Quem Morreu Do Creedence Clearwater Revival?
John's leadership led to great success for the band. Their first, self-titled album as Creedence Clearwater Revival came out in 1968 and was a hit. In early 1969 the song "Proud Mary" went to number 2 on the Billboard Top 100 and paved the way for five more albums within three years, with a slew of hit singles that are still popular classic rock favorites today, including "Green River," "Bad Moon Rising," and "Down On The Corner."
John Fogerty fights Fantasy Records
Right in the middle of the creative roar, the stage manager pulled the plug on Fogerty’s amp, yelling that the band were wasting everyone’s time. “He said, ‘You’re not going anywhere anyhow,’” Fogerty recalled. “I looked at him and said, ‘Not going anywhere? Give me a year, pal.’”
The dream began in their high school music room as 12 year olds; John Fogerty was the lead singer and songwriter for Creedence Clearwater Revival, Doug Clifford the drummer and Stu Cook played piano, then bass.
“I don’t know that we ever made the jump,” admits Cook. “We were a garage band from our inception, and we worked hard at our craft. But I think we were at our best on a smaller stage, closer to an audience that was really paying attention. When you get on a stage that’s 40-feet wide, you kind of lose touch with each other. It’s harder to get the feeling across. It’s more of a spectacle. What’s going on in the audience, who can tell? And Woodstock was the epitome of that. My favourite quote about that show comes from Gregg Rolie: ‘It’s all hair and teeth after the first 20 rows.’”
Tom Fogerty admired his brother's talent, but John believed he was jealous
The band rallied behind Fogerty’s vision. Cook recalls, “We’d sit every morning before rehearsal, talking about the sound and direction of the band. John suggested that we really mine the roots of rural and urban American black music, which was our favourite kind of music anyhow. We’d all grown up together, listening to it for years. The whole thing of the south gave John great imagery to work with. John led, and each of us was there to do our part in putting this vision across.”
The first Fogerty song to really go someplace was Proud Mary. In a trick he’d repeat many times over, he struck a balance between unshakeable guitar riff, pop smarts and screaming rock’n’roll. “It was John’s first real Tin Pan Alley kind of tune,” remarks Cook, “with a beginning, middle and end. And the track has a very laid-back feel, very greasy. A really deep groove.”
John has continued to record and perform
As 1970 dawned, Creedence motored through their frequent differences of opinion and kept the radio hits coming. (Is there a more electrifying intro in rock than Up Around The Bend or a better feelgood tune than Lookin’ Out My Back Door?) They also brought their American swamp thing to ecstatic crowds in Europe and Australia, enjoying many rock-star moments along the way – hanging out with the Moody Blues, making a narrow Hard Day’s Night-style car escape from rabid fans in Germany and partying with Led Zeppelin.
But the Avalon stage manager wasn’t alone in his low estimation. “We were like Rodney Dangerfield – we didn’t get any respect,” Stu Cook tells Classic Rock with a laugh. “All these people in San Francisco, like the Dead and the Airplane, who’d been in folk bands and were now hanging out at Golden Gate Park and the Haight-Ashbury, they had their own thing going. We were out of sync, the guys from the East Bay who had a completely different take on the kind of music we wanted to play. We’d been working hard at it since the late 50s. While we had a psychedelic moment with Suzie Q, which gave us a little bit of cred as a band you could trip out to, most of our stuff was focused on singles. For years, wherever we played – state fairs, frat parties – it was singles. That was our specialty. John was a huge fan of the three-minute-or-less story.”
Tom Fogerty Leaves Creedence Clearwater Revival
At Woodstock, CCR took the stage at 3am, after the Grateful Dead’s marathon jam had lulled most to sleep. Fogerty recalled in Bad Moon Rising, “It was like a painting of a Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud.” He zoomed in on one guy flicking his Bic a quarter-mile back and played to him.
Putting it across was hard work, but Creedence applied themselves with fervour. From their proto-grunge flannel-and-jeans to their drug-free lifestyle, they were like working-class soldiers pledged in the service of swamp rock. Nowhere was this discipline more effective than in the studio.
Cook adds, “Even way back then when recording was primitive, it cost a lot of money to go into a studio. More than we could afford. So we never thought of it as place where you experimented. We were really focused and well-rehearsed. When we went in the studio, we expected a result and we got the result. Every time we went in, we got better. So by the time we started having hits, we were super efficient. We could lock into those laid-back, greasy grooves instantly.”
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Fogerty was good to his word. By mid-1969, Creedence were the hottest band in America. In that year alone, they accomplished more than most groups in their career. They had four Top 10 singles, three of which reached No.2. They released three classic albums, including Green River and Bayou Country, and played for close to a million people at arenas and festivals, including a headlining slot at Woodstock. Billboard awarded them Top Singles Artist, while Rolling Stone named them Best American Band. Give me a year, indeed.
“I put the music in the swamp where, of course, I had never lived,” Fogerty continued. “I was trying to be a pure writer, no guitar in hand, visualising and looking at the bare walls of my apartment. Chasing down a hoodoo. Hoodoo is a magical, mystical, spiritual, non-defined apparition, like a ghost or a shadow, not necessarily evil, but otherworldly.”
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He found the hoodoo in evergreen classics like Born On The Bayou (and put the ‘hoodoo’ into the lyric), Green River and Bad Moon Rising. Even the titles sound like they could double as plays by Tennessee Williams. Earthy, mysterious and, for a world that wasn’t yet globally connected, exotic and alluring.
“I was so excited that I was playing in front of a real audience in San Francisco, like any kid would be,” John Fogerty told American Songwriter this year. “I was just charged. And suddenly, I was inspired. It just kind of happened at once, and I turned to the band and said, ‘Just do this. Just follow this!’ And I just started screaming at the top of my range, just a melody and vowel sounds and consonants. It’s all sort of primitive, but I’m making noises. This is exactly how I write songs. This was happening right there. And then suddenly, nothing.”
“My basic philosophy is that you’ve got to have it sounding like what you want right there in the room,” Fogerty said in Bad Moon Rising. “That’s where it all happens. Then it’s up to the engineer and the producer – who was me – to get it down on tape.