Creedence Clearwater Revival: C or D?

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!

I think there are quite a few Brits on here, myself included, who love CCR. And the 'uniquely American' thing isn't a hindrance (though you could prob argue the Beatles being part of their musical upbringing as with 95% of US bands of that era) - there's been an obsession with American music over here since at least the forties, not least the Beatles and Stones themselves.

Very interesting that you mention Los Lobos though, and you could have a point there. I've been thinking of starting a Los Lobos thread for a while as I've not encountered anyone over here who sees anything in them. And there is something similarly broad in their musical scope to the bands you mention (the Dead etc). For a Mexcian-American band the 'American' is at least as important as the 'Mexcian'.

Where did I say they weren't conscientious about choosing their name? "somewhat bitter irony" = conscious deliberation. The use of the word "revival" was very deliberate, yes to ref. tent-preachers, and yes to invoke an aesthetic which said "the present is corrupt, the past it's where it's at" — except (here's where the deliberate irony kicks in) we CCR are the real present and so the PRESENT is where it's at.

If anyone's assuming that because I'm saying "hey this is pop not rock" I'm saying the makers didn't care a great deal about it, or that it matters less "artistically", then they're exactly missing the point of Fogerty's attitude to the "throwaway pop" of the 50s: that the work put into it that counted was work that was directed at the present, not work calculated to second-guess the future.

I don't think this is really accurate, and this is why I brought up Fogerty's notorious controlling studio perfectionism - as evidence that they (or at least JF) *did* think and care about lasting. I don't think Fogerty was naive about what he was doing or what kind of myth he was trying to build. The point up-thread about the Berry-Fogerty-Springsteen progression of American "everyman" is pertinent here, he saw himself in - and acted to fit into - this kind of progression. In a sense, even getting screwed over the ownership of their songs does *more* to cement this kind of myth ("look! The Man is fucking with me!") although I'm sure that wasn't Fogerty's intention (to get screwed, that is).

I misunderstood your point about the "revival" in their name, sorry.

I find it interesting that CCR is kind of viral -- lots of people who don't want to like 'em do anyway, and they slip completely from your conciousness only to sock you in the gut after random jukebox encounters. Why is that so?

it's obv. a circular argument, but perhaps this is why the CCR-are-classic camp would describe them as such.

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