Photo by Lee Cherry
Audio By Carbonatix
One of the great classic-rock shockers is learning that Creedence Clearwater Revival actually formed in California.
Do you mean the band that wrote the anthem “Born on the Bayou” and sang in “Proud Mary” about cleaning a lot of plates in Memphis and pumping a lot of pain down in New Orleans wasn’t from the South?
Beyond the lyrical content, CCR could always create the swampiest of sounds with two guitars, bass, and drums. But the real kicker was the twang in singer John Fogerty’s voice that sounded like he had just swallowed a couple of snorts of moonshine.
If the band’s official bio is to be believed, Creedence Clearwater Revival was formed in 1967 in El Cerrito, California, a half-hour northeast of San Francisco. John and his guitarist brother Tom Fogerty, along with bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford, undoubtedly were influenced by the 1960s San Francisco psych scene, but it seems their heads were really in the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll: the American South. CCR spent four remarkably prolific years, from 1968 to 1972, pumping out seven records method-acting as though it was the greatest Southern rock band that ever lived, singing about “Rollin’ with some Cajun Queen/Wishin’ I were a fat freight train/Just a-chooglin’ on down to New Orleans.”
Even the band’s covers had a Dirty South feel, transmogrifying the smooth Motown sound of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” into an 11-minute juke-joint jam and trading the boogie-woogie piano of Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly” for electric guitar solos.
But according to a contemporaneous 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Fogerty had never even been to the South when he recorded and wrote these classics. Rather, he let his imagination run wild, inspired by what came out of that region: “Most of the people I saw that I really liked came from there or seemed to come from there. Fats Domino, I always pictured Jerry Lee Lewis as being from there. For sure, Elvis must have been from there. Carl Perkins, and the whole Sun Records thing.” But it wasn’t just the music that captured his imagination; it was the depiction of the South in all forms of pop culture, from Mark Twain’s writings to the TV series Maverick.
Somehow, by trying to channel the past that never existed, Fogerty helped make CCR shorthand for the past that was. The band’s fuzzy, humid songs seem to soundtrack every Vietnam War scene ever filmed. You hear the protopunk-rock classic “Fortunate Son” when Forrest Gump goes to Nam, Apocalypse Now included a cover of “Susie Q,” Born on the Fourth of July had “Green River,” and Air America featured “Run Through the Jungle.”
So while it seems the Beatles represent the hope and positivity of the Sixties, CCR embodies to music supervisors the chaos and tumult of the decade. The one thing two of the great 1960s quartets formed by childhood friends have in common is that once they broke up, they never got back together. CCR fell apart in 1972 over disputes of songwriting credits and financial matters and sadly never got back together in the studio. In the ensuing decades since Tom Fogerty died in 1990, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford have toured as Creedence Clearwater Revisited, while John Fogerty played CCR songs as a solo artist.
Fogerty recently bought back the rights to the Creedence Clearwater Revival songs he wrote 50-plus years earlier, and he’s celebrating with a tour heavy on CCR songs that will make its way to Hard Rock Live on July 30 after, fittingly, making its way all around the South.
John Fogerty. With Hearty Har. 7 p.m. Sunday, July 30, at Hard Rock Live, 1 Seminole Way, Hollywood; 954-797-5531; myhrl.com. Tickets cost $55 to $145 via ticketmaster.com.
