Creedence Clearwater Revival - The basic grammar of rock

Creedence Clearwater Revival are perhaps the most important rock band of all time, even though, among the greats, they may seem the most ordinary. In the pyramid of rock, Creedence Clearwater Revival sit at the very base, that lowest common denominator from which, one way or another, every subgenre you like can be defined. If an outsider asked for a telling example of rock, a Creedence Clearwater Revival song is really the only answer we could give.

How crucial formality was to the Creedence Clearwater Revival operation is shown by their choice of covers. As history teaches us, many historical avant-gardes – in art as in music – paradoxically developed precisely by reclaiming models tied to the past and to tradition. So Creedence Clearwater Revival wrote songs, or took songs, from the country-rock'n'roll of twenty years earlier; the point is that they played them in a completely different way. The proto-rock groups of the Sixties covered songs not only to "learn" – or because, at the time, it still wasn't a given that composer and performer would be the same person – but also, and above all, because theirs was an essentially formal pursuit: one had to abandon the blues continuum for syncopated rock, one had to find – both the consequence and the means of that break – the perfect synergy between guitar, bass and drums.

To trace the history of Creedence Clearwater Revival, we must first recall the figure of Ellis McDaniel, better known as Bo Diddley. He is one of the most important figures in the history of music. Formed in Chicago, like the father of rock'n'roll Chuck Berry, he is tangible proof of how rock'n'roll was born out of the electric blues of Black Chicago musicians – which had arrived there from the Texas of the legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson – in the 1940s (Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, all tremendous guitarists and composers born at the turn of the century, to whom we should add Sonny Boy Williamson, who played the other key instrument of the blues, the harmonica). It's worth noting that all these founding fathers of rock'n'roll, and later of rock, were Black; while all their "children" would be white. While Chuck Berry broke free from the blues by essentially inventing rock'n'roll, Diddley carried on down the blues road, adding rhythm but keeping a measured, mid-range tone, both vocally and on guitar. It is precisely that mid-range tone which, after the rock'n'roll outburst, would prove to be the foundation of rock, needing only the addition of rock'n'roll's two pillars: the searing guitar solo and the iconoclastic scream.

Creedence Clearwater Revival amount to raising Diddley's chords and volumes up to Berry's level, while simultaneously reining in all of Berry's excesses through Diddley's measured mid-range tone. In other words: Diddley gave rock its rhythm section; Berry gave it the guitar. Diddley produced his seminal and numerous masterpieces (at least twenty of them, including astonishing free-speaking tracks) between '55 and '57. Neither the modern blues artists (Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton) nor the rockers who would later emerge – Creedence Clearwater Revival among them – could do without those records. Because Diddley, within his mid-range approach, could be read as both reactionary (blues) and progressive (rock).

Having learned that lesson, between 1968 and 1970 – in just three years – Creedence Clearwater Revival released five albums. The sixth, in 1972, can also be considered something of an outlier. As few bands in history have managed, the group kept the same line-up throughout: leader and songwriter John Fogerty (1945) on vocals and lead guitar, the extraordinary co-stars – and peers – Doug Clifford (drums) and Stu Cook (bass), and John's brother Tom on rhythm guitar – the oldest of the four (though in '68 he was still only 25).

In 1968 California – which at that very time was laying the groundwork to become the richest, most populous and most modern hub in the world – was deep into the hippie and psychedelic era. San Francisco, with the acid-rock of Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead, was the epicenter of the movement. Musically speaking, alongside the psychedelic revolution, this period also saw talk of a reactionary revival, both in England and in the United States. In truth, these were two sides of the same coin. And it's better to speak of continuity than of rupture. While, on one level, the new Seventies – think singer-songwriters and hard rock – would mean a return to musical immediacy after the excesses of the late Sixties (Velvet Underground, Red Crayola, Frank Zappa, etc.), on another level this would create a largely unbridgeable gap with the more sophisticated music of the same era: the evolution of progressive, of electronic music, of Canterbury scene. If the late Sixties produced hybrids between rock and non-rock, by the early Seventies it was easy to tell what was rock from what wasn't (like kosmische musik).

On one hand, then, simplification; on the other, exasperation. Creedence Clearwater Revival were among those who worked by subtraction. But – whatever their name might suggest – the Creedence Clearwater Revival "revival," if revival is even the right word – after all, folk and blues never died in America – only makes sense once you bear in mind Jefferson Airplane and company, that is, the intricate, cerebral psychedelic acid-rock that carried forward the primal discourse first set in motion by folk-blues.

In 1968 Jefferson Airplane were on their fourth album. The Los Angeles-based Byrds were on their fifth, their forebears and fellow Angelenos Beach Boys were past their tenth, and their own offspring and fellow Angelenos the Doors were on their third. After all of them had moved away from folk-blues (while still keeping a thin thread connecting them to it), Creedence Clearwater Revival went back to it, yet they remain inexplicable without the folk-blues heretics of the Sixties. And it's perhaps more appropriate to speak of revival – blues, folk, neoclassical – in relation to Britain (think John Mayall, Fairport Convention, Alexis Korner, Moody Blues); though it's equally true of the American – and Californian – work of Janis Joplin, Gram Parsons, The Band. The fact is that what we're really dealing with are sophisticated contemplations of tradition, revisited with the detachment of myth and modern cunning, rather than mere revivalism. In this sense, Creedence Clearwater Revival were far more innovative than "revivalist."

Creedence Clearwater Revival (July 1968) contains eight tracks, the standouts being: "Gloomy," one of the absolute pinnacles of acid-rock, where the Fogerty brothers' guitars school everyone else – Young included – and "Walking on the Water," somewhere between the Byrds (for its electric hissing) and Springsteen (for its progressive, pathos-laden build). The record also features other original songs like "The Working Man," in which Fogerty proves himself a skilled blues composer, on a par with Richards and Jagger. "Get Down Woman," meanwhile, unfolds somewhere between Bo Diddley's "Before You Accuse Me" and a John Lee Hooker-style Detroit blues, while "Porterville" shifts the center of gravity closer to the roots-rock of Buffalo Springfield.

The album also includes a number of covers. The band's first single (which reached no.58) "I Put a Spell On You" (written by Hawkins) is a splendid and moving distillation of rock emerging from rhythm and blues, while "Suzie Q" (Broadwater/Hawkins/Lewis), a song from 1958, is reworked into a sprawling epic that already hints at the acid jam sessions of the Grateful Dead (who debuted a year before Creedence Clearwater Revival). "Ninety-Nine And A Half (Won't Do)," meanwhile, revisits a song by Wilson Pickett, who, alongside Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, is the most important Black soul singer of the Sixties.

The second album, Bayou Country, came out in January 1969 and contains seven tracks. After the reinterpretations of blues classics on the debut, CCR veer toward largely country-folk atmospheres. The masterpiece here is "Graveyard Train," written by Fogerty, a pitch-black blues built around bass and harmonica, in which Fogerty's voice unleashes its full raspy, soulful darkness. Here the band reaches peaks of tension and obsession worthy of the future Nick Cave, who, not coincidentally, draws on the very same source Fogerty taps into: Chicago blues (and, more indirectly, the folk music of the prairies).

"Born On The Bayou," on the other hand, is a mighty soul-blues number that reaches hard rock volumes – and riffs – while on "Bootleg," a gentle boogie, the acoustic guitar takes center stage, engaged in a call-and-response with the other instruments in the best blues tradition. "Penthouse Pauper" is rock's ABC, with the guitar well to the fore and a voice still steeped in soul-blues, drawing on Carl Perkins and, midway through, quoting Howlin' Wolf's old riff from "I Ain't Superstitious."

Fogerty's first great hit, "Proud Mary," effortlessly blends country and rock, while "Keep On Chooglin'" is a frenzied rhythm and blues number (with a hard rock finale) that makes this the darkest, bluesiest album Creedence Clearwater Revival ever made. The only cover on the record is "Good Golly Miss Molly" (by the duo Blackwell-Marascalco), a wild track packed with rock'n'roll riffs, which the phenomenal Little Richard had taken to success barely a decade earlier.

Green River (August 1969) continues the move away from the blues that, heading toward country-folk, finds its way to purer, more genuine rock. The title track, built on a roots-blues scaffolding, would – with its surrealist guitar work and loping gait – go on to influence even the new wave of Television. CCR are at their best on "Commotion," a powerful slab of blues-rock that could pass for the most epileptic, hard-edged Hendrix, and on "Sinister Purpose," a dazzling, moving r&b procession that deserves classic status.

"Tombstone Shadow" takes the path of raw garage-blues in the Cream mold, while "Wrote A Song For Everyone," "Bad Moon Rising" and "Lodi" lay the groundwork for that quintessentially American brand of rock that would later find its fullest expression in a songwriter like Bruce Springsteen. "Cross-Tie Walker," with its bass riffs and guitar flourishes, draws its roots from that age-old country-folk wellspring which Neil Young himself also drew inspiration from. Here too there's only one cover: this time it's a soul classic, "The Night Time Is the Right Time" (Brown/Cadena/Herman), already recorded by Ray Charles back in 1958 and performed here with a distinctly Rolling Stones swagger.

Three albums in one year: very few acts in rock history have managed to release so many records of such quality in so little time. As if that weren't enough, with Willy and the Poor Boys (November 1969) CCR delivered their fourth masterpiece in a row. Here the band achieves formal perfection, with performances that are consistently flawless and original. And it's precisely the band's playing that is, at once, the most "revivalist" or traditionalist and the most forward-looking of their career. A naive tone – at times even dark – is the final added touch to the new album.

The absolute masterpiece is “Effigy”, a melodrama caught between acoustic and electric that could raise goosebumps on Neil Young, and which is lavishly loaded with pyrotechnic effects in the leader's heart-on-sleeve guitar work. Also notable are the sarcastic generational anthem “Fortunate Son”, a frontal assault of unstoppable guitar and furious vocals, and the instrumental “Side O' the Road”, an acid blues somewhere between Grateful Dead and Clapton that would go on to school Stevie Ray Vaughan. A journey “on the road” – quite literally – steered by John Fogerty's guitar and his band, which backs him like a metronome.

Rounding out the picture are “Down On The Corner”, the quintessence of Creedence Clearwater Revival's country-rock, somewhere between easygoing, nostalgic and dark; “It Came Out Of The Sky”, which despite a vocal approach indebted to Bob Dylan boasts a venomous, granite-hard guitar (an ideal bridge between Chuck Berry and the new wave of the late Seventies); “Feelin' Blue”, a masterclass exercise balancing country (the musical base) and soul (the vertiginous vocal); and finally “Don't Look Now”, a flawless, surrealist example of thoroughly renewed country-folk.

There are only two covers: Leadbelly's “Cotton Fields” (Blind Lemon Jefferson's old travelling companion) and the traditional “The Midnight Special”.

Although 1969 had already seen Creedence Clearwater Revival place three albums and seven singles on the charts, 1970 was their year, with two albums and six singles in the top 5 (all from Cosmo's Factory). With the breakup of the Beatles, Creedence then crowned themselves the sole, undisputed “hit-single band” in the United States, a dance machine able to bring together opposing factions: psychedelia-loving hippies and rock'n'roll nostalgists, high-schoolers and college students, mainstream radio and alternative frequencies. By the time Cosmo's Factory came out, few believed there was any more room for artistic exploits, and yet the four Californians stunned the world once again.

Creedence Clearwater Revival's fifth album actually came out at a moment of real tension and internal chaos: having returned in spring from their first European tour (which included a stop at London's historic Royal Albert Hall), the band needed a break from the success-record-tour-mass media routine and some time to unwind. Leader John Fogerty's overwhelming dominance (lead vocals and guitar, sax, keyboards, songwriter and manager) was starting to chafe on the rest of the band, particularly on his older brother Tom, with whom relations had never been idyllic. Despite these problems, what they were about to record would be the finest and best-selling album of their career, a solemn epitaph to two years lived at full throttle.

Cosmo's Factory (No. 1 in both the US and UK) represents the stylistic summa of Creedence, managing to bring together every one of their musical ingredients: driving rock anthems tailor-made for the charts, soft soul ballads, tributes to their roots (rock'n'roll, blues and R&B), country, and extended instrumental jams. Disproving accusations of being “just a singles band”, Creedence delivered their most cohesive record, where every song has its own story to tell. The opener is “Ramble Tamble”, a simmering uptempo rocker that barrels along at full speed like a freight train, powered by an incisive, relentless riff and a vocal performance as raspy as ever. Just when it seems like it's all over, the song slows down and transforms: the guitars cool the fiery heat of the preceding passages and veer into a slow ballad that carries on undisturbed until yet another tempo shift and a fast close that mirrors the opening section.

Bo Diddley's “Before You Accuse Me” opens the album's run of covers (four in all) and settles the mood with a sparkling rock/blues showcase, featuring orthodox solos and piano in the background. But it's only a momentary lull, since the unleashed “Travelin' Band” is lying in wait, with its tenor sax intro and the murderous drive of bass and drums: John's voice always sounds on the verge of cracking, such is the expressive fervour. Getting up to dance feels almost inevitable.

The pulse eases off slightly with Roy Orbison's “Ooby Dooby”, an effective tribute to the rock'n'roll of Sun Records, the historic label of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Orbison himself. As with the Diddley cover, what stands out here is the band's reverent relationship with their Fifties roots and the chameleon-like skills that earned them the reputation of being “the Fifties' press office for the new generation”.

With “Lookin' Out My Back Door” the band explores the horizons of country-rock: the theme of travel (closer to the fun, picaresque adventures narrated by Mark Twain than to the lysergic road trip of “Easy Rider”) unwinds through a shuffle with a contagious chorus and an effective, bouncing melody. It's practically the opposite of “Run Through The Jungle”, whose guitar explosions and obsessive riffs capture well the setting referenced in the title. Here Creedence come across at their dustiest and most ominous, masters of that swampy “jungle beat” that can't help but evoke Vietnam: soldiers on the run, tropical trees, and scorching cascades of napalm.

Unsettling scenarios give way to a partial easing of tension with “Up Around The Bend” and “My Baby Left Me”: a great electric riff, choruses and a perfect refrain for the first, a brilliant rock'n'roll reinterpretation (originally Presley's, 1956) and the usual stop-and-go dynamics for the second.

At this point everything is set for John Fogerty's great masterpiece, the splendid “Who'll Stop The Rain”, which returns to the subject of war and the Viet Cong. The mood, however, is more serene, communal and relaxed than on “Jungle”, lit up as it is by open acoustic-guitar phrasing and vocal harmonies worthy of a generational anthem.

With Marvin Gaye's “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” the band shows it has perfectly absorbed its Black-music roots too, managing to effortlessly rework them, uncovering new expressive territories and possibilities the original author himself could never have dreamed of. In this case Gaye's original loses all the sexy, glamorous sheen it once had, getting its hands dirty across eleven exhausting, exhilarating minutes of hallucinated soul-rock jamming. The track drags itself along, slow and unflappable, through insinuating guitar whirls and a rock-solid rhythm section (the Stu Cook/Doug Clifford pairing in storming form) toward an ending that never quite arrives and which, fittingly, simply fades to black.

The closing “Long As I Can See The Light”, with its lazy soul groove, brings things to a romantic close, with a languid saxophone and an optimistic look toward the future. Creedence's future, however, would not last much longer.

In December 1970 came Pendulum, the only Creedence Clearwater Revival album with no covers: it is, in fact, a Fogerty singer-songwriter album. Despite the good intentions, the record marks the beginning of the end for the band. Tom Fogerty would leave right after the recording sessions, and his brother's well of inspiration would prove to have dried up soon after. The record, dismissed by critics but embraced by audiences, is worth admiring if nothing else for its formal polish and for the skill with which it executes its various poses and styles – so varied, in fact, that they end up calling into question the very cornerstone of Creedence Clearwater Revival: rock itself. If the band's previous “default setting” was rock, now it's pop. A case in point is the country-pop of “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”, the peak of desolation (making even “Who'll Stop the Rain” sound cheerful by comparison). “(Wish I Could) Hideaway”, on the other hand, is a more baroque song, dominated by Seventies-style keyboards, while “Rude Awakening, No. 2” unfolds as a full-blown progressive instrumental: the first two minutes are unusual, exquisitely refined, engaging and melancholic, and are worth the rest of the track, which more or less loses itself in fairly gratuitous quasi-electronic experiments.

The other tracks worth noting are “Pagan Baby” and “Hey Tonight” – in both of which a very “roots” guitar takes centre stage – and “Sailor's Lament”, which anticipates Paul Simon's ethno-pop (“Graceland”) by more than 15 years. “Molina” and, above all, “Born To Move” meanwhile throw out a bridge toward James Brown and funk.

Mardi Gras (April 1972) is the first and last Creedence Clearwater Revival album without Tom Fogerty. Clifford and Cook take part in writing many of the songs, but the collapse is already looming. The result is a record with more dark moments than bright ones (worth remembering are “Looking for a Reason”, “Sweet Hitch-Hiker” and the cover of “Hello Mary Lou”). We are witnessing the end of Creedence Clearwater Revival. John Fogerty would go on to launch a successful solo career, while the remaining members would instead give life to the “revival of the revival” with Creedence Clearwater Revisited, taking the band's old repertoire out on the road.

It took just a few years to carry CCR to the very top of rock's Olympus, a peak from which the only way is down. Creedence were too in love with unfashionable values ever to be considered "trendy": no drugs/sex/violence or revolutionary ideals, no allegiance to the avant-garde or the underground. The pure, elemental energy that springs from those songs needs no secret key to be decoded. 

For these reasons they never crossed the threshold that leads from cult status to cultural icon: unlike the Stones, Dylan or the Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival didn't live in teenagers' wet dreams. With those beards and glasses, nobody was pulling; the checked shirts wouldn't come back into fashion for another twenty years. And yet that mélange of primitive rock and plain-spoken populist statements would make Creedence the "working class" rock band par excellence: from Keith Richards to Bruce Springsteen, by way of the fringes of Southern rock (Lynyrd Skynyrd) and alt-country (Gram Parsons; Long Ryders; Uncle Tupelo), there's always someone who admired them, absorbed them, and evoked them in their own music.

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