Creedence Clearwater tribute show closes FST summer cabaret series

In the home where he grew up, musical performer Vaden Thurgood recalls his family “loved The Beatles, but it was well known that Creedence Clearwater Revival was our band.”

That puts a little context into the concert show he created “Creedence Clearwater Remixed,” which comes to Florida Studio Theatre’s Goldstein Cabaret this week for a run that continues through Oct. 22.

It’s not a traditional tribute show, with a group of singers and musicians slavishly recreating the sound of an original band. Thurgood describes it as “a musical tribute to the band with their greatest hits interwoven into the timeline of their lives. It’s a historical retelling of CCR’s journey, mostly focusing on John Fogerty being the impetus for the band.”

Thurgood, who previously performed in “The Jersey Tenors” and “The Jersey Tenors: Part II” at FST, will be joined by a rotating group of performers who will be highlighting some of the band’s greatest hits, including “Proud Mary,” “Fortunate Son,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” and more.

Those titles are among the group’s biggest hits, but Thurgood said “The No. 1 response we get after a show is people coming up to say, one, I didn’t know they wrote all those and, two, I didn’t know I knew all those songs.”

The band got its start in 1959 as The Blue Velvets with Fogerty, and junior high school friends Doug Clifford and Stu Cook, playing with John’s older brother, Tom. Five years later, they were known as Vision and the Golliwogs, which became Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1968.

That’s when they joined forces with Saul Zaentz of Fantasy Records “who made them sign one of the worst contracts in music history,” Thurgood said. It essentially required Fogerty to keep churning out songs to meet his contractual obligations.

Three years later, Tom Fogerty, departed the group leading to increasing tension and the eventual break-up of the band a year later. 

“John always claimed no one put in any effort but him. They claimed John was stifling them with control, the kind that makes you want to punch someone in the face,” Thurgood said. The band tried to make deals with John “That said you’re going to do it our way or we’re out. My sense is that at some point he realized it’s all going to fall apart and the band splits, Fantasy Records lets the other guys go and put John into indentured servitude.”

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Still, the band produced dozens of hit songs, many of which became standards of the rock era.

Thurgood will be sharing the stage over the course of the run with a variety of performers with theater backgrounds, including Krista Buccellato, Melanie Burg, Nino Ruggeri, Dan Faber, Adam Machart, Ian Underwood and Correy West. Faber appeared in “Mack the Knife: The Bobby Darin Songbook” at FST.

His show had its debut in 2018, after developing the project for a year, and he knew early on from hearing a lot of other tribute groups “that there’s no way, without a lot of external effort, of someone who is going to create the sound perfectly the same. We didn’t want to try to make a carbon copy of their sound, we wanted people to experience something different.”

Aside from pandemic shutdowns, the show has been regularly booked across the country with a lot of one-night corporate gigs, but Sarasota is a rare opportunity to play the show for an extended period of time.

“It’s a beautiful thing to have a sit down like Sarasota. We will get this rare opportunity nine times a week to gauge reactions of the audience, how they’re responding, how we talk to them. It’s a perfect training ground.”

‘Creedence Clearwater Remixed’

Created by Vaden Thurgood. Runs Aug. 22-Oct. 22, Florida Studio Theatre Goldstein Cabaret, 1241 N. Palm Ave., Sarasota. $18-$39. 941-366-9000; floridastudiotheatre.org

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: CCR tribute show goes beyond the hits at FST cabaret