Creedence Clearwater Revival: C or D?

And I was going to make the point about the Stones, but Matos made it for me. Except that I would have mentioned "Country Honk", and that he is TOTALLY wrong about "Factory Girl". That is one of the high points of that lp! It was great when they dug it up for the Steel Wheels tour...

(Also, the thing that makes songs like Dear Doctor et al more interesting to me is that they are not done straight--Jagger always has a distance from the material, and the lyrics themselves are somewhat ambiguous/parodistic, which makes the songs a bit more interesting since you don't know how seriously to take them)

As to yr main point -- I agree that the influx of country and mountain music is more important and successful with CCR than it is the Stones (although the Stones' double country whammy of "Dead Flowers" and "Sweet Virginia" kicks all of CCR's ass halfway to Modesto), but CCR's blues infusion feels kinda weak to me. I'm thinking of the middle bits of Willy & the Poor Boys here, and while Johnny can do a fair sharecropper impression with that yelp of his, it falls flat. It just seems that the Stones wanted to get the Negro strut down more than anything (which Mick still works at but Keith was born with), to get the style and the feel, while CCR went for the sound, but not the emotion. Maybe this is why CCR is so commonly identified as a very "white" band? (I'm thinking of the Big Lebowski and White Men Can't Jump (Snipes hassles Woody for them, doesn't he?) in particular)

On principle of not relating to rootsy Americana trad-rock boredom, which then gets shoved in your face as real authentic 'good' music. The whole rough-and-ready meat-and-potatoes-ness of it all. Of hating country music like any well-adjusted person. Like I said, though, they don't actually sound that bad. It's all pettiness.

Clarke just butted in but I know what he means about the aura.

Tracer roxor as always, even if I do think the Stones were ultimately a...not "better" but greater band, if you see what I mean--wider ranging (counts for a lot w/me, Prince was my formative listening) and more chance-taking. CCR's more perfect but the Stones had greater outreach. love 'em both about equally in that way

You can't say something like "I dislike them on principle", on this board of all places, and not expect to be called out on the meaninglessness of the statement unless you define your terms.

Of hating country music like any well-adjusted person

Color me ill-adjusted.

I agree with Andrew L about Grapevine... their ultimate endless boogie track was Back on the Bayou

Also due to the demands of their label, Fogerty released 3
albums in 1969 and two in 1970, ranking from good to excellent.
Imagine what dynamite albums they could have released on a
one-per-year schedule:

Bayou Country
01. Born On The Bayou
02. Good Golly Miss Molly
03. Proud Mary
04. Green River
05. Bad Moon Rising
06. Lodi
07. Wrote A Song For Everyone
08. Don't Look Now
09. Down On The Corner
10. Fortunate Son
11. Midnight Special

Cosmo's Factory
01. Before You Accuse Me
02. Travelin' Band
03. Lookin' Out My Back Door
04. Run Through The Jungle
05. Up Around The Bend
06. Who'll Stop The Rain
07. Long As I Can See The Light
08. Have You Ever Seen The Rain?
09. Hey Tonight
10. Molina

I'll go on the record as saying that these two proposed
tracklists kick every Stones album directly in the ass.

strictly speaking they are of course anti-rockist

explain.

I don't get this one.

also i think that the music they minded about was music that ROCK AS IT BECAME AWARE OF ITSELF was trying to put behind it, or get beyond, or something

like in the late 60s, a LOT of music — pop and non-pop — from the 50s and early 60s was widely considered a bit of a primitive yokel joke: and i think they clung to it in quite a lonely, dogged way...

this later (80s etc) became for others a revivalist shtick which played super-well in music mags etc — grrr the clash haha — and part of the general dad-rock cd-rerelease spasm, but these were the years when rock was in its prime and needed no memory, or anyway a sense of its own HISTORY was not yet at all important to its essential identity

(sorry this probably isn't very clear: i think what i'm saying is that the content of "revival" in their name and aesthetic — partly bcz it wz half ironic, in a bitter sort of way — was that it refused to place faith in these huge PLACEMARKER WORKS, dylan/beatles/stones blah blah, which stood in the way of understanding where they themselves as works came from, and provided the glue of the music community all round, the values it shared...)

Guess I shouldn't have used the term "poseur" in the question then. But really, it's when the Stones were brought in that the "authenticity" topic raised its ugly head (mostly because for some reason people find the Stones' toying with the whole concept to be such a stroke of genius - though I don't share this view personally).

re: Mark S. I see what you're saying I guess. Regressive traditionalist attitude = anti-rockist. I like their albums but no argument that they were a singles band, their albums are not deliberately constructed as statements (a la Blonde on Blonde or Her Satanic Majesties' ad nauseum).

i'm tempted to say that i don't think they thought about or cared about LASTING (possibly also why they got screwed over re ownership of their songs?) (i mean this may have been just naivety, and i don't mean to sentimentalise or romanticise some kind of po'boy live-in-the-now nonsense, but sometimes not second-guessing how the future will see you gives you access to a power to speak in the present which actually hands the future to you... )

The Fantasy/Saul Zaentz debacle is a whole other issue...

at the height of the grunge fad, i do remember wondering why it was that Neil Young was getting all the credit for inspiring that sort of music but CCR weren't name-checked at all -- which struck me as odd because Green River kinda works in the same vein and is almost as "grunge"-y as Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. maybe it's because Fogerty always stuck to what worked and never did anything as left-field as Neil Young did?

"if i only had a dollar for every song i've sung and ev´ry time I had to play while people sat there drunk ... " hard to beat that IMHO.

Do Brits listen to bands like this? I think there's something uniquely American there that many of them don't hear or fimd interesting (because I don't hear them talk about these bands much). See also Los Lobos.

I actually wish I could hear most of my favorite music this way--catch it by surprise--but the radio is just so awful at the moment, so I end up buying a lot of records. My favorite moments are those when I'm seized, for no reason I can articulate, by the desire to hear a very particular album or song, almost as though it had come to me by accident.

Oh, also, I had a conversation about CCR with a good friend last week. I saw the box set sitting on his table. I remember him telling me--maybe six or seven years ago-- that he couldn't stand John Fogerty's voice, that it was too obviously an affectation. I mentioned this, and he turned to me with a puzzled expression, and said basically, Oh no, I was stupid then, of course they're grebt. So I don't know anyone who's been able to sustain a dislike for this band for very long.

Yes! Perhaps not 4, but I long for the days of an album or two a year. All that lovely filler and songs written by the drummer - all GRATE stuff!

Late last night
I WEN FO WAH

So is the Hollies “long cool woman in a black dress” the uk’s best attempt at ccr style

It's definitely the most blatant!

Yeah. Im trying to think of an American band that ripped off the UK in a similar way

Nick Lowe had an excellent one with "Stick It Where the Sun Don’t Shine," but the Hollies' track probably gets my vote for the best.

That one is so shameless

Hunk of Burning Love definitely owes a lot to CCR.

As far as rips go.

Im trying to think of an American band that ripped off the UK in a similar way

Well there was that pop-punk vocal style that was sometimes said to coopt 70s UK poonk, innit

Every Nuggets track imitating English accents.

I assumed that wasn't a serious comment.

Don’t go ‘round tonight
Well it’s bound to take yo life
There’s a bathroom on the right

I've heard Creedence four times on the radio today, once in what was possibly a block of three or four songs in a row, which threw me off, because everybody knows today is two-for- Tuesday. Had to Google Fogerty to make sure everything was okay.

So you're saying that your radio station... kept on chooglin'?

Two-for-choogsday

Electric Choogaloo

Choogs your own adventure

lol

Just finished John Lingan's A Song for Everyone. Pretty good--the right side of serviceable, I guess. He had the cooperation of Stu Cook and Doug Clifford but not, surprise, Fogerty. One good thing is that the book gives due diligence to "Ramble Tamble." And the page on The Big Lebowski is good--never cared for it that much, but I may revisit. Think I'll try to track down some solo work from the other three.

The ending is even sadder and messier than I knew. I didn't know that John never visited Tom in the hospital when he died in 1990.

i had an opportunity to talk to doug and stu a couple years ago but my editor wasn't interested unless i could get fogerty too, very bitter about that still smh

That's kind of lousy. Doug and Stu were still half of this monumental band...they were there, every step of the way.