Fortunate Son

The Zoo Crew has got a real roadhouse kicker spinning for the Zoo Freaks, and it is The Dead Daisies taking a run at "Fortunate Son" off the 2016 album Make Some Noise. This is the kind of record that smells like a warm amp and a stack of vinyl that has been dragged from town to town. The song started life with Creedence Clearwater Revival on Willy and the Poor Boys back in 1969, a John Fogerty protest number that hit number three on the American charts that December and later landed at number 99 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs. Fogerty has said he knocked the thing out in about twenty minutes, which is a wild little fact when you hear how hard it still hits. The Daisies did not treat it like a museum piece. They put their own boots on it.

The story behind their version is pure band-bus logic. Guitarist Doug Aldrich told Metal Express Radio that the group had already been playing "Fortunate Son" live for a number of years before he was even in the lineup, and it always went over well on stage. They decided at the last minute to cut it for Make Some Noise, did it in two takes, and walked out pleased with the way it landed. John Corabi, who was singing on that record, told Bravewords they had been encoring with it on the tour the year before, mixed in with other covers like Deep Purple's "Hush," Free's "All Right Now," and the odd Beatles tune. He could not even remember who first brought the Creedence song up. It just kept working. In an interview with The Aquarian, Corabi said the song was written in the Vietnam era as a protest number, but it is one of those tunes you can play anywhere in the world and people get it. He was not guessing. Talking to the Italian press around the same time, he said they had already been pulling it out in America, Russia, and England, and the crowd sang every single word from memory. That is why it made the album. They were still fans first, paying respects to the bands they grew up on, the same way the Stones and Grand Funk used to drop covers without overthinking it. A funny side note from those same interviews is that a lot of folks at the shows thought their Who cover, "Join Together," was a Daisies original and kept complimenting them on it.

Make Some Noise itself was built the old way, fast and in the room. David Lowy told The Aquarian they wrote the songs together in New York in twelve days, then headed to Nashville to record with producer Marti Frederiksen. Corabi has said the whole job, writing through tracking, took about forty-five days. Aldrich remembered five guys working it from start to finish, raw but tight, the kind of energy you can still hear. The lineup on that record was Corabi on vocals, Lowy and Aldrich on guitars, Marco Mendoza on bass, and Brian Tichy on drums. No keyboards this time around, which is why the album sits heavier than the one before it. They wanted a classic seventies kick-ass rock and roll record, and the songs told them where to go. "Fortunate Son" also turned up on the 2017 live album Live & Louder, and the band later cut it again as a single ahead of the 2019 covers set Locked and Loaded. Their own site still carries the story, noting that everybody in the Daisies camp loves this one, and that they put their own stamp on a track Fogerty wrote in twenty minutes.

The band that cut that record did not come out of a boardroom. It started in Sydney in 2012, when guitarist David Lowy and singer Jon Stevens got together after music man David Edwards reintroduced them. Stevens had already done time with Noiseworks and INXS. Lowy had been playing in garage bands since he was young, then spent years in the family business and as an award-winning acrobatic pilot, with earlier groups like Red Phoenix, Mink, and Doc Neeson's Angels under his belt. He has said he is basically the same kind of rock fan who shows up to the shows, and that the band was a long-running wish to play the music of his youth with a modern twist and a wall of electric guitars. They cut the self-titled debut in two weeks at Wishbone Studios in Los Angeles in 2013 with producer John Fields, then started hiring road-tested players. The first touring crew pulled in names like Richard Fortus, and the lineup has kept rotating ever since, with folks who have also played in Guns N' Roses, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Mötley Crüe, the Rolling Stones, and Thin Lizzy. Corabi came aboard in 2015 when Stevens could not make a run of dates in Cuba. He has said Lowy started the whole circus in Australia with Stevens, they wrote a record, then started calling friends. When Fortus and Dizzy Reed headed back to Guns N' Roses, Aldrich stepped in, and Fortus was the one who put his name forward. By the time of Make Some Noise, they were done being a loose project and were running as a solid band, scattered across the map but writing like a unit.

That is the spirit the Zoo Crew likes on the air at THE ZOO. A bunch of lifers who still get a charge out of a Fogerty song, cut it in two takes because the rooms already knew every line, and kept the amps loud enough for the back row. If you want the rest of the story straight from the camp, the official home is The Dead Daisies, where the bio still lists Make Some Noise among the records and the discography keeps the album right there with the rest of the catalog. The "Fortunate Son" write-up lives on the same site at Fortunate Son, and the album page is up at Make Some Noise. You can also find them on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Crank it, Zoo Freaks. This one was built for a long highway and a loud car.