What the L?
Thursday in the park? How about 25 or 7 to 3?
Chicago’s first greatest hits collection – the one they christened Chicago IX in its string of naming albums in Roman numeral order – turns L this summer.
Far be it from any record company to capitalize on such an occasion and, right on schedule, this summer sees the Golden Anniversary reissue complete with a cover that’s – get this – gold instead of the original’s white. Clever, huh?
Yet corporate also has messed with the running order of the original album’s tracks. A record that has been around for 50 years means its sequence is written in stone, dammit. Side one, track one, is 25 or 6 to 4, followed by Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is, followed by Just You ‘n Me, and so on.
The album to come this summer is like iTunes on shuffle play, which completely shuffles my fond memory of listening to these indelible hit singles on this album IN A CERTAIN ORDER. Chicago IX was one of the first “real” albums I bought with my paper route money and it has been in my regular listening rotation for decades. When I put it on, it needs to go the way it goes.
The new version messes with my record-obsessive feng shui, adding a second album and a 21 songs to the set. That’s fine on its own – The Beatles Inc. did the same thing a couple years back for the 50th anniversary of the vaunted ‘red’ and ‘blue’ greatest hits collections but at least had the decency to isolate the added tracks on a third disc. Not here. And that annoys me.
My point here, if there is one, is that nostalgia doesn’t give a lot of room for changing it around. When I get nostalgic for an object, such as Chicago IX, I want to hear it in the version that gave me the shpilkes in the first place. Not some bastardized product pretending to be an updated version of the thing. Hiss and also boo.
I get it, though: repackaging has been a part of the music business for as long as music has been a business, and our collective nostalgia gene drives its commercial value.
Enter, then, John Fogerty. His Creedence Clearwater Revival songs are the bedrock of classic rock radio; songs embedded in our culture. Bad Moon Rising. Have You Ever Seen The Rain. You know them all.
He famously signed away his publishing rights to those songs in a horrible deal inked at the start of his career – a deal that caused him to retreat from writing or recording for the better part of a decade and then, for awhile, refusing to play any Creedence songs in concert. (I saw one of those Creedence-free shows, the setlist heavy with songs like Eye of the Zombie and Mr. Greed. It was horrific, but at least he played The Old Man Down The Road which sounds a lot like Green River.)
He also has famously bitched about the whole thing pretty much non-stop for the last 50 years or so. Fair enough when somebody else is making the big money off your hard work, but there comes a time when one might want to let it go. I thought we were in the clear when news came last year that John’s wife, God bless her, had brokered a deal to revert those publishing rights to her husband.
But John can’t leave well enough alone and this summer is putting out his own brand of nostalgia with a record he calls Legacy. There he is on the cover with his 60s-era mushroom haircut and flannel shirt. The new record comprises 20 of his CCR-era classics, “playing these songs on my terms,” he says, “with the people I love.”
As opposed to the people he does not love, namely, the other guys in Creedence. And the new record hilariously adds the parenthetical “John’s Version” to each of the titles, which is funny when history tells us the original CCR broke up in the fury of a band tired of playing John’s songs precisely to his terms. The versions we’ve heard for years are nothing if not John’s.
It's not the first time he’s tried to rewrite and reclaim the past: during the pandemic, he cut a bunch of Creedence songs with his family and called it Fogerty’s Factory (instead of the Creedence classic Cosmo’s Factory).
Perhaps he wants to pad his pension and try to sell these songs one more time — from what I understand, his new deal gives him only the publishing, not the rights to the original Creedence recordings. My guess is he hopes radio, television, movies, and TikTok will use these new Legacy versions instead of the old. My guess is that he will be disappointed and further embittered.
Taylor Swift just did this with her “Taylor’s Version” recordings for a similar reason – in her case, she had her master recordings sold out from underneath her so just went ahead and re-recorded everything she had lost. It was national news a few weeks back when she was able to buy back those originals, eliminating the need for further re-recordings and I say hooray for her.
The difference between the two is Taylor’s fan base is eager to hear anything the artist decides to put out, even if it’s a note-perfect rendering of a song she first issued only five years ago. Reports say her biggest fans are saddened by the idea that Taylor’s reclaiming of her master recordings puts an end to the parade of “Taylor’s Version” albums.
John’s version of fan base, though, is different entirely. A recreation of Green River some 60 years after the fact might be fun (or not) to hear once, but these new takes will never take the place of the songs we’ve heard thousands of times and respect, already, as John’s versions.