If you actively dislike Creedence Clearwater Revival, then I can never respect anything you have to say about anything.

New (Old) Warehouse Decree: EVERY FRIDAY is CREEDENCE FRIDAY

stevie, you wouldn't per chance be in LA this weekend? because i will be.

xpost: why's it matter what he inspired? and anyway didn't he inspire, like, bob seger and john cougar more than he inspired the derailers?

They aren't in existance, so how?

I got a 'greatest hits' in a bootsale, was all 'ah lovely' got it home, thought "This is boring".

Is that active enough for yez?

and anyone seen the ccr woodstock footage? they're like fuckin' merzbow up there.

WRONG. I would be perfectly happy to never hear another note performed by John Fogerty ever, ever again.

I love CCR but I can certainly understand why people wouldn't like them: Fogerty's voice, samey arrangements, tendency to jam aimlessly
-- Oh No, It's Dadaismus (dadaismu...), June 2nd, 2006 11:12 AM.

You got it.

where can this be seen? (Youtube it...?) its not in the movie.

swerve that i don't actually want to start a thread for

i'm listening to a lot of top 40 am radio from the late 60s/early 70s lately and creedence is popular, justifiably so, but you know who's also everywhere, fucking THREE DOG NIGHT

like three dog night were as popular, perhaps more popular, than creedence

i was listening to the recording of Radio First Termer, where he says he's playing "heavy acid rock", and there's a fucking Three Dog Night song in there

like three dog night weren't _bad_ but they had, like, 20 separate songs that got airplay on top 30 radio in the late 60s and early 70s

it mystifies me

i guess i bring it up because my mom had some gas station promo cassettes that had this random selection of hits

and one of them was "joy to the world" and the other was "proud mary" and my mom loved them both equally

and ok "proud mary" isn't creedence's best song but come the fuck on

i don't know if it's valid but after "who'll stop the rain" i tend to thing that every time fogerty says "rain" he means "vietnam war"

Always liked "Who'll Stop the Rain" better than "Have You Ever Seen the Rain." (And the Beatles "Rain" better than both...)

(That's totally valid--pretty sure that's what he meant.)

I like that interpretation but the song is inspired by the rain at Woodstock.

He obviously welded that inspiration to the times.

Honestly? Wow--I've taken the Vietnam interpretation as fact for decades.

Iirc every one of Three Dog Night's many hits was a cover, that's pretty unusual.

"Who'll Stop the Rain" pretty def. about Vietnam, "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" is more about the general bad vibe of the times.

Ah, I didn't know about the more recent video for the song. That's probably a lot of it.

In 2007 during a concert in Shelburne, Vermont, he said the following about the song:

"Well, this next song has a bit of a fable surrounding it. A lot of folks seem to think I sang this song at Woodstock way back then. No, I was at Woodstock 1969. I think. It was a nice event. I'm a California kid. I went up there and saw a whole bunch of really nice young people Hairy, Colorful. It started to rain, and got really muddy, and then half a million people took their clothes off! Boomer generation making its presence known, I guess. Anyway, then I went home and wrote this song."

Pretty mundane explanation for such a melancholy song!

Springsteen covered it a lot on the River tour. You can find a lot of recordings of him playing it with Fogerty. "Fortunate Son," too.

He wants to know, have you ever seen Lorraine?

https://cdn.britannica.com/16/137716-050-72F6412D/Lorraine-region-France.jpg

one time there were two rain songs

Was thinking about Fogerty's different modes. He has his rainy/apocalyptic/brooding side, and his good-time side. The biggest hits are about evenly split between them. (It helps that they all have good tunes, obviously.) I like how "Lookin' Out My Back Door" is almost meta about its good-time intentions — he locks the world out, says "bother me tomorrow," and puts on Buck Owens.

"Lookin' Out My Back Door" is far and away my favourite folksy, good-time CCR song--and some of the lyrics ("tambourines and elephants"...) surely also a parody of the hippy-dippy bands that overshadowed CCR early on.

He wonders, who’ll stop Lorraine?
Sorry

wonder if Prince was listening when Fogerty sang about tambourines and elephants.

one time there were two rain songs

― andrew m.

and neither of them were The Rain Song

In interviews Fogerty said the parade scenery in "Lookin' Out My Back Door" came from Dr. Seuss' And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which he was reading to his kid a lot at the time. And was not a drug song! Similar to what Lennon said about "Lucy in the Sky" coming from a drawing by Julian. Of course, could be both a drug song and a kids' song, see also "Puff the Magic Dragon."

I thought of it more as making gentle fun of drug songs (according to the bio I recently read, Fogerty was--no surprise--completely uninterested in drugs).

Has anyone ever polled songs with "rain" in the title? Must be dozens of good ones.

Fogerty has said that Have You Ever Seen The Rain was about the impending breakup of the band.

no idea how anyone could think fogerty is making fun of anything in lookin out my back door, which is as earnest a song about using your imagination to have fun as i've ever heard.

Blue Eyes Crying in the Who’ll Stop The Rain Song

(xpost) I think he could easily have a great time making fun of psychedelic-styled lyrics. It was made pretty clear in the bio that Fogerty had a very jaundiced attitude towards the way rock critics were taking all the drug-fueled San Francisco bands very seriously. I'll try to dig up a quote from the book.

Parodying something and joyousness are hardly exclusive--cf. "Flagpole Sitta."

Saw Fogerty tonight at the Beacon. He played an 80th birthday show yesterday but added tonight's show when that one sold out. Second time seeing him and was pretty close this time - I've never seen someone so happy to own his songs. Of course it probably helps that his shows are no family affairs where his children are playing with him - if I was a parent and a musician, that would probably make me happy night after night. At one point, it was him, two sons and his daughter playing side-by-side on guitars, and he mentioned that his daughter just graduated last week in that very venue from NYU. (He actually posted photos of them at the ceremony after it happened. Also taking part in NYU's graduation, albeit in a different location: Paul McCartney, who was there for his grandson. Jesus, imagine going to school with John Fogerty's daughter and Paul McCartney's grandson....)

But yeah, he was great. Played a couple of my favorite non-Chronicle cuts: "Effigy" and "It Came Out of the Sky," both off of my favorite CCR album. Glad I caught him, it was only my second time seeing him in concert.

(Mentioning it was my second time a second time was totally unnecessary.)

*now family affairs

*very same venue

<3

I was watching 1985 mtv on YouTube yesterday and they played the video for “old man down the road” and I thought damn this could have come straight off chronicle. The little high guitar riff

lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogerty_v._Fantasy,_Inc.

During one of the video projections at yesterday's concert, there's a dramatized scene where Fogerty is shocked to find a bootleg CD of Chronicles being sold off the side of a road by a decrepit old man that strongly resembled Saul Zaentz. It looked like it was filmed sometime in the last four years - I may have seen it at his 2023 show at Radio City Music Hall. I thought it was hilarious that he still had to stick it to him like that even though Zaentz has been dead for over ten years.

I was curious what the other band members have said about the disagreements that broke up CCR. Found this from a 2015 interview with Doug Clifford:

Q: You mentioned in passing John suing you over the [Creedence Clearwater Revisited] name. And you mentioned in passing John as a brilliant songwriter. When you think of him now, what are your thoughts?

A: Well, he … uh ... I mean, my thoughts aren't good. He said that we were jealous of him and wanted to take control of the band. And what we wanted to take control of — or have someone else who was qualified take control of — was the business affairs. John was our manager. And he didn't understand the contracts. He doesn't own his songs to this day. We were renegotiating our record contract and found out that Fantasy was offering us 10 percent of the company plus the contract we already had. There had never been a deal like that made up to that point in time, where a band got a piece of the company. And there were other perks that went with it. But he didn't understand the contracts and totally blew it and then wouldn't tell us, except, "These guys are evil." He used to go to business meetings with a baseball and a glove and throw the ball against the wall like Steve McQueen did in "The Great Escape."

The other thing is he cut Tom Fogerty out from singing. It was Tom who took us along with him to record because his band didn't see the opportunity that was presented to them. But he believed in us and stuck with us the whole time. He paid for the recordings. He had a wife, two kids, a house and a mortgage. And he was just wonderful. Without Tom, we wouldn't be talking. There wouldn't have been a Creedence Clearwater Revival. When Tom graciously gave up the vocals to his younger brother, he had no idea that he would never be singing another song again. So Stu and I and Tom were always at odds with John about that. Tom had a high tenor voice like his brother but he had what I call a sweet tenor. Like Ritchie Valens. I think John was afraid that if Tom had a hit, he'd lose control. And John is a control freak.

That's where "Mardi Gras" came from. Tom was not allowed to sing a song, so then when Tom quit the band, John gave us an ultimatum that we'd do a third of the material each and write our own songs. That was the way he'd deal out punishment. And when the band finally broke up, he told the press Stu and I held a gun to his head and said, "We want to do a third of the material." That's the last thing we wanted to do. And that's the real regret I have about the way it went down. We took the blame as the a--holes who thought we could become singer-songwriters. We knew we weren't.

He does say this though:

I'm very disappointed in a guy I would have jumped in front of a bullet for at a certain point in my life. But it's like a family. You may not like what's going on. You may not like the person. But you love them because they're family. We did accomplish our junior-high dream and the thing that kept us together was a common goal that we all had to get on board and pull the wagon. We had an amazing run and I'm proud of it. I'm just sort of disappointed in the way it came out in the end. Not the music. Thank God for the music. That's our legacy. That's what I want to hang my hat on because that's what it's all about. I wish John well. People say, "You must really hate the guy." I don't hate the guy. I love the guy. I just don't like the way he operates.

And John is a control freak.

As presented in the book I keep mentioning, that's the beginning, middle, and end of it. He was Phil Spector through and through when it came to the records, concerts (it was John who one day unilaterally decided they wouldn't do encores anymore), everything.

aw, i had no idea, that's terrible

he uhm... comes off as a nice guy in his autobio

I just assume a load of shit goes on behind the scenes with any successful band, unless it involves actual assault I figure it's best not to know. Probably if he'd been a nice easygoing dude they'd never have got anywhere or been any good.

words to live by

John Fogerty a control freak, Pope Catholic etc.

Well hitch a wagon to a rising star, the star’s gonna decide where to go. I get that it was “Tom’s band,” but it’s kind of like the Replacements being Bob’s band until Paul showed up. As a fan you’d like to hear that everyone was cool and kind to each other, but the trade-off is you might not have the music then.

The biggest issue was the songwriting. And, having listened to Tom's first two solo records now, there was only one song between the two of them I'd consider putting on a CCR album. So artistically, probably the right choice. For longevity/morale, maybe not. Thinking of the Beatles...Lennon/McCartney were obviously autocratic when it came to the songwriting, but they did, just to keep the peace, give George some leeway, one or two songs an album. Tom Fogerty wasn't George Harrison, so I'm sure that made the concession a lot easier with the Beatles.

Some people recommended this to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62hFEbDk5Ls

Tom doesn't actually sing a whole lot on it. If I didn't know better, I would've guessed he was originally with Santana, not CCR.

This is the one song from those first two albums that I saved on the hard drive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU6BIKveg7c

How well it would fit onto a CCR album, I don't know--doesn't much sound like any version of them.

Somewhere I read John defending his dominance in the studio as a reaction to Fantasy Records' crazy production demands (which I mention above), that there was no time to ask everybody if they loved the mix when a new album was due every few months; though bbviously, based on his solo career as well, he likes to have the final say.

The rhythmic fakeout in Midnight Special is sooo sick. When the first chorus starts with just bass and guitar you think "alright this is gonna be a shuffle" but then the drums come in and nope ACTUALLY it's just the grooviest straight-time choogle you've ever heard

otm

i love the idea of an ILM poll for "you could work/play for musician X, but it probably won't be fun." fogerty, mascis, wilson, etc.

James Brown. Mark E Smith. Captain Beefheart. Chris Squire. Frank Zappa. Although I have the impression Frank Zappa auditioned his players thoroughly and generally treated them well, perhaps because some of them were relatively high-profile.

The "Midnight Special" trick is clever. At the start of the chorus it's "chunk, a-chunka, a-chunka" and then suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, it's "chunk-a-chunk-a-chunk". There is no astronaut Frank Douglas, no mystery to be solved.

It still beggars my mind-beef that they released three albums in 1969. Their whole career was over in three years. Plus Mardi Gras at the end but no-one wants to talk about that. And yet people do want to talk about it.