Together with its flipside “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” (they were released as dual A-sides), “Hey Tonight climbed as high as #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 when Creedence Clearwater Revival released it in 1971.
It was one of the band’s last hit singles and one of their best. So given Bruce Springsteen’s long-professed admiration for its songwriter John Fogerty, we might wonder why he’s never covered it in concert.
Except he has–five times, in fact. But you couldn’t have caught most of them unless your kid went to school with Bruce’s kids, because each performance was at one of the annual fundraising benefits for the Rumson Country Day School, and only parents of students were allowed to attend.
There was one exception, though. The first time Bruce performed “Hey Tonight” was in Sayreville, New Jersey, and if you were a John Eddie Fan you might have been there that night in October 1994 to catch Eddie’s set at The Playpen.
And if you stayed through the encores, you’d have been there when Eddie invited some singer-songwriter friends of his to join him on stage, and you’d have been stunned when those friends turned out to be Greg Kihn, Marshall Crenshaw, Elliott Murphy, and Bruce Springsteen.
With such an incredible array of talent on stage, whose songs did they choose to play? They chose all covers, of course, starting with CCR’s 1971 hit single.
It’s a hard-driving performance with traded vocals (we can clearly hear Bruce at the mic at times), and it was a great way to kick off the encore set. (See here and here for more of it.) Sadly, though, it was a one-off–at least for Bruce, who was still five years away from his next rock tour, and another three before he attempted “Hey Tonight” again at those RCDS benefits.
If we’re lucky, maybe a recording from one of those shows will surface one day.
Hey Tonight
First performed: October 21, 1994 (Sayreville, NJ)
Last performed: April 25, 2004 (Asbury Park, NJ)
