BY FRED SHUSTER >MUSIC WRITER

One day some 40 years ago, John Fogerty sat back in his small Berkeley apartment, took another sip of coffee and glanced at the words to a song he'd just written.

The tune was about a domestic washerwoman who did her job with unusual commitment, but something about the chugging rhythm made him think instead of a New Orleans riverboat.

A few word changes later, Fogerty had his first pop classic. "Proud Mary" was an instant standard.

While events haven't always been that easy for the former Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman, his music never lost that paddle wheel rhythm, a sound that evokes the Mississippi River - even though when he wrote "Proud Mary," the Bay Area native had never ventured farther east than Montana.

Southern swamp pop, Memphis soul, country and gospel are still the sounds that inspire. By staying true to his musical roots, and owning one of the most instantly recognizable raspy voices in rock, the singer-songwriter has carved out a place in the pop pantheon.

"I'm flabbergasted the Creedence stuff has lasted this long," he said. "When we started, I used to tell people I wanted to make records that'll still get played in 10 years. Because in 1968, when I said that, you just wouldn't hear stuff made in 1958. I had this concept of a 10-year life span for songs."

Creedence, which bubbled to the surface after a string of dates at San Francisco's Fillmore West the summer after the Summer of Love, only lasted five years, but managed 14 hit singles in the period from 1968 through 1972. Creedence numbers like "Green River," "Bad Moon Rising," "Fortunate Son," "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" and "Born on the Bayou" are as perennial as "Moon River."

Fogerty, who went on to a successful solo career, could have retired on the earnings of "Proud Mary" alone (he recently settled years of legal squabbling over the Creedence back catalog).

The song has been covered hundreds of times, most famously by Ike and Tina Turner, with subsequent versions by Elvis Presley, Jewel and Beyoncé, Prince, Conway Twitty and even "Star Trek" actor Leonard Nimoy.

"After I wrote it, I sat there thinking, `Oh my gosh, this is a standard,' " Fogerty, 62, said. "I was and still am a huge fan of songwriters. And to write songs that might have a life span of 10 years is still my goal."

Radio stations have been playing Fogerty for decades. At XM Satellite Radio's Americana channel, X Country, dozens of his songs, going back to the very first Creedence album, are on the play list.

"His music is real, it resonates," said X Country program director Jessie Scott. "He's remained true to the great American music forms - country, pop, blues and folk. What he does is unique. He doesn't pack his songs with a lot of extraneous stuff. You wind up with a lot of space and syncopation and that great voice of his."

Fogerty, undoubtedly wearing the usual flannel work shirt, jeans and black Gibson Les Paul guitar, will appear Friday at the Nokia Theatre, focusing on "Revival," his best set of songs in years. The band includes longtime John Mellencamp drummer Kenny Aronoff.

After a Beantown show a few weeks ago, the Boston Herald noted that Fogerty "looked and played like a man just paroled, supercharging through such early hits as the familiar stuttering riff of `Green River' and the hillbilly stomp of `Lookin' Out My Back Door' with fervor and pure joy."

Rooted in '50s rock 'n' roll, country and rockabilly, much of Fogerty's new material addresses his deep disappointment with the Bush administration and the Iraq war. In "I Can't Take It No More," Fogerty sings: "You know you lied about WMDs/You know you lied about the detainees ... I can't take it no more." Another song, "Long Dark Night," refers to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld as an unholy trinity.

Fogerty is at a loss to explain why so few young songwriters are speaking out about the state of things. One of his most highly regarded songs, "Fortunate Son," written when he was just 23, is sung from the perspective of a soldier who ends up having to fight in Vietnam because he's not a "senator's son" or a "fortunate one."

The enduring song was included in the film "Forrest Gump," in the computer game "Battlefield Vietnam" and in the recent action film "Live Free or Die Hard." Fogerty performed the song in front of President Clinton and a national TV audience on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the "America's Millennium" show on Dec. 31, 1999.

Raised in a liberal Berkeley household, Fogerty remembers being taken to folk music concerts on the university campus by his parents, where he'd hear Pete Seeger sing about events drawn from that day's newspaper.

"I'm a very political person, and I care about the other guy," Fogerty says. "It surprises me there's a deafening silence to what's going on. Iraq is a tragic mess, and I don't see any way out of it. I don't know what the answer is, but I'm fed up hearing Bush talking about staying the course.

"We're losing thousands of young American lives and throwing away billions of dollars, and the president is telling us everything's OK. Well, I for one don't buy any of it."

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Fred Shuster (818) 713-3676

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JOHN FOGERTY

>Where: Nokia Theatre, 777 Chick Hearn Court, Los Angeles.
>When: 8:15 p.m. Friday, Nov. 23.
>Tickets: $45 to $65. www.ticketmaster.com.

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The guitars of John Fogerty: How the Creedence leader learned to love the Les Paul