Thompson Creedence Clearwater Revival

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78952-427-7
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

Creedence Clearwater Revival were a San Francisco band of the 1960s that had nothing to do with Human Be Ins, Timothy Leary, or the Summer of Love. They were, for a time, the most popular band in the US but never scored a number one hit. They were headliners at Woodstock but didn't appear in the film or on the soundtrack LP. They shared a radical 'back to basics' sensibility with The Band but were not embraced by the emerging rock press with anywhere near the same enthusiasm. While the punks were hunting dinosaur bands to extinction in 1977, Richard Hell covered one of their songs on his debut album. In the 1980s, as their songs became staples of 'classic rock' radio, they were revered by underground bands like The Gun Club, The Minutemen and The Scientists. As Butch said to Sundance, 'Who are those guys?'
In this book, a track-by-track analysis of all the band's recorded output, Tony Thompson rolls up the sleeves on his plaid shirt and prepares to answer the big questions. Who's Jody? What is chooglin'? Where is Green River? Why can't the singer leave Lodi? Who was the fortunate son? Is the bathroom on the right?

Tony Thompson is a Canadian writer based in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Doors on track (Sonicbond 2021), Summer of Monsters (Walker Books 2014), and Shakespeare: The Most Famous Man in London (Black Dog Books 2009). His articles on books, music and education have appeared in The Age, The Australian, The Daily Review Australia, toppermost.co.uk and Eureka Street. He is a well-regarded speaker and has been a regular guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival and other literary events throughout Australia. He plays blues harmonica with great enthusiasm.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Thompson, Tony

Leseproben

Chapter 2

The Creedence Sound: Players, Influences, and Precursors

There is no one Creedence sound any more than there is one Rolling Stones sound or a single Beatles style. On every one of their seven albums, CCR experimented with different genres from song to song. Yet there is no mistaking one of their songs when it comes on the radio or a playlist. There is a difference between ‘Born on the Bayou’, for example, and ‘Have You Ever Seen The Rain?’ but there is something, a particular quality, that identifies them as CCR songs.

Until their sixth and penultimate release, Pendulum, few other instruments are heard on Creedence albums. The ‘Buddy Holly’ formula – two guitars, bass, drums – is all that you are hearing on the majority of their 60 or so songs. By late 1960s standards, that qualified as minimalist in rock and roll and it set them apart. John Fogerty was a versatile and inventive guitar player, but he couldn’t have created the range of Creedence sounds alone.

The Players

Doug Clifford, drums

He is an underrated drummer and a key part of the Creedence sound. In 2013, John Fogerty recorded several Creedence songs with other acts for an album called Wrote A Song For Everyone. It has some charming moments, but I defy you to listen to any of the songs without feeling an immediate need to hear the original. There is something about Clifford and Fogerty’s chemistry that is missing in the updated versions. Clifford was never only a timekeeper. He’s following Fogerty’s vocal and lead guitar work at every step. There are great drummers and there are drummers who listen. Clifford is the latter. His timing, his ability to play rockabilly rhythms, and his poignant rolls are all integral.

Stu Cook, bass

His bass work is also underrated. Cook grew into the job. He was always a rock-solid part of the rhythm section, but by the Willie and the Poor Boys LP, a much more melodic side begins to emerge. Stu never overplays. He is part of that elite group in rock and roll of ‘smart’ bass players. Like Clifford, he is a listener who locates his place in the arrangement. He can fill it up or he can step back. The rockabilly style comes naturally, but he also shines on the R&B material and the more acoustic songs. Listen to the Pendulum album on headphones with the bass turned up slightly. There is a lot going on.

Tom Fogerty, rhythm guitar

What was wonderful about Tom Fogerty’s guitar work was that he took his title seriously, meaning he wasn’t the frustrated second guitarist, riffing and slyly slipping in bits of lead work. He was part of the rhythm section. His style is a key element in their sound. Sometimes he is playing in tandem with John, sometimes, he’s quietly providing gentle up strokes way down in the mix. Creedence’s arrangements never sound busy or crowded. If he had been a different kind of player, they might have sounded, guitar-wise, more like Buffalo Springfield or even the Stones. There is no gladiatorial axe battle here. Like the others in the rhythm section, Tom used space rather than simply filling it.

John Fogerty, guitar, voice, harmonica, keys, saxophone

John Fogerty’s voice should be in the Smithsonian. It’s powerful, evocative, and utterly American. Part Howlin’ Wolf, Wilson Pickett, Rick Nelson, Hank Williams and part gospel preacher, it’s not a ‘beautiful’ voice or one that would get all three judges on their feet on one of those singing shows. He’s a storyteller, a campfire orator. It’s a weary, weathered instrument that developed in the mid-sixties while the band chased success. Night after night in California dive bars, his original voice broke down and gave way to something new. No one sounds like John Fogerty.

His guitar playing is striking too. While many of his contemporaries were based in the various Chicago blues styles, he was, at heart, a rockabilly player in the tradition of Scotty Moore. Blues is certainly in there – Albert King, in particular – but so is Steve Cropper’s work at Stax, Pop Staples’ reverb gospel lines, Duane Eddy’s hillbilly surf, and James Burton’s classy work with Rick Nelson.

Influences and Precursors

Rockabilly

Two words: Scotty Moore. He was Elvis’ original guitar player and one of the architects of rockabilly and rock and roll guitar. He picked up where early figures like Charlie Christian, Merle Travis and Sister Rosetta Tharpe left off, and created a template for lead playing that remains in use. John Fogerty has never made any secret of his admiration for the man. In countless guitar magazine interviews, he has raved about the older guitarist’s work on Elvis’s early recordings. The cover of ‘My Baby Left Me’ on Cosmo’s Factory is almost a note-for-note re-creation of the King’s 1956 version. Presley’s recordings at Sun Records left their mark on Fogerty, but if you are searching for one of the main ingredients in the Creedence sound, it is closer to those early RCA sessions with drummer DJ Fontana joining Scotty, Bill Black, and Elvis. ‘My Baby Left Me’ was one of the first recordings Elvis made after leaving Sun.

Rockabilly is one of the great postmodern forms. It has fragments of blues, boogie woogie piano, bluegrass, hillbilly bop, western swing, rhythm and blues, and even bebop jazz. Sometimes, it is mistakenly called ‘an early form of rock and roll’. This suggests that it went out with pedal pushers and hula hoops. A cursory listen to popular rock and roll in the following decades suggests that it is never far below the surface. When The Stray Cats had hit singles in the early 1980s, there was talk of a ‘revival’. I’m not sure that it needed reviving. That would be ignoring the rockabilly songs recorded by The Beatles and other British Invasion bands in the 1960s, along with obvious nods to the form in so much garage punk. CCR bridged the late 1960s and early 1970s, in time for the obvious rockabilly elements in glam. Consider David Essex’s ‘Rock On’ or Mud’s ‘The Cat Crept In’. Punk always seemed to have rockabilly somewhere in the mix and American bands like X, The Gun Club, and, of course, The Cramps just made it obvious. Among the early English punk bands, The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Jam all recorded rockabilly standards. At about the same time, Bruce Springsteen was doing things like ‘Open All Night’ in his basement in New Jersey. These are a few random examples, but my point is that it was a form distinct from early rock and roll and remains so.

It’s been noted that Creedence was out of step with their exact contemporaries in the San Francisco music scene of the 1960s. The fact that rockabilly rather than blues underpinned their sound is significant. Most of the other San Francisco bands associated with that period were staffed with either blues players or ex-folkies. Geography comes into play here as Creedence’s early days as The Blue Velvets were spent playing scout halls and Junior High dances in the suburbs like the one they had grown up in. Country Joe MacDonald, after a spell in the army, ended up in Berkeley. It was a short bus ride from El Cerrito where the Creedence guys grew up but, culturally, was another universe. The university and a long bohemian tradition meant that Berkeley would be one staging ground for the West Coast folk revival. Jerry Garcia moved around the city as a child but spent his formative years as a musician in Menlo Park, which, like Berkeley, had a nearby university – Stanford – and a bohemian element where folk music was the soundtrack. Joan Baez finished high school and began her music career in the area. Country Joe and Jerry were early rock and roll fans too, but while they were learning Leadbelly songs to play at the local coffee house in 1960, John Fogerty was polishing up the latest Duane Eddy instrumental for a prom in El Cerrito.

Fogerty provides a comprehensive list of influences in his memoir, Fortunate Son (2015). Rockabilly favourites include Rick Nelson’s early work with the legendary James Burton on guitar and Carl Perkins, who was also an influence on George Harrison. His preference seemed to be for the more countrified version of rockabilly. Fellow Californian Eddie Cochran is not mentioned, nor is Gene Vincent. Fogerty lists some lesser-known names, too. Jimmy Dee and the Offbeats’ ‘Henrietta’ is a gutbucket Texas rockabilly workout that he has covered in his solo career. If you listen past the hiccupping vocals, there is something of the Creedence choogle here. Fogerty wasn’t the only one who loved this record. There is some evidence that it was the first single a certain teenager in Hibbing, Minnesota, bought and learned to play before going acoustic in 1960.

‘Endless Sleep’ by Jody Reynolds is another song that Fogerty returns to several times in his memoir. Reynolds grew up in Oklahoma and had a brief period in the spotlight when this song climbed the national charts in 1958. The reverb-laden guitar in the first few bars turns up in more than a few Creedence songs and it isn’t difficult to imagine them covering it. Intriguingly, The Gun Club, who ably tackled Creedence’s ‘Run Through The Jungle’ in the 1980s, recorded Reynolds’ ‘Fire Of Love’ for their second album and named their first after it.

There was a craze for guitar instrumentals...