leap back a few decades was more than successful, and Fogerty slowly sailed toward the middle of the show, where the punch of three-minute songs was in places swapped for drawn-out instrumental excursions, handled sometimes by him and sometimes by his young backing guitarist on the left side of the stage. One of the most intense moments of the night came with the bouncy little rock’n’roll number Ramble Tamble, loaded with Hammond keys and an energetic rhythm section, which this time completely overpowered the otherwise slower bluesy charm so typical of John Fogerty. In the gorgeous setting of Trieste’s lit-up heart, which even Fogerty himself couldn’t pass over in one of his stage banters, the stroll through CCR history continued with the evergreens Hot Rod Heart, Penthouse Pauper and Midhight Special, when the worst possible scenario came true…
…We weren’t the only ones in the crowd eyeing the threatening black sky in fear of a downpour, so on his manager’s orders, even before the first fat drops fell, Fogerty said his goodbyes and left the stage after a good forty minutes of playing, leaving a hungry crowd waiting. Minutes ticked by, the first people started leaving, until Aleš and I also followed the herd instinct and found safe shelter from the weather in one of the nearby bars. Fogerty never came back on stage that night, so he remains a big debtor to the Trieste crowd, who were left with nothing to do but sing the lines “and I Wonder, still I wonder, who’ll stop the rain?”. Truth be told, though, you can’t be mad at Fogerty, since the cancellation was entirely the fault of unpredictable mother nature. For some, the turn of events involuntarily brought back 2007, when Francis Rossi in Graz got shaken by an electric shock from a lightning strike after just two songs, so a shocked Status Quo cancelled the rest of the show. But that’s obviously another story…
Setlist
1. Hey Tonight
2. Green River
3. Who’ll Stop the Rain
4. Born on the Bayou
5. Lodi
6. Ramble Tamble
7. Lookin’ Out My Back Door
8. Hot Rod Heart
9. Penthouse Pauper
10. Midnight Special
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