Creedence Clearwater Revival: C or D?

you could say the same of "Factory Girl" and "Dear Doctor," too, though I agree that CCR's albums aren't as good as the Stones'. oh, and the answer is TOTAL CLASSIC.

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.

I just treated myself to this set and absolutely agree.

My whole family sat around listening to the difference between the remastered Spotify version of Green River and the mono single. Consensus was that the remastered stereo version sounds “more polished” but the mono version’s “got that dog” in it

After that I treated them to a 2-hour discourse on vinyl mastering which they all listened to in rapt fascination, best night of their lives

ok sold

what is the DVD material from?

also lol tracer, that was an xp so I could not properly appreciate your tart self-deprecation

but it's all true, mono 45s rule

I love well made compilations like that. Will be on the lookout.

is there DVD material? i just have the 45s.

the booklet that comes with it is sadly pretty useless. written like a beginner's potted history. surely anyone enough of a lunatic to buy this is Heavily Into Creedence and wants session notes, oral histories etc

ohh ok there is I guess a bonus DVD with the 2xCD set? which is what I got b/c cheap

Lol Tracer. Fwiw I would legit listen if you recorded that as a podcast

FWIW, Russ Gary (the engineer) once posted on another forum that the Green River singles are true dedicated mixes. The mono single mix for the song "Green River" alone really is amazing. Everything else might be folds though.

what are folds?

Mono mixes that are electronically converted from the original stereo, rather than being mixed specifically to mono, or "dedicated" to mono.

There used to be a button on stereo systems that would do this.

It was right next to the Loudness button iirc

My Bluetooth headphones sometimes accidentally do those folds sometimes. Really a trip when listening to Olivia Rodrigo or something else clearly not mixed that way.

Bluetooth sometimes seems to have a mind of its own imho.

In my experience

there's a mono setting on android - works pretty neat

Gonna listen to "Rude Awakening #2" all day brb

This compilation is on Tidal, and yeah, it sounds great. Might have to pick up a physical copy for the living room.

just ordered the mono singles comp, excited to hear it #deathtostereo

My Bluetooth headphones sometimes accidentally do those folds sometimes. Really a trip when listening to Olivia Rodrigo or something else clearly not mixed that way.

bluefolded

Late last night
I WEN FO WAH