John Fogerty releases "John's Version" of CCR's classic songs

Perhaps inspired by Taylor Swift, John Fogerty recently re-cut 20 CCR songs for his new Legacy album. He plays Fallsview Casino Aug 30.

Watch CCR play "Fortunate Son" at London's Royal Albert Hall in 1970

CCR's performance at Royal Albert Hall in London is being released on Sept 16. Check out "Fortunate Son" below. 

Here's the scoop...

Recently, Craft Recordings announced the forthcoming release of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s legendary long-lost recording of their 1970 show at London’s Royal Albert Hall, which will be available for the first time ever in multiple formats as Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall. The 12-track live album is set for release on September 16 and is available now for pre-order right here.

Ahead of the album release, CCR shared the full live performance of their major hit, "Fortunate Son" which you can view below. The video captures bandmates, John Fogerty, Tom Fogerty, Doug Clifford, and Stu Cook, fully engrossed in the high-energy performance for one of their most beloved tracks, a song that’s been covered far and wide by artists including Pearl Jam, Rise Against, U2, Foo Fighters, and more, as well as being recognized by Rolling Stone as one of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time – number 99 on the list for those keeping score at home.    

Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall will be available September 16 on 180-gram vinyl, CD, and cassette, while select retailers will offer a variety of exclusive colour variants, including Walmart (Tombstone Shadow vinyl) and Target (Green River vinyl). Additionally, the album will be available across digital platforms, including in hi-res and Dolby ATMOS® immersive audio formats. A limited Super Deluxe Edition Box Set will follow later in the year. 

After spending roughly 50 years in storage, the original multi-track tapes were meticulously restored and mixed by the Grammy Award-winning team of producer, Giles Martin, and engineer, Sam Okell, who have helmed countless acclaimed projects together, including the Beatles’ 50th-anniversary editions of Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as well as audio for the Elton John biopic, Rocketman, and Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back series. The LP was mastered by the celebrated engineer Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios using half-speed technology.

Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall will be released concurrently with the documentary concert feature film, Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall. Directed by two-time Grammy Award winner, Bob Smeaton (The Beatles Anthology and Jimi Hendrix Band of Gypsies), and narrated by Academy Award-winning actor, Jeff Bridges, the film takes viewers from the band’s earliest years together in El Cerrito, CA through their meteoric rise to fame. Featuring a wealth of unseen footage, Travelin’ Band culminates with the band’s show at the Royal Albert Hall—marking the only concert footage of the original CCR lineup to be released in its entirety. The film will rollout internationally on September 16—more details coming soon.

On November 14, both the album and the film will be presented in a Super Deluxe Edition Box Set, available exclusively via CraftRecordings.com. The 2-LP/2-CD/1-Blu-ray collection includes Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall on two 45-RPM 180-gram vinyl LPs as well as on CD. A second CD features music from the film, including formative recordings from the band’s earliest incarnations (including Tommy Fogerty and the Blue Velvets and the Golliwogs), while the Blu-ray offers the complete Travelin’ Band:  Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall film, plus the digital album in hi-res and Dolby ATMOS® immersive audio. Limited to 5,000 copies worldwide, each individually numbered set is housed in a 12” x 12” box, with embossed gold foil detail, and includes a reproduction of the original 1970 tour program, a 17” x 24” poster, and a 16-page booklet, featuring an excerpt from Bridges’ voice-over script, which offers background on the band’s incredible path to the London show. 

When Creedence Clearwater Revival stepped onto the Royal Albert Hall’s stage on April 14, 1970—just days after the Beatles announced their breakup—the California rockers had arguably just become the biggest band in the world. Leading up to the show, CCR had enjoyed an unprecedented “magical year,” as Jeff Bridges narrates in the film. “In only 12 months the band had achieved five Top 10 singles and three Top 10 albums [Bayou Country, Green River, Willy and the Poor Boys] on the American charts, outselling the Beatles. They had appeared on the legendary Ed Sullivan Show and played to over a million people across America, including the hundreds of thousands gathered at Woodstock. John, Tom, Stu, and Doug may not have had the familiar ring to it of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but Creedence were challenging the Beatles for the title of the biggest group in the world.” During their two-night sold-out residency at the iconic venue, CCR not only followed in the footsteps of acts like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles, but they proved they were equals.

While Creedence Clearwater Revival would go their separate ways just two years later, speculation around a live recording of that legendary concert began to permeate their fanbase in 1980. That same year, Fantasy Records had released a live album by the band, mistakenly titled The Royal Albert Hall Concert. It was quickly discovered that the audio was, in fact, from the Oakland Coliseum show, captured months earlier. While the label rushed to sticker the album with correctional information—and properly re-named the January 1970 performance as The Concert for later production runs—actual footage from the Royal Albert Hall remained the stuff of rock ’n’ roll lore…until now. 

For more info, check out the Craft Recordings site right here. Watch CCR's performance of "Fortunate Son" below.   

Mavis Staples makes a Jeff Tweedy album

For the last couple of years, the Anti- label has been jump-starting the flagging careers of old-school soul greats like Solomon Burke, Bettye LaVette and Mavis Staples with remarkable success. Their strategy is really quite simple and basically involves a bit of studio matchmaking in which a veteran performer with impeccable vocal chops is set up with a fanboy musician for whom the chance to compose songs and produce an album for an idol is a dream come true. 
If everything goes according to plan, it can be a cost effective method for a respected older artist to make an album which appeals to a much larger audience than the people who remember their 45s. To date, the series of novel cultural-collision experiments undertaken by Anti- have delighted music critics and award show juries alike. Yet in spite of all the hoopla surrounding the unusual pairings, the resulting recordings from Burke, LaVette and Staples haven't been terribly memorable. They certainly don't stand up well against the artists' best loved work of their peak years, or even the lesser known songs from the same period. That has much less to do with the singer's vocal strength or control than with the selection of repertoire, arrangements, limitations of the session musicians and the production choices.

Furthermore, now that the same scheme has been pulled numerous times, the novelty is wearing thin but that hasn't stopped Anti- from going back to the well once again for Mavis Staples' You Are Not Alone, an album of hymns and spirituals produced by Jeff Tweedy. Even by Anti- standards, it's an odd coupling since the Wilco frontman has never actually produced any recordings of note on his own and his knowledge of gospel music is questionable. Really, the only thing he has in common with Staples is a Chicago mailing address.
As for Staples, she had no idea who Wilco was when Tweedy first met her backstage after a show at the Hideout in the Windy City, but she was willing to give the recording project a shot. No doubt having her touring unit with her in the studio, joined by Wilco keyboardist Patrick Sansone and  backing vocalist of the stars Kelly Hogan, raised her comfort level considerably during sessions at Wilco's homey studio, The Loft.  
Upon hearing Rick Holmstrom's spot-on recreation of Pops Staples' trademark guitar vibrato on the album's opening reprise of the Staple Singers' fave You Don't Knock, it momentarily seemed like this unusual collaboration might work out after all. Checking the track listing, the third song was another Staple Singers' gem Downward Road which suggested that maybe Tweedy took the time to familiarize himself with Staples' definitive early recordings and would use their entrancingly eerie sound as a jump off point to create an appropriate new sonic framework for her spellbinding voice. But sadly, all hopes of Tweedy building on power and glory of the Staple Singers' Vee-Jay period for You Are Not Alone were dashed with the second track, Tweedy's own strummy title tune which signals the unfortunate descent into a hand-clapping folk mass-style singalong of frightful campfire kumbaya dimensions.
As a producer, Tweedy has the good sense to keep the arrangements spare and give the genuinely gifted singer room to move. However, many of the song choices – including album highlight tunes from Allen Toussaint and John Fogerty (either of whom would've made  a better producer of this album incidentally) – don't seem to have any real connection to Staples or the furtive Chicago gospel scene from which she arose. That's a problem for a stand-up belter like Staples who relies so heavily on the power of her conviction to connect with an audience. 
You have to wonder how Tweedy and Staples arrived at the seemingly random repertoire selections. The old Episcopal hymn In Christ There Is No East Or West for the album might appear to come totally out of left field but the choice is a telling clue which may help solve at least part of the mystery of how this whole strange project came together.

The song's lyrics were written by William A. Dunkerley (aka John Oxenham) back in 1908 for the Pageant of Darkness and Light at the London Missionary Society's exhibition "The Orient In London" and has appeared as such in various hymn books ever since. My guess is that Tweedy didn't learn In Christ There Is No East Or West in church while growing up in Belleville, but rather, the John Fahey fan probably first heard it hauntingly interpreted by Fahey on the Blind Joe Death (Takoma) album. Of course, the Fahey connection could be just a coincidence. But then, Blind Joe Death also includes Fahey's finger-picked version of another hymn called Uncloudy Day.
Originally titled Unclouded Day by it's composer Josiah Kelley Allwood, an Ohio-based minister in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ when it was written in 1879, the song later became more commonly known as Uncloudy Day and became a gospel hit when it was revamped in 1956 by – you guessed it – the Staple Singers who turned it into their signature song.
Tweedy is sharp enough to know that turning You Are Not Alone into a Fahey tribute album wasn't a surefire recipe for commercial success – however delighted his pal Jim O'Rourke would've been with the concept – but coming up with other suitably churchy numbers could be a challenge for a rock-schooled heathen out of his depth.

That is, unless you happen to have access to a copy of Lance Ledbetter's Goodbye, Babylon (Dust-To-Digital) six-disc compendium of vintage spirituals and sermons. Among the mammoth anthology's 135 songs are I Belong To The Band – Hallelujah! by Rev. Gary Davis, Creep Along Moses by the Taskiana Four and Found A Wonderful Savior by the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet each of which appear in revised form on You Are Not Alone. To her credit, Staples knocks them out with such confidence and control, you'd think that she'd been singing them since childhood.
Thanks to Staples' supremely soulful voice and exceptional interpretive skill, what easily could've been a confusing hodgepodge of random Jesus-free spirituals has turned out to be an engaging showcase for an artist who, at 71, remains one of the truly great singers of our time. And while You Are Not Alone doesn't come close to Staples' finest work – for that you need to go back to the Staple Singers' Uncloudy Day and Swing Low Sweet Chariot albums for Vee-Jay along with the Stax recordings Soul Folk In Action, Staple Swingers and Be Altitude: Respect Yourself – it still makes for a more enjoyable listen than either of those two forgettable albums she did with Prince.    


Wrote A Song For Everyone by Mavis Staples with Jeff Tweedy


LINKS
Mavis Staples  http://www.mavisstaples.com/
Anti-  http://www.anti.com/home/
Goodbye, Babylon  http://www.dust-digital.com/goodbye-babylon.htm
Wilco's Numero Group mixtape