Legacy: the Creedence Clearwater Revival years

There's no arguing with Fogerty's singing either - nor his distinctive guitar; part anger, part mad joy, like he's playing mid-Apocalypse. As for the arrangements, they're pretty much can't-believe-it's-not-Creedence. [Sep 2025, p,86]

The decades since Fogerty first recorded these tracks have perhaps cost him some of the high top and low bottom ends of that distinctive half-drawl-half-snarl with which a California kid reinvented himself as some Southern swamp monster, but across “Legacy” he sounds generally in vigorous form, verging in parts on the downright feral, and he is surely entitled to what is as much a vindication as a celebration. [Sep 2025, p.30]

Legacy is a welcome look back at a band that held a significant place in the 1960s—producing omnipresent, radio-friendly hits that were redolent of the counterculture movement, yet also stood apart in their craft and singular vision.

What’s most remarkable about Revival revisited is perhaps not the attention to detail of the arrangements, nor the determination to recapture every last fuzz, thrum, reverb and flourish heard on the first studio versions. Anyone listening to Fogerty’s testifying rasps on Have You Ever Seen The Rain? or Bad Moon Rising 50-plus years ago, might have expected him to have roared himself mute by now. But no, the power and presence of the voice haven’t weakened in the slightest. [Sep 2025, p.104]