DINOSAUR VICTROLA

Uh-oh, it’s turning into National Treasure Week on the Tongue— here’s another: CCR.

The old-school SAT analogy would be “Sly and the Family Stone is to James Brown as CCR is to Bob Dylan.”

Both groups built on certain key elements of their analogues, and created something that in theory should have been marginal, but in practice was epochal.

CCR translated the mythic portents of Dylan into plainspeak. Yeah, a hard rain was gonna fall— Have you seen it? Who’ll stop it?

Plus, they turned Dylan’s elliptical protests into Fortunate Son, perhaps the most stirring and clearheaded thing of its kind.

And then there’s Proud Mary, one of the best American songs of the 20th Century…

I could prattle on through the catalog, but you get the point. Chances are you got the point before you got here.

John Fogerty also followed a rough outline of the “burnout/dissipation of visionary talent/lost wandering in the wilderness” paradigm—his drug of choice appeared to be bitterness, which is highly addictive and tough as hell to kick.

Fogerty, however, had his redemptive moment in the mid 1980s, when he reappeared looking and sounding so much like he did in his prime that everyone was willing to overlook the fact the he didn’t really signify anymore.

The tailend of his wilderness period played out in public in the form of lawsuits and stubborn refusals to play his old CCR songs, but he softened in the light and gave the people the grace notes they desired...