BY STEVEN ROSEN

Featuring Eric Burdon & the Animals, Jack Bruce, Turtles, Melanie, Badfinger, Jonathan Edwards… Even if this touring festival is almost over, the word needs to get out – history needs to be recorded – about Hippiefest. It isn’t a goof. Not a nostalgic, kitschy novelty.

OK, sure, Melanie’s ragged charm today rests mostly in conjuring memories of when “Brand New Key” sounded cute and innocent on the radio, and Joey Molland’s Badfinger (he was its guitarist) is primarily a so-so tribute band. The Turtles, whose pop songs are timelessly effervescent, have become a  Smothers Brothers variation with Flo and Eddie’s hilarious (and sometimes dirty) stage patter. And those tie-dyed T-shirts that the venue staff was wearing (as were many patrons) looked quite out of place on those aging bodies.

But the show’s lead acts – Jack Bruce and Eric Burdon – have no cobwebs on them, musically or culturally. Their material isn’t dated or poppy-cutesy or mired in the sentimental love-peace vibe that Hippiefest tries to conjure with its advertising and marketing.

If anything, the dark, bluesy and sometimes-angry edge to their signature 1960s-era songs pointed to where rock – and society – was going in the future. And if either is tired of playing that material, they didn’t show it. The sets were ferociously, defiantly authoritative.

Bruce, who took the stage at the outdoor pavilion in suburban Dayton as the sun was setting, is the only member of Cream who can do its songs live without the others present. He was the singer and co-writer, besides being a muscular, sensitive bassist who refuses to let a lead guitarist drown out his supple playing. In his set here, he also played short, jazz-like bass solos during opener “Sunshine of Your Love” and closer “White Room.”

His set list, like his bittersweet and pining vocals, highlighted how rueful, even melancholy, Cream’s best material was. So many Cream imitators have churned out formulaic blues-rock that you forget how subtly evolving its songs’ melodies were, how mysterious the lyrics and imagery.

Bruce, in perfect voice and lean and fit, did “I Feel Free,” a still-strangely disquieting evocation of freedom, and  “We’re Going Wrong” in addition to the opener and closer, plus churning versions of “Sittin’ On Top of the World” and “Politician.” His guitarist, Godfrey Townsend, provided fluid and emotional passages that recalled when Eric Clapton, as Cream guitarist, played with a sense of creative, interpretive purpose, rather than just the lots of notes of his solo career.

To be honest, I had trepidation about Burdon before he stomped onstage after dark with his terrific six-piece band, which included Hilton Valentine on guitar and Red Young on B-3 organ. (This Animals was not the band from the sixties, although Valentine was, along with Burdon, in that original lineup.) I’d seen a recent appearance on a PBS fundraiser; the voice was good but the energy level only middlin’. Was he too old for this? (He’s 67.)

But the white-haired, sunglass-wearing Burdon, while chunkier than in his hit days, prowled and stomped around the stage as if leading a military charge. If anything, the volume and clarity of his growling voice were stronger than on the recorded versions of his hits, and his tendency to scat and otherwise vocally improvise revealed him to be a mature blues/pop/jazz singer who can still rock like hell.

There is also an I-told-you-so nature to his hard-life-lived songs that fuels their immediacy. When he sang of his father’s hair turning gray in opener “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place,” he pointed to his own. On the resonant “When I Was Young,” he added a tribute to singers popular in the 1960s. “It’s My Life” still sounded mad; “House of the Rising Sun” still mournful.

And the encore, the anti-war “Sky Pilot,” flowered into a full-force anthem live, stripped free of the recorded version’s baroque ornamentation. Only “San Franciscan Nights” came off musty. But Burdon’s heart-of-darkness, fiddle-driven version of “Paint It Black” was a revelation. It could make Mick Jagger envious.

There were moments when you sensed Burdon found the groove in one of his songs and wanted to sustain it, marching “into the mystic” with it like his contemporary, Van Morrison. The Hippiefest format didn’t allow it. But on the basis of this show and this band, Burdon deserves the kind of showcase bookings and venues where an audience demands that kind of soul-searching of him. He’s certainly ready to provide it.