Creedence Clearwater Revival's 'Green River' At 50
... Creedence Clearwater Revival wound up on crooner Andy Williams' NBC show in the summer of 1969. The performance, taped shortly before Woodstock, opens with a troupe of smiling young people in marching band uniforms, holding tambourines and trumpets while cheerfully high-stepping around the small set, singing. The refrain: "In this world of troubled times, we all want survival / One solution seems to be... Creedence Clearwater Revival."
A fog rolls in — and there's John Fogerty, in a fringed brown-suede vest, clawing the opening guitar line to "Green River." It's not surprising that TV producers didn't get Creedence Clearwater Revival. During its rapid ascent in 1969, even those inside rock culture didn't really know what to make of the band. Here was a group from San Francisco that was pointedly not interested in, or aligned with, the city's most intriguing (and best-known) export, psychedelic rock. A band that was not into drugs, that positioned itself as counter to the counterculture. A band that mythologized the American South with an exotic mixture of blues, New Orleans R&B and rockabilly, despite being a product of California. A band that had a sound built for FM radio, but songs that adhered to the tight verse/chorus requirements of AM.
The commercial rise of Creedence seems torrid, almost paranormal, in hindsight — by the end of 1969, Creedence had three top-10 albums on the Billboard 200, and four top-five singles on the Billboard Hot 100. But that pales in comparison to its artistic evolution: During an incredibly prolific 18-month stretch — approximately from the recording of Bayou Country around October 1968 to the recording of Cosmo's Factory around May 1970 — the band developed a distinct and instantly recognizable sonic signature. It applied that soundprint to direct, tuneful, incandescent songs that enchanted pretty much everybody – hippies and new suburbanites, Vietnam protesters and war veterans.
And though those songs have been canonized as individual works, arguably the band's most striking accomplishment is the way its music registers now – as a set of brilliant, interconnected flashes, elements in a mythology. We smile when any of Creedence's songs leap from the radio, maybe at the beach — because they're great songs, and also, possibly, because the sound puts us in close proximity to the mystical realm Fogerty and crew conjured like a magic trick, over and over again.
full article at:
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/02/744929605/creedence-clearwater-revivals-green-river-at-50-our-essential-guide-to-early-ccr
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