I haven’t been in a car in awhile, so I’d forgotten that there are three songs you can count on hearing on the radio on any drive through Michigan longer than an hour. “Glory Days,” “Jack and Diane,” and “Proud Mary.” Something maudlin but defiant about time moving forever forward is at the core of what rock music has always been about, and of these three classic rock tracks, I’ve always felt Creedence got the balance just right: “And I never lost one minute of sleeping, Worrying bout the way things might have been.”
Of course, Creedence also had the exceptional luck of having Ike and Tina cover their song two years after it was released, in a fantastic showstopper of a performance that converts the swamp lethargy of those turning wheels into burning hip gyrations, Tina spitting out the lyrics like firecrackers. I heard the cover first, and that version always sounds like definitive one.
Creedence makes great driving music, the riverboat/interstate analogy works perfectly to endow whatever mundane task your headed to with a glint of rebellion. But seeing a man with tight twists and a superman t-shirt turn it out with Tina’s version last night at a gay karaoke bar gave driving music another meaning entirely.
Ike and Tina start the song “nice on backup and easy,” Ike almost parodying Creedence by drawling out “rolling on the river” slow as molasses, before th band abruptly switches to an up-tempo dance version that jolts you out of your torpor and drives your body into ecstatic motion. Tina repeating the lyrics in both idioms lifts the spirit up through a sort of parallax view on life’s vicissitudes: two equally valid viewpoints on a single phenomenon that cannot ever be reconciled with each other.
I always know which one I want to see, hear and feel.
