Sunday Music – As Long As I Can See The Light

Posted on Sun 05/01/2022 by TonyfromOz

By Anton Lang ~

Today’s music video is As Long As I Can See The Light and the song is sung here by John Fogerty and My Morning Jacket.

Link to Video at You Tube

This video was posted to You Tube by Guenter Mayer

When it comes to music, I’m pretty much old school. In ninety nine cases out of a hundred, I prefer the original song performed by the original artist or band, rather than a cover by another artist or band, or a rehash of the original many years after the original. On some occasions though, you hear a revival of an old song and it snaps your head back, and that’s what happened to me when I heard this song during this past week on a TV show I was watching. Luckily, the text I could look up at the bottom of the screen told me who it was, and when I saw it was indeed the original writer of the song, John Fogerty, and backed up by a band called My Morning Jacket. All I had to do then was chase up the song, and thanks to the Internet these days, that is so much easier.

I knew the original of this song, because it was on one of my original LPs (probably one in the first dozen of them in fact) that I purchased when I started to get into music, and this record was Cosmo’s Factory by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and that album was probably one of the best selling albums of 1970/71. It topped the album charts here in Australia for many weeks, and had two Double Sided Singles which both went to Number One on the Singles charts as well, and this song was one of them, starting out as the B Side, but actually getting more airplay than the A Side, Lookin’ Out My Back Door. I lost my copy of that album a couple of years later in unfortunate circumstances. I was in the Royal Australian Air Force at the time, and I was driving home from the Base near Newcastle where I was stationed at to my home on The Gold Coast 500 miles to the North. On this trip I actually had a passenger with me, and the car I owned was small Toyota Corolla. The luggage for four weeks holidays for two people was more than would fit in the boot, and as packed as that boot was, we also needed space on the back seat as well. I had two zip up vinyl folios which each held a dozen LP albums, and they were on the back seat. My passenger packed some extra things in last, and he moved one case of those albums off the seat and onto the flat panel behind that rear seat, under the rear window, and I didn’t know he did this, and I couldn’t see in the rear view mirror as it was sitting a little below the top of the seat. We left at Midday, in the days of Summer, for the drive North, and that pack of a dozen LPs sat there with the Sun bearing down on that pack for a further six hours or so. When I checked the following morning, I saw that pack on the shelf and feared the worst, soon verified when I checked the albums. Every one of them, all twelve were warped, bent, crazed, and utterly ruined. Oh well, put it down to bad luck I suppose. Cosmo’s Factory was one of those twelve albums I lost that day, along with a couple of Dylans, a couple of Bee Gees, two Beatles Best of albums, and some others that I didn’t miss. I actually didn’t replace the Creedence album, and in fact, I only replaced one of the Dylans, and one of the Bee Gees albums, so the others were just lost, but I had already had at least a couple of years enjoyment out of them.

This latest version of this song Long As I Can See The Light is from John Fogerty’s ninth studio album, Wrote A Song For Everyone, and what surprised me most was that this album was released in 2013, now almost nine years ago, surprising because I had never heard this version of the song before this week, and I suppose that is reasonable considering the album, while relatively successful here in Australia, would not have been readily available, and the songs most probably not played much on radio, let alone any radio station I might have been listening to at the time in Rockhampton, a long way from the Capital Cities where there are so many radio stations,

All the songs from the album were written by John, but what he did here with this album was to record each song with a different artist or band. This has been done before by a number of artists, but this is very clever here on John’s part, because he recorded each song with a different artist or band, he titled the album as Wrote A Song For Everyone, and why that was a clever title because of all the different artists for each song, it is also a song he wrote and performed with his original band, Creedence, back in 1969, and was included on the album Green River, that bands third album.

This latest album has 14 songs, all written by John, and most from his days with Creedence, his solo career, and a couple of new songs. This particular song was recorded with the American rock band My Morning Jacket, who I have never heard of before, but they add an element of hard rock to what was originally a poetic song with a distinct Blues feel. John’s voice is a lot rougher than it used to be back when the song was originally recorded, but that roughness adds to the song I think. On the original back in 1970, John played a lead section on electric piano, and also on Saxophone, while on this song, there are two distinct solos, both done with electric guitar, and I also think that adds something to the song as well, as that second solo has two electric guitars, and coming as I do from the 60s and 70s, I just love a good guitar solo.

The album was released in 2013, and was released on John’s 68th birthday, amazing that these old musicians just keep on keeping on.

Ah, how times change ….. even though good music lives on forever.

Anton Lang uses the screen name of TonyfromOz, and he writes at this site, PA Pundits International on topics related to electrical power generation, from all sources, concentrating mainly on Renewable Power, and how the two most favoured methods of renewable power generation, Wind Power and all versions of Solar Power, fail comprehensively to deliver levels of power required to replace traditional power generation. His Bio is at this link.