In August 1969, the biggest band in America appeared to come from somewhere that did not exist. Creedence Clearwater Revival sounded as though they had crawled out of a Louisiana swamp: with John Fogerty singing in a ferocious Southern rasp about bayous, paddle steamers, cotton fields and gathering storms. In reality, the four musicians came from a suburb of San Francisco, and none had any connection with the South. Fogerty’s bayou was pieced together from old blues and folk records, country radio, Mark Twain novels and Uncle Remus stories.
Three members of the band – John, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford – were only 24 years old (rhythm guitarist Tom Fogerty, John’s big brother, was a little older) but they had already been playing together for a decade. It had taken them a while to arrive at this sound: in 1964, the same quartet, then called The Golliwogs, signed to the Berkeley-based label Fantasy, where A&R man Hy Weiss tried to make them sound like a hybrid of the Beatles and the Stones. That came to an end when John Fogerty was drafted into the US Army in 1966. On his discharge, two years later, he decided to stop imitating the Brits and instead lean into rock music’s American roots: “because rock ‘n’ roll is a Southern invention”.
No Creedence album embraced the South more completely than Green River. Released in August 1969, it was the band’s third LP and their second that year, and one that constructed an entire imagined landscape of riverbanks, rural bars, ominous skies and lost childhoods.
It also marked the point at which Creedence’s music became inescapable. While the Beatles were disintegrating, the Rolling Stones were regrouping and San Francisco’s psychedelic aristocracy disappeared into extended improvisations, Creedence released three platinum-selling albums in ten months: Bayou Country, Green River and Willy and the Poor Boys. Between them came huge-selling singles like “Proud Mary”, “Down on the Corner” and “Fortunate Son”. Part of their astonishing productivity came from John Fogerty’s terrified belief that, unless they constantly inundated the charts with new music, they would lose the pop world’s attention and fall from relevance.
And, as a result, Credence absolutely dominated the last year of the 1960s. Green River topped the US album chart. Its two singles, “Bad Moon Rising” and the title track, both reached number two, a chart position they achieved five times in their short career. In 1969 they even outsold The Beatles in the US – something no other American band had done since the British invasion.
Their ascent had been startling. The band’s self-titled debut, released only the previous summer, still sounded like the work of a nascent psychedelic blues group. Their breakthrough cover of swamp rock singer Dale Hawkins’s “Susie Q” lasted more than eight minutes, its loping riff resembling a piece of proto-krautrock. But Fogerty soon realised that concision was a more powerful weapon. “Proud Mary”, released in January 1969, announced Fogerty as a songwriter of unusual imaginative economy, someone whose songs felt instantly traditional.
By 1969, San Francisco had eclipsed London and New York as the centre of the rock and roll world, which put Creedence in a perfect place to break out beyond the counterculture. Yet they were distinctly out of step with their more psychedelic contemporaries on the Bay Area scene, such as Sly & The Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & The Holding Company, The Grateful Dead and The Steve Miller Band. In an era of constant change, Creedence became a counter-revolutionary force. They eschewed exotic paisley-patterned psychedelia, space-age FX pedals and the flamboyant mysticism of prog and acid rock. They wore workman’s clothes, rejected stagecraft and projected a blue-collar anti-image. Almost uniquely for the period, they maintained a strict anti-drugs policy (alcohol was very much their intoxicant of choice). They embraced old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll but jettisoned its glamour and sexuality.
On Green River, the songs sound elemental, but had an eerie contemporary resonance. “Bad Moon Rising” contains visions of earthquakes, hurricanes and overflowing rivers, which Fogerty said were inspired by a storm scene in the 1941 film The Devil and Daniel Webster, but its warning (“don’t go out tonight/it’s bound to take your life”) seemed linked to a curdling of the Summer of Love: urban riots, political assassinations, Nixon’s election victory and the escalating Vietnam war.
The title track, “Green River”, was inspired by Putah Creek in California, where Fogerty’s family had holidayed when he was young, and by a soft-drink syrup called Green River. But its mosquito-haunted banks, rope swings and bullfrogs occupy the same invented South as “Born on the Bayou”. When Fogerty sings “Take me back down where the cool water flows”, he sounds like he’s returning to ancestral ground rather than a childhood holiday spot. The lyrics to “Sinister Purpose” could soundtrack a piece of Black Sabbath-style satanic metal, but instead we enter the world of snake-handling diabolic preachers. Even the only cover here, “The Night Time Is The Right Time” , a song that Ray Charles can turn into something excitable and suggestive, is turned into something dark and diabolic.
Crucially, Fogerty’s Americana seldom felt fraudulent. Creedence did not merely copy the tropes of roots music; they grasped its capacity to turn ordinary language into folklore. Even the band’s name was assembled from scraps. “Creedence” came from a friend of Tom Fogerty’s, Credence Nuball; “Clearwater” was inspired by a beer advertisement; “Revival” signalled renewed ambition after years of slogging on California’s bar-room circuit (something explored in the single “Lodi”, the tale of a musician stranded in a small California town after his ambitions have failed).
The album arrived in the same month that Creedence appeared at Woodstock. They were the first major act to sign up for the festival, accepting a fee of $10,000. But scheduling delays pushed their headline set into the early hours of Sunday morning, after a long Grateful Dead performance which, Fogerty claimed later, had sent the crowd to sleep. As Creedence played 11 songs – including four from Green River – Fogerty looked out at a dark field of wet, exhausted and sleeping bodies and felt the band had played into a void. He subsequently refused permission for the performance to appear in the original film or soundtrack, which gave the peculiar impression that the biggest band of 1969 were absent from the year’s most important music event.
Still, Creedence did not need Woodstock. Radio stations loved them, both the singles-orientated AM formats and the album-orientated FM shows. Creedence’s music worked in cars, kitchens, factories and bars. It appealed to hippies, country fans and rock audiences without alienating any of them. Some of their biggest fans were soldiers serving in Vietnam, or inmates in America’s penitentiaries.
The band’s reign was as brief as its rise was rapid. Willy and the Poor Boys followed only three months after Green River, featuring “Down on the Corner” and the furious anti-war, anti-draft-dodger anthem “Fortunate Son”. Cosmo’s Factory, released in July 1970, became their commercial summit. But Fogerty’s control, the same force that had made their extraordinary productivity possible, generated resentment. By the end of 1972, Creedence were finished. Their imperial phase lasted scarcely three years.
But, in 1969, while other bands explored outer space, Creedence travelled downriver. Green River made that journey feel both ancient and immediate, idyllic and threatening, wholly American and entirely invented.