It was the start of a torrent of classic hits from the gritty, Little Richard-inspired singer over the next two years, including "Bad Moon Rising," "Green River," "Down on the Corner," "Travelin' Band," "Who'll Stop the Rain," "Up Around the Bend," and "Lookin' Out My Back Door."Ĭreedence also made good albums - Green River, Willy and the Poor Boys, and Cosmo's Factory all rank among the best of the rock era - but their true forte was as a singles band. On their first album, 1968's Creedence Clearwater Revival, the group played it both ways, offering extended, quasi-psychedelic workouts of the '50s classics "I Put a Spell on You" and "Suzie-Q." The latter song became their first big hit, but the band didn't really bloom until "Proud Mary," a number two single in early 1969 that demonstrated John's talent at tapping into Southern roots music and imagery with a natural ease. The group only found themselves when John took firm reins over the band's direction, singing and writing virtually all of their material. In fact, there's little promise to be found on those early efforts they were extremely derivative of the British Invasion and other R&B and rock trends of the day, with few hints of the swampy roots rock that would characterize CCR. By the mid-'60s, with a few hopelessly obscure recordings under their belt, the band - including Tom and John with two high-school friends, drummer Doug Clifford and bassist Stu Cook - signed to Fantasy, releasing several singles as the Golliwogs that went nowhere. John's older brother Tom formed the Blue Velvets in the late '50s in El Cerrito, California, a tiny suburb across the bay from San Francisco. The key elements of Creedence had been woodshedding in bar bands for about a decade before their breakthrough to national success in the late '60s. The band's genius was their ability to accomplish this with the economic, primal power of a classic rockabilly ensemble.
Fogerty's classic compositions for Creedence evoked enduring images of Americana, and they simultaneously reflected burning social issues of the day. Although the band's tight, punchy arrangements were a group effort, their vision belonged to singer, songwriter, guitarist, and leader John Fogerty. Fogerty’s soulful, raspy howl presided over stripped-down grooves leavened by amped-up guitar solos, and he complemented his indelible writing with inventive covers of early rock ’n’ roll and blues gems like “Suzie Q” and “I Put a Spell on You.” The group acrimoniously disbanded in 1972, but over the decades, CCR emerged as spiritual forefathers for post-punk groups like The Minutemen and Hüsker Dü, unencumbered by trappings of the late ’60s.At a time when rock music was evolving away from the forces that had made it possible in the first place, Creedence Clearwater Revival brought rock back to its roots with a concise synthesis of rockabilly, swamp pop, R&B, and country. The men had never experienced the American South, yet they nonetheless built their sound upon the musical traditions of Mississippi and Louisiana, with an unadorned collision of blues, R&B, and swamp rock. The flannel shirts worn by frontman John Fogerty, who wrote and sang all of CCR’s original material, came to symbolize a blue-collar aesthetic embedded in the group’s unfussy arrangements and songs celebrating working-class struggles (“Proud Mary”) and lodging anti-war plaints (“Fortunate Son”). The members of the band had played together for nearly a decade as The Blue Velvets and The Golliwogs prior to renaming themselves Creedence Clearwater Revival. This Bay Area quartet dropped seven hit albums during a remarkable five-year run starting in 1968, pushing aside the Summer of Love psychedelia that surrounded them to lay the foundations for what eventually became roots rock.