Creedence Clearwater Revival … were progressive and anachronistic at the same time. An unapologetic throwback to the golden era of rock and roll, they broke ranks with their peers on the progressive, psychedelic San Francisco scene. Their approach was basic and uncompromising, holding true to the band members’ working-class origins. The term “roots rock” had not yet been invented when Creedence came along, but in essence, they defined it, drawing inspiration from the likes of Little Richard, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the artisans of soul at Motown and Stax. In so doing, Creedence Clearwater Revival became the standard bearers and foremost celebrants of homegrown American music.
As read at CCR’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
I’m surprised to note that this is Creedence Clearwater Revival’s first appearance in Songs of the Day, which seems a strange oversight, given how much I’ve always admired the group once touted in the Rolling Stone Record Guide as America’s greatest singles band. They aren’t the only ones vying for that title (hey what about the Supremes?) but they certainly racked up a lot of hits, and almost continuous airplay, during their brief heyday in the late Sixties and early Seventies, charting with 14 top 10 records between 1969 and 1971, many of which remain standards: Proud Mary, Run Through the Jungle, Green River, Who’ll Stop the Rain, Bad Moon Rising, and many others, a collection that eventually made for a jam-packed greatest hits album dubbed Chronicle, which went 12X platinum, has sold six million copies since 1991, and surged back on to the Billboard Hot 200 again this year.
No wonder; there’s an evergreen, earthy, unpretentious quality to their songs, none of which sound anything like the trippy psychedelia of the era (much less the output of the West Coast music scene that emerged later), despite the group’s origins in the San Francisco Bay area community of El Cerrito. These were working class guys from working class families on the wrong side of the tracks, and to them, the whole drug-fuelled flower power movement was a frivolous indulgence of privileged kids from wealthy backgrounds, people who could afford to screw around and wallow in decadence for a while before running back home to Mommy and Daddy. Fine for the likes of them to lie around like hobos in the street at Haight-Ashbury, listening to Jefferson Airplane, the Electric Prunes, Moby Grape, the Grateful Dead, and Strawberry Alarm Clock, or some such shit, until they passed out from all the cosmic sunshine. There’d be none of that opaque, addle-brained nonsense from CCR. As noted during their Hall of Fame induction, Creedence was all about what later came to be called “Roots Rock”, the sort of music you might hear in a bar full of truckers and longshoremen, solid, catchy, often somewhat edgy tunes that ditched the studio wizardry in favour of a sound that could easily be duplicated live, on stage. You know – honest, old school rock ‘n roll, sometimes with a dash of more traditional styles thrown in.
This made their music accessible to a broad audience, especially the more upbeat numbers, many of which still sound as if they could have been written anytime, perhaps just yesterday, or maybe back in 1952, like Lookin’ Out My Back Door, or the 45RPM flip-side of today’s selection, Down On the Corner, my brother’s fondness for which gave rise to one of my favourite childhood memories. I guess it was around 1972, and Mark was going through his Chicago phase. He played Chicago incessantly, and his closed bedroom door did little to mute the bombastic and often shrill-sounding brass that so often formed the backbone of their songs (think 25 Or Six To Four), a particular style that set my father’s teeth on edge. Dad hated Chicago. He cringed whenever Mark slapped one of their discs on our old monophonic turntable with its five-pound tonearm, which had only one little speaker, but still managed somehow to be loud. Why don’t these kids ever play any nice music? he’d moan, like parents everywhere in those days. Well they did, sometimes, and one day I came upon Dad paused motionless outside of Mark’s room, listening as Down On the Corner, decidedly not the despised Chicago, was plainly audible through the woodwork. He seemed both relieved and excited, maybe imagining that my bro’s musical taste had finally turned a corner, and he could bid farewell to all those shrieking horns and screaming vocals (no such luck). There, he said to me with a broad smile, that’s what I mean. That’s what I’ve been talking about. He lingered, bobbing his head to the infectious rhythm. Yes. Yes. That’s the real deal. He had a good ear, my Dad (as did Mark, actually, Chicago notwithstanding), and anyway who could resist a tune like this:
CCR wasn’t always so upbeat, of course, but I don’t think they ever sounded as angry, or as downright bitter, as they did with Fortunate Son. This was a protest song, plain and simple, a musical screed against the iniquities of America’s class system in general, and the administration of the military draft in particular, and the way it always seemed to be the poor kids who got sent off to the meat-grinder then chewing up America’s minority and lower class youth in South East Asia (with a fully justified rant about America’s perennially unfair distribution of tax burdens thrown in for good measure). Said composer and lead singer John Fogerty, interviewed recently in the wake of Donald Trump’s frequent use of Fortunate Son to warm up the crowds at his Nuremberg Rallies:
Recently, the President’s been using my song ‘Fortunate Son’ at his rallies, which I find confounding to say the least… I wrote the song back in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War. By the time I wrote the song I had already been drafted and had served in the military. I’ve been a lifelong supporter of our guys and gals in the military probably because of that experience. Back in those days we still had a draft, and something I was very upset about was that people of privilege – in other words, rich people or people that had position – could use that to avoid the draft. I found that very upsetting, and that’s why I wrote ‘Fortunate Son.’ That was the whole intent of the song, the inspiration for the song.
The very first lines are:
Some folks are born made to wave the flag
Ohh, they’re red, white and blue
But when the band plays “Hail to the chief”
They point the cannon at you
Well, that’s exactly what happened recently in Lafayette Park. When the President decided to take a walk across the park, he cleared out the area using federal troops so that he could stand in front of St. John’s Church with a bible.
Trump and his campaign staff were apparently mistaking Fortunate Son for a patriotic salute to the good old Hew Ess of A, like Lee Greenwood’s god-awful God Bless the USA (a mistake also made frequently by Republican politicians, including Ronald Reagan, when making use of Springsteen’s Born in the USA), and it browned Fogerty to no end. Patriotic? Rah-rah America?? As if! And of all people to make use of it! Trump himself, the draft-dodging Private Bone Spurs, was exactly the sort of privileged prick Fogerty had been writing about, one of those rich kids who avoided service by being in college, or having Daddy pull some strings. Somehow, Donald kept getting his bogus medical deferrals, keeping him out of harm’s way, unlike all those losers who couldn’t evade Uncle Sam. Talk about a fortunate son! The song was actually an enraged indictment of Donald and his kind, didn’t he get that?
Well no, of course he didn’t.
I’ve read commentary in the music press opining that the first hints of Heavy Metal, Grunge, and even Punk can be heard in the strident, in-your-face guitar riffs of Fortunate Son. Maybe. In any case, it sure does rock hard, and it sure is full of the same sort of passion and political awareness that would later turn up in the output of Springsteen, and even harder-rocking outfits like the Clash. Like them, CCR aimed to be a voice for the little guy, the poor, downtrodden working folk who always get the shit-end while doing all the dirty jobs, including, whenever the shit hit the fan, dying in some god-forsaken jungle or scorching third world sandlot. Looking around today, taking in the growing disparity in wealth, the tax relief repeatedly granted to the already super-rich, and the way that America’s all-volunteer armed forces nevertheless continue to fill their ranks with lower and lower-middle class recruits, Fogerty must mutter to himself that some things never change, except, of course, for the worse.
the needlefish 