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'.
― James Ball (James Ball), Wednesday, 29 January 2003 11:03 (twenty-one years ago) link
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.
― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, 29 January 2003 11:39 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Colin Meeder (Mert), Wednesday, 29 January 2003 11:53 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Dr. C (Dr. C), Wednesday, 29 January 2003 11:54 (twenty-one years ago) link
― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, 29 January 2003 12:06 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Tom (Groke), Wednesday, 29 January 2003 14:47 (twenty-one years ago) link
― o. nate (onate), Wednesday, 29 January 2003 16:31 (twenty-one years ago) link
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.
― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 29 January 2003 18:25 (twenty-one years ago) link
― pauls00, Wednesday, 29 January 2003 18:28 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 29 January 2003 18:33 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Colin Meeder (Mert), Wednesday, 29 January 2003 18:55 (twenty-one years ago) link
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.
― hstencil, Wednesday, 29 January 2003 18:58 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Wednesday, 29 January 2003 19:12 (twenty-one years ago) link
― sundar subramanian (sundar), Saturday, 1 February 2003 18:43 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Saturday, 1 February 2003 22:19 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Saturday, 1 February 2003 22:53 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Saturday, 1 February 2003 22:56 (twenty-one years ago) link
No comment, I just felt like reprinting that thought so that we could savor it.
"Love In Vain," "Country Honk," "Let It Bleed," "You Got the Silver," You Can't Always Get What You Want" = songs that would improve Let It Bleed by being absent.
CCR = Sexless, timid, lacking in experiment, hence not much at all like the music they were drawing on (compare "Green River" to Elvis's "Mystery Train"), though that doesn't make them a bad group, since those were limits that worked for Fogerty ("Green River" a real good song). Fogerty set songs in the South because he thought his own life in El Cerrito, California was boring, so preferred to write from his imagination. Well-loved by white people in Appalachia County, Virginia when I passed through in 1971. Black people there preferred James Brown. I was the only one to prefer "Brown Sugar." But neither CCR nor Stones defined rock by then. Hendrix, Cream, Zeppelin had changed the game.
The adjective "authentic" is close to useless unless paired with a word that it is modifying.
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Sunday, 2 February 2003 01:45 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 2 February 2003 01:50 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Ben Williams, Sunday, 2 February 2003 01:59 (twenty-one years ago) link
― mark s (mark s), Sunday, 2 February 2003 02:08 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Genevieve, Sunday, 2 February 2003 02:18 (twenty-one years ago) link
(All the songs you list are amazing, ESPECIALLY "You Got The Silver": I sometimes prefer Keith as a vocalist to Mick)
― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Sunday, 2 February 2003 02:30 (twenty-one years ago) link
― James Blount (James Blount), Sunday, 2 February 2003 02:31 (twenty-one years ago) link
(But then if I had Let It Bleed on CD I might like it fine. Given the memory function, almost all my beloved CDs end up as four-song EPs. For instance, there are only three albums on my Pazz & Jop ballot this year that I listen to more than four songs on, and two of those three are near the bottom of my list.)
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Sunday, 2 February 2003 03:21 (twenty-one years ago) link
Semi-agree. Definitely keep "Country Honk" (a total gas) and "Let it Bleed" and in the very least the Sisters of Mercy sections of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (+ all of "Gimme Shelter" and "Monkey Man," though maybe only the bass line from "Live With Me"), get rid of the rest, especially "Midnight Rambler" and "Love in Vain."
― s woods, Sunday, 2 February 2003 06:18 (twenty-one years ago) link
Revelation - maybe I'm a folkist
― gabbneb (gabbneb), Sunday, 2 February 2003 06:29 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Sunday, 2 February 2003 06:39 (twenty-one years ago) link
"Sexless" - I have no complaint here, I think, because this isn't their subject (a classroom-hallway distinction?).
I may be hypocritical, though, because I have the "Sexless" complaint about Chuck D. But I want his subject to suit his music.
No, they never improved on (or equaled) Mystery Train. But my ill-informed instincts say Elvis wouldn't have known to sing Lodi like Fogerty did, and wouldn't have done Fortunate Son, period.
― gabbneb (gabbneb), Sunday, 2 February 2003 06:48 (twenty-one years ago) link
Except Hendrix, Cream, and Zeppelin all sound dated now while "There Was a Time," "Lodi," and "Brown Sugar" do not.
― Burr, Sunday, 2 February 2003 07:51 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Sunday, 2 February 2003 08:02 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Sunday, 2 February 2003 08:03 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Ben WIlliams, Sunday, 2 February 2003 15:46 (twenty-one years ago) link
(haha & maybe I've been reading too much Curnow & Brasch lately, but while not taking geography-as-destiny (or geography-as-haunting) too seriously, all the NZ rawkundroll fans I know have spent far more time around the otago/cantebury plains than I have).
― Ess Kay (esskay), Monday, 3 February 2003 02:23 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Monday, 3 February 2003 02:26 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Ben Williams, Monday, 3 February 2003 14:12 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Ben Williams, Monday, 3 February 2003 14:13 (twenty-one years ago) link
― o. nate (onate), Monday, 3 February 2003 15:58 (twenty-one years ago) link
"Subjective" is no good as a synonym for "value-laden." As a matter of fact it's no good as a word, period. (Nor is its twin "objective. Ban 'em both!)
Tracer: there are all sorts of ways to use the word "folk," but if you're using it anthropologically (folkways, folklore), I can't think of any other songs in modern America that are as folk as Xmas Carols, except maybe for "Happy Birthday" and "Rock 'N' Roll Part 2."
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 02:27 (twenty-one years ago) link
― gabbneb (gabbneb), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 02:37 (twenty-one years ago) link
Zeppelin doesn't strike me as dated, while Hendrix and Cream and CCR do, though I don't have a quick explanation why. Punk and hair metal helped to switch the game again, maybe knocking Hendrix and Cream into the past, but since Stones-based punks like the Stooges, Dolls, and Pistols had all absorbed Clapton-Hendrix-Kaukonen guitar sustain, their changing the game didn't bring Stones '70 back to seeming retrospectively modern. (And the Stones themselves transformed from a song band to a groove band, though I don't think they pulled this off thoroughly until Emotional Rescue.) If "Brown Sugar" sounds not-so-dated now, this is because its style of riffing has a life in new country (though it hadn't back in the day). "Brown Sugar" is all over the place in recent Brooks & Dunn. Strangely, given that CCR was admired so much in country land, CCR doesn't live in modern country, while Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, and the Eagles all do.
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 02:46 (twenty-one years ago) link
They were both of and not of the counterculture, which was one of the interesting things about them.
Mark, I still doubt that the term "rockist" helps people to communicate or think through their ideas, but I won't make that argument here. I want to point out, though, that in using "rockist," Shakey is raising the question as to whether it's rockist to like Creedence now, not whether Creedence was rockist back in their day. For instance, staking one's allegiance to the Ramones makes you butt-plug reactionary now but didn't in 1977, at least didn't for most people. Depends how you deployed your allegiance to the band. Note, that there's a difference between liking the Ramones and staking your allegiance to them. I still like 'em. I think.
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 03:03 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 03:05 (twenty-one years ago) link
Funny that you mention this, 'cause I was thinking the same thing after I re-read my comment about "Lodi" after this thread sprang back to life. That tension -- being both of and not of the counterculture -- is what makes that (and other) CCR songs work. Lyrically, it's about the American Dream -- staking out on yer own to "make it," the singer working hard for and having "success" dangled in front of him. Musically (at least at the beginning), it's meat-and-potatoes American rock (or CCR-type "chooglin'"). Then comes the last verse, with the key change and the singer's epiphany that his version of the "American Dream" might be being stuck in shitty bars sinking to drunks for the rest of his life. At least to me, it seems very much of its time -- a counter-cultural Sixties twist on a common American archetype which may still resonate because of its craft and sublety, but also because of how cynical we've become since the Sixties.
my two cents anyway.
― Tad (llamasfur), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 03:20 (twenty-one years ago) link
Hendrix, "dated"? I don't think it's ever going to date, that stuff is as audacious as the day he made it. I've come to the conclusion that, as much as I like rock and roll, and as instinctively hostile I can be toward "rockism" or whatever you call it, Hendrix is in a whole different class than anybody else who ever made "rock." I'm sure this opinion is not shared by everyone.
CCR, though...it is stiff, stiff. Bad rhythm section. Mechanical. Great songs performed with a kind of caution, a really bad reverence for some "past" which consistently hobbles the whole project. Ben Williams up the thread hit it, "Let it Bleed" contains some "eerie" moments where the bullshit of Jagger's lyrics sorta gets hijacked by something altogether more mystical...as in the slide-guitar/piano/vibes bit in "Monkey Man." Which is all Keith. Whereas CCR never once hit a note like that.
That said, I still kind of like them, as superior radio music, and I think "Willy and the Poor Boys" is a fine record, I always liked "Effigy." I mean explain to me how "Effigy" is all that different from "Mod Lang" or something...once you get past the limberness of the Big Star rhythm section and the stiffness of CCR's. But the basic conception is similar...
So, a classic, but even more dated than the Band, who had some of the same problems of over-thinking everything and self-conscious mythologizing...the Band were far superior musicians, and they sounded like they had been having a better time out on the road than CCR had...
― frank p. jones (frank p. jones), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 13:43 (twenty-one years ago) link
Dan Penn does "Lodi" on his early '70s "Nobody's Fool" album, quite well.
― frank p. jones (frank p. jones), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 13:49 (twenty-one years ago) link
If we had football chants in America they'd probably be the ultimate successful example of folk attitude in this country. The Pinefox mentioned on a war thread that he feels the art of chanting is DOA. Maybe he could expand on that here? I think if he's right it has serious implications for democracy!
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 17:38 (twenty-one years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 18:05 (twenty-one years ago) link
― M Matos (M Matos), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 18:11 (twenty-one years ago) link
I don't see how "sexy" by this definition is different from "makes me think about sex" - and as such it seems to be necessarily observer-dependent, ie., different strokes for different folks. For example, if I was to say that I don't find Elvis "sexy", how would you argue that I was wrong?
― o. nate (onate), Tuesday, 18 February 2003 19:48 (twenty-one years ago) link