ROCK icon John Fogerty is madder than a hoodoo- chasin’ hound dog at the fortunate sons who send others to war. His righteous anger toward the Bush administration and the war in Iraq comes through forcefully in the song “I Can’t Take It No More,” one of 14 powerful tracks on his dynamic new CD “Revival.”
“That’s exactly how I feel,” the 62-year-old Fogerty tells The Post in an interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I’ve had it up to here.”
In 1969, when he was the 24-year-old leader of the swamp-rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fogerty’s song “Fortunate Son” became an anthem for Vietnam War protesters. Time has done little to alter his left-leaning views.
“When Vietnam ended, my feeling was: ‘Let’s just make damn sure this doesn’t happen again,’ ” Fogerty says.
“Then we invade Iraq. It just kills me. Shame on the older people to allow a president to send our children out to die.”
The notion that this world could be better place if our priorities changed is a recurring theme in “Revival.” In the leadoff single “Don’t You Wish It Was True,” Fogerty dreams of an Eden in which “everybody had enough/the world wasn’t quite so rough.”
Fogerty calls the idyllic tune “the most unforgettable song I’ve ever written” – no meager claim for a Grammy-winning perfectionist whose résumé includes “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” and “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”
The energy of those earlier songs echoes through “Revival,” both in catchy guitar riffs (“I want to be able to rock out and have a guitar solo,” Fogerty explains) and the artist’s trademark timbre. Fogerty still twists lyrics like “make a poor man feel like a king” into “megga po’ mayen feelikka kaing.”
The similarity in sound is most intentional in “Creedence Song,” about a musician inspired by Fogerty’s early work. It represents a dramatic about-face for Fogerty, who for years refused to play his older songs because of a long-running legal dispute with his record label.
With this new album, Fogerty says he went back to “the center of myself” and is glad to revisit his rock roots.
“I’m a pretty happy guy, happy to make a song about my past,” he says. “I don’t walk around thinking about all that bad stuff like I used to.”
The album’s most personal tune is “Broken Down Cowboy,” Fogerty’s self-deprecating ballad to his wife, Julie, who he says has “pushed the bitterness out of me” since they met in 1986.
Most work-in-progress songs are “dreadful,” Fogerty says, noting his post-Creedence solo career that began in 1973 has “been quite a struggle, and sometimes downright depressing.” But “Cowboy” was different.
“I knew instantly that this was really good,” he recalls.
“The words came out of me. I was writing a bit that afternoon somewhat teary-eyed.”
Fogerty’s 18-city tour in support of “Revival” begins Nov. 2 at Hammerstein Ballroom.