{"id":12185,"date":"2014-03-28T18:27:06","date_gmt":"2014-03-29T01:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=12185"},"modified":"2014-03-28T18:27:06","modified_gmt":"2014-03-29T01:27:06","slug":"rosanne-cash-john-fogerty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2014\/03\/rosanne-cash-john-fogerty\/","title":{"rendered":"ROSANNE CASH & JOHN FOGERTY"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"RosanneROSANNE CASH & JOHN FOGERTY<\/h1>\n

Journey South To Self-Discovery and Rediscovery<\/h2>\n

Do yourself a favor: If you get a chance to see Rosanne Cash\u2019s show during her current The River & the Thread tour, grab it.<\/p>\n

With a fabulous seven-piece backing band, she performs the entire album from start to finish, explaining each song and the concept behind them, as well as The River & the Thread as a whole, which resulted from a series of trips the longtime New York resident\u2014with her husband, producer and guitarist\/music director John Leventhal\u2014took to her native South in a personal quest of self-discovery and rediscovery.<\/p>\n

\"JohnAs such, it brought to mind another landmark album, John Fogerty\u2019s Blue Moon Swamp.<\/p>\n

The 1997 release was Fogerty\u2019s first since his 1986 album Eye of the Zombie, the relatively lackluster follow-up to his chart-topping 1985 Centerfield, which had yielded the titletrack hit along with \u201cThe Old Man Down the Road\u201d and \u201cRock and Roll Girls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Centerfield also notably included \u201cZanz Kant Danz,\u201d which was believed by Fogerty\u2019s nemesis Saul Zaentz\u2014the late head of Creedence Clearwater Revival\u2019s Fantasy Records, with whom he fought long and hard and bitterly over his contract with the label\u2014to be a direct attack on his character, what with lines relating to a \u201clittle pig\u201d named Zanz (like \u201cZanz can\u2019t dance but he\u2019ll steal your money).\u201d<\/p>\n

\"JohnZaentz sued over the title and lyric, forcing Fogerty to change the \u201cZanz\u201d name to \u201cVanz\u201d; he also sued Fogerty for copyright infringement, claiming that the chorus of \u201cThe Old Man Down the Road\u201d was the same as CCR\u2019s \u201cRun Through the Jungle.\u201d Fogerty eventually won the suit, and a countersuit for attorney fees that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

But the litigation, and everything that preceded it, took a terrible emotional and financial toll on Fogerty, who refused to play CCR songs\u2014thereby generating money for copyright owner Zaentz\u2014from 1972 until a concert in Washington, D.C., for Vietnam veterans, on July 4, 1987.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was such a perversion of the spirit of what music should be about,\u201d he told me on the eve of Blue Moon Swamp\u2019s release. \u201cIt sounds naive now, but I was totally unprepared for all the negative things that happened\u2014and lost the assuredness of knowing what I\u2019m doing. I got confused and disjointed, and started on a quest without knowing why.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"RosanneLike Cash, Fogerty\u2019s quest took him South, in his case, to explore the deep rural roots of the blues\u2014\u201cmy first huge influence\u201d he said, stating what seemed to a longtime fan to be the obvious. But to my great surprise, he said he actually knew little about the blues beyond the urban blues giants. So he drove alone throughout the Mississippi Delta, and celebrated his 45th birthday standing outside Parchman Farm, the infamous Mississippi Prison of blues lore.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometime after, I started recording the album\u2014and it all started coming out of me!\u201d Fogerty said, and did it ever: Blue Moon Swamp not only had plenty of the blues- and swamp-drenched roots rock music that had informed his music ever since Creedence, but also included \u201cJoy of My Life,\u201d his first-ever love song, and \u201cRambunctious Boy,\u201d which his then label Warner Bros.\u2019 Nashville division took to country radio.<\/p>\n

The album went on to earn Fogerty his first Grammy award, for Best Rock Album. Rosanne Cash\u2019s similar journey down south, as manifest in The River & the Thread, will likewise merit Grammy consideration, at the very least.<\/p>\n

Jim Bessman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ROSANNE CASH & JOHN FOGERTY Journey South To Self-Discovery and Rediscovery Do yourself a favor: If you get a chance to see Rosanne Cash\u2019s show during her current The River & the Thread tour, grab it. With a fabulous seven-piece backing band, she performs the entire album from start to finish, explaining each song and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4976],"tags":[735,675],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12185"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12190,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12185\/revisions\/12190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}