It’s 10:30 on a Sunday night and I just came inside from sitting on the big tin roof of my building. From the roof I have a great view of the sky and the huge Norfolk Pines in the Esplanade Park right across the street. Oh, and in between those nice trees I had a perfect view of John Fogarty (CCR lead singer) playing live for over an hour.

Fogarty was the last act of the annual Blues & Roots Music Festival held in the Esplanade ever year. There were thousands of people there and a two-day pass to enjoy the 40 or so bands costs you $200, luckily all I had to do was climb out a window and crawl across about 20 feet of rooftop to get a great view of the main stage. Fogarty played about a dozen songs including Proud Mary, Bad Moon Rising, Fortunate Son, Have you ever seen the rain, and a pretty cool version of Elvis’ Blue Suede Shoes. It was a pretty good set with all of his famous songs and from looking at the big screens next to the stage it was easy to tell that despite being at least 60, he was still singing and playing all of the tough solos on his own.

This is Fogarty while playing Have you ever seen the Rain? Not the greatest picture but it was dark and hard to get a good picture.

Just a picture to show how close we were. That is one of the girls from Saint Mary’s along with some random drunk guy who somehow climbed up on the roof to join us. He was dancing up a storm and almost fell and killed himself about 4 times.

I didn’t get a chance to see too many other bands from the roof becuase I had a pretty busy weekend packed with other things to do, but I did catch O.A.R. who was one of the opening acts on Saturday. It was their first time ever playing live in Australia, I was kind of shocked at how small their crowd was but it was very early on the first day and they aren’t a very popluar band down under at this point.

Some other big names that were around were KT Tunstall - who sings the “Suddenly I see” song (which I didn’t know until yesterday) - Buddy Guy, Sugarland, Donovan Frankenreiter, Don McLean and Damian Marley. There were also a bunch of popular Australian bands that I have never heard of. All in all, it was pretty cool to here live performances of famous songs playing from my bedroom window for the past two days.

This is our crew hanging out during the concert with me rocking out in the middle, a few more filtered in by the end of the show.