BOULDER COUNTY — Adam Perry resisted playing in a tribute band for many years. The lifelong alt-country-rock performer found a new perspective on tribute bands, however, after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I remember just thinking, people wanna have fun,” recalls Perry, “and they don’t want as much of that energy of convincing you that you’re great and important and you’re gonna make it. That really changed things for me.”
In response, he started Rolling Harvest, a tribute group focusing on the discographies of Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Not only did it encourage everyone to have fun performing this music, but it also allowed Perry to start a group with local musicians he admires.
“Bob Dylan and Neil Young both literally have thousands of songs,” says Perry on Rolling Harvest’s focus. “There’s never gonna be a time where any of us say, ‘Well, we’ve played all of Bob Dylan and Neil Young.’ No matter how much of a fan you are of either artist, you can always find new stuff you didn’t know about.”
However, with a larger lineup of performers, typically six to seven each performance, Rolling Harvest found it harder to take gigs with every member’s schedules lined up.
To combat that problem, four members of Rolling Harvest—Perry, Hunter Stone, Jason Patton, and Fred “Freddy” Reisen—have started the group Dear Creedence, focusing on the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
“I think my experience is the same as a lot of people,” Perry says about his first time listening to Creedence. “As soon as I heard it as a kid, I’m like, ‘This must be some authentic, amazing band from Louisiana or Muscle Shoals or something.’ The more that you learn about Creedence, these are, like, four dudes who grew up in the East Bay, in the suburbs in El Cerrito.
“I can’t think of another artist who wrote as many songs that could not be farther from what his experience in life was,” continues Perry about John Fogerty in particular. “It’s funny. It’s this guy with this little Beatles haircut growing up in the Berkeley area, and he’s writing, ‘I never saw the good side of the city until I hitched a ride on a riverboat’ and ‘I was born on the bayou.’”
Perry emphasizes a different impact that Creedence has left compared to Young and Dylan. Where Young and Dylan have a generally beloved body of work with a lesser emphasis on hits, Creedence’s body of work consists of many radio hits embraced by the masses, something that allows Creedence to have a different kind of fun than in Rolling Harvest performances.
“The four of us, we’re a unit, and I think that comes out in the music, too,” says Perry about their dynamic. “We’re having so much fun, and we can also mess up and laugh about it, and it actually enhances the show.”
Dear Creedence will perform at Avery Brewing Company, located at 4910 Nautilus Court N., Boulder, on Friday, October 9, 2026, starting at 6 p.m. You can find Dear Creedence on Facebook.
