When Creedence Clearwater Revival broke up fifty years in the past this fall, they had been critically revered, massively influential, and widespread nearly past perception. Billboard credit the band with 9 High Ten singles in simply two and a half years, from early 1969 to the summer season of ’71—a tremendous stat, however one that also undercounts the band’s success. The fanciful twang of “Down on the Nook” and the blue-collar rage of “Lucky Son” had been every tremendously widespread, however, as a result of they had been pressed on flip sides of the identical 45, Billboard counted them as just one hit file. C.C.R. additionally has probably the most No. 2 hits—5—of any band that by no means scored a No. 1. In 1969, as John Lingan notes in his new e-book, “A Song for Everyone,” Creedence Clearwater Revival even reportedly achieved “one thing that no different group had accomplished in America since 1964: They outsold the Beatles.”
Someway, the sheer scope of what they achieved has at all times appeared underappreciated. “Everybody has probably the most fucking respect for the Beatles,” C.C.R.’s drummer, Doug Clifford, complained to Hit Parader, including, “Nicely, we’re the most important American group.” Granted, Clifford’s remark displays a way of grievance that the band—consisting of Clifford, bassist Stu Cook dinner; guitarist Tom Fogerty; and singer-guitarist-songwriter-producer John Fogerty, Tom’s youthful brother—had nursed for years. They emerged from a transformative Bay Space music scene that included Sly and the Household Stone and Jefferson Airplane. However, as a result of they carried out notably sober and straight, and had been all married—and particularly as a result of they favored two-to-three-minute-long pop gems, tightly rehearsed, relatively than improvised jams—they had been perceived as squares even in their very own scene. Hip crowds on the Fillmore jokingly referred to them, Lingan writes, as “the Boy Scouts of Rock and Roll.” When the critic Ralph J. Gleason referred to the band as “a superb instance of the Third Technology of San Francisco bands,” they felt disrespected once more: they’d been performing collectively within the space, first because the Blue Velvets, then because the Golliwogs, because the late fifties. Look carefully on the cowl of their 1970 album “Cosmo’s Manufacturing unit,” and also you’ll see an embittered, handmade motivational poster tacked up of their rehearsal area: “third GENERATION.”
However even admiring critics acknowledged that the general public picture of the band wasn’t equal to their greatness. “For all Creedence’s immense reputation, John Fogerty has by no means made it as a media hero, and the group has by no means crossed the road from best-selling rock band to cultural phenomenon,” Ellen Willis wrote on this journal, in 1972. Willis attributed this partly to the truth that Fogerty projected “intelligence and moderation,” relatively than, as an illustration, “freakiness, messianism, intercourse, violence.” (This was additionally, she famous, “most likely the primary cause I’ve come to favor him to Mick Jagger,” and partly why C.C.R. had develop into her favourite rock-and-roll band.)
There have been different causes, too: “Proud Mary,” the primary of the band’s a number of signature tunes, nearly instantly turned higher often known as Ike and Tina Turner’s signature tune. At Woodstock, C.C.R. took the stage between the Grateful Useless and Janis Joplin, however, after Fogerty deemed the expertise unsatisfactory, they had been not noted of the following live performance movie, and off its soundtrack. Fogerty’s bandmates had been steadily postpone by his imperiousness: he’d instituted a strict no-encores coverage, as an illustration, which translated to much less enjoyable for viewers and band alike. Tom Fogerty stop the band first, bored with “eternally strumming” rhythm guitar—as Lingan describes the state of affairs—for a gaggle he used to entrance. And, by the autumn of 1972, exhausted from near-constant touring and a recording tempo that produced seven albums in lower than 5 years, Cook dinner and Clifford had had sufficient, too. John Fogerty agreed with them. “I don’t need to do that anymore,” he instructed one in all his bandmates, in response to Lingan.
Creedence stopped, however Creedence’s music saved proper on going; “Chronicle,” a greatest-hits assortment launched 4 years after the band pulled the plug, has immediately offered greater than ten million copies. In the meantime, C.C.R.’s songs—“Inexperienced River,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?,” “Born on the Bayou,” and “Dangerous Moon Rising,” amongst others—have gained generations of recent followers by means of relentless soundtrack appearances. With only a sharp, swampy chord or two, Creedence’s music has effortlessly conjured what we consider because the sixties for viewers of “The Huge Chill” and “The Huge Lebowski,” “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Forrest Gump.” (The band’s portentous “Up Across the Bend” is deployed in the latest season of “Stranger Things.”)
This has helped maintain the band’s reputation, however it has additionally had a approach of fixing the music to a selected time and place. Noting the socially and politically risky second that impressed the Creedence songbook—that fraught stretch when the sixties dissolved into the seventies—critics have tended to characterize John Fogerty as a songwriter foretelling nothing however doom. Dave Marsh likened him to an Outdated Testomony prophet; Willis heard a “fatalism finest expressed in his repeated use of rain as a metaphor for social ills.” Such gloomy characterizations weren’t mistaken, however Lingan explains a lot of C.C.R.’s attraction with a easy reminder: melody and groove matter, too. Fogerty’s lyrics had been routinely cataclysmic, however they had been at all times expressed through sunny, sing-along choruses and the band’s danceable, roots-forward rock and roll. Lingan calls it “feel-good tunes for feel-bad occasions.”
C.C.R.’s temporary window as a working band coincided with the years during which rock music was busy splintering, innovating, into all kinds of recent subgenres: progressive rock, psychedelic rock, nation rock, glam rock, bubblegum, exhausting rock and heavy steel, funk, energy pop, jam bands, and delicate singer-songwriter sorts. Creedence’s backward-glancing strategy might have appeared spinoff; their chief heroes weren’t Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix however Little Richard, whose sound they swiped for “Travelin’ Band,” and Chuck Berry, whose comedian storytelling Fogerty channelled for “It Got here Out of the Sky.” However the reality is that, by retooling old-school rock and soul for a brand new period, they helped invent one other new subgenre, one that’s maybe less-heralded however nonetheless thriving: roots-rock. A big swath of the artists we now time period Americana may pretty look to Creedence as forebears.
And, although the band’s songs are sometimes diminished to beloved signifiers of a storied way back, the C.C.R. catalogue feels poised to be retconned for right-now wants. Take “Commotion,” during which Fogerty howls about how we’re all “Rushin’ to the treadmill, rushin’ to get dwelling,”and take into consideration our ongoing Great Resignation. Or “Tombstone Shadow.” “Each time I get some excellent news, ooh / There’s a shadow on my again,” Fogerty sings. It’s good for doom-scrolling Twitter, ready for the subsequent assault on democracy to pattern. And there’s the well-known trio of ominous climate songs: “Dangerous Moon Rising,” “Who’ll Cease the Rain,” and “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” Fogerty wrote all three of them proper across the authentic Earth Day, and every one works climate metaphors nearly too on-the-nose for the climate-change cataclysm at hand. “I hear hurricanes a-blowin’,” Fogerty sings, on “Dangerous Moon Rising.” After which: “Hope you might be fairly ready to die.”
Doom and gloom certainly. However there’s at all times hope in a tragic tune that makes you need to sing alongside. There’s extra hope nonetheless in a tune that conjures up you to hitch voices with different victims. Subsequent month, “Creedence Clearwater Revival on the Royal Albert Corridor,” a beforehand unreleased dwell recording from 1970, might be issued, accompanied by “Travelin’ Band,” a documentary narrated by Jeff Bridges. Maybe the time has even come after we can see C.C.R. for the innovators they had been to start with.
Final yr, the singer Miko Marks and her band the Resurrectors—they get categorized as Americana however roots-rock works as effectively—closed their EP, “Race Information,” with a model of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lengthy as I Can See the Gentle.” They carry out the half-century-old ballad with zero nostalgia. The state of affairs and particulars are all very normal however Marks’s tone is pressing. The street is darkish. There’s hassle behind and she or he is aware of, we all know, worse troubles lie forward. She appears to lock eyes with ours—and we’re off, assured that collectively we are going to both make it again dwelling or we are going to construct a brand new one. “Lengthy as I Can See the Gentle” has been beloved for a very long time even because it appeared trapped in a particular previous. Nowadays, although, C.C.R.’s songbook can really feel freshly freed—as if these outdated songs had been ready for us all alongside to indicate up and want them once more in current tense. ♦
