Populist one

There was no mistaking the distinctive rasp on the other end of the phone line, but there was something new in Bruce Springsteen’s voice -- John Fogerty heard dejection coming through the line, as well as enough pauses to suggest that his typically articulate friend was more than a little dazed by the world.

It was Nov. 3, and just a few hours earlier, the presidential election had wrapped up with another phone call -- the one offering Sen. John F. Kerry’s concession to President Bush.

For populist rock heroes Springsteen and Fogerty, Kerry’s loss was especially stinging. They had given their names, time and music to the campaign’s cause and almost certainly lost fans who either disagreed strongly on the candidates or simply loathed the idea that pop songs should be played from atop soap boxes.

The blitz of concerts in battleground states featured R.E.M., Pearl Jam, James Taylor, the Dixie Chicks and others, and raised millions for the liberal political apparatus.

Fogerty was still thinking about the Springsteen call almost a week later. “It was very gracious. He wanted to thank me and my wife for helping out,” Fogerty said. “Bruce is a really wonderful person, and I absolutely loved playing with him.”

A few months earlier, Springsteen had called to feel out Fogerty about joining a concert tour that was unprecedented in its rock-world partisanship. Fogerty leaped at the offer with “no second thought needed,” and he calls the resulting two weeks of Concerts for Change events “something I will remember forever.”

Fogerty comes to the Pantages Theatre on Friday with his own band and songbook of Creedence Clearwater Revival hits, as well as his newest album, whose antiwar title track, “Deja Vu (All Over Again),” finds the veteran rocker looking at Iraq now and feeling the same fears and anger he felt as a young musician witnessing the toll of the Vietnam War.

Back then, Fogerty’s pen and pinched howl animated the war and the era in potent songs such as “Fortunate Son” and “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” slices of everyman Americana that prompted Springsteen to describe the 59-year-old Fogerty as the living musician who most closely echoes Hank Williams and his dirt-road artistry. CCR remains a staple of the “classic rock” radio format but, in a rare twist for that sector, its songs actually are classics, with a rural wisdom and self-contained spirit that hold up on fresh listening.

On this tour, Fogerty is mining the reaches of the CCR catalog, going beyond the band’s biggest hits and, really for the first time, he’s taking enough rehearsed material on the bus ride to allow major set-list variations.

“I’m playing ‘Run Through the Jungle’ and one of my favorites, ‘Don’t Look Now,’ which I don’t think CCR ever played.”

Much of his music is exuberant, and Fogerty has a boyish grin and gait on stage -- as seen on the Concerts for Change dates. This is, after all, a guy who has not a lick of irony in mind when he runs on stage to sing “Centerfield” with a guitar shaped like a Louisville Slugger that makes him look not unlike a softball coach wailing on a pretend guitar.

“ ‘Louie Louie’ wasn’t profound, you know; it was fun, and that’s good enough,” Fogerty says. True, and his songs such as “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” fall into a category of delightful diversion that he calls “good-time swamp rock.”

That is not the case with “Deja Vu,” a haunting song that Fogerty found as hard to ignore as a stubbed toe.

“I usually start with a title when I write and I go from there; the title gives you a theme and feel ... but on this song, it just jumped in my head and I started playing it. I dropped everything and grabbed a guitar.” The singer said he’s been walking the artist’s path long enough to know the rarity of such an instant road map. “This was a gift. This wasn’t something I was looking for.”

Fogerty looks to have much fun on stage. So a natural question would be why fans don’t hear from him more often. One reason is that the studio process has been a flummoxing one on this and other recent projects, and the life of a middle-aged and second-family father has shifted him into a different gear. He just doesn’t produce albums as fast as he used to.

CCR was a musical comet -- the band released a dizzying five albums between 1969 and 1970 and had seven hit singles. The music triumphed, even if the band itself seemed persistently underrated.

Perhaps the music’s unapologetic bayou-roots were too off-road for that era’s pop-star parade routes, but that musical imprint also gave the songs a timelessness.

From the days the band was a high school lark in El Cerrito, Calif., up through their hits with “Suzie Q,” “Proud Mary” and beyond, Fogerty was the taskmaster in the Revival’s circle of guitarist Tom Fogerty (John’s brother), bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford. But his pace has gone from an album every five months to maybe one every five years.

“There are things that have taken me off the path,” he says, “and it’s been a real struggle that I’m trying to figure out.” He declines to get into too much detail, but then describes the wheels-in-mud mishaps that come with labored studio revisions. “This album took seven months to record, which is a big improvement over the four years I spent or whatever on ‘Blue Moon Swamp.’ I learned the pitfalls.”

There’s also the time sopped up with life undertakings, like moving his family from California to Nashville in 1999 and then back west (“I’ve always lived in California, and I guess I had to again. I just feel like I belong in California”). His daughter, Kayley, 4, fills his schedule too, but he handles that with a serenity that “I just didn’t have as father the first time when I was 21, 22 and on the move.”

Once in a lifetime

Encores in life are natural for musicians, and Fogerty said that not only does the father role fit better now, he also finds new resonances in the CCR songs that he plays on the road. Singing “Fortunate Son” in the Concerts for Change fundraising shows leading to the election was heady stuff, and chiming in on “Born in the U.S.A.” with Springsteen or joining Michael Stipe at the mike for “People Have the Power” were moments “I really will never forget. I hope to play with all those guys again.”

But probably not in Concerts for Change, circa 2008.

“We never really said it, but I think we both knew and agreed that it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Fogerty said.

“I mean, you’d hate to think of it as a routine thing. These shows happened because it was an emergency. This wasn’t politics as usual. All of us did what we did because of this moment in time.”

Fogerty paused with a deep sigh. Springsteen, as much as or more than anyone, was an engine and symbol of the rock-as-campaign in 2004, moving beyond the team-up shows to stump and perform at Kerry’s side. “I would never want to speak for Bruce,” Fogerty said. “But I can say that the people involved in this from top to bottom didn’t think of it as something they’d be doing again. But, you know, they also thought Kerry would win.”