Time Capsule: Creedence Clearwater Revival, 'Green River'

Every Saturday, Paste will be revisiting albums that came out before the magazine was founded in July 2002 and assessing its current cultural relevance. This week, we’re looking at Creedence Clearwater Revival’s third album, a 29-minute affair that jump-started their reign on rock ‘n’ roll in the Western world for the next three years through tapestries of muscular, catchy swamp tracks.

Who is the greatest American rock band ever? It’s a question that, as all great debates must, rages on far into modern discourse. Typical answers involve the Beach Boys, the Grateful Dead and Nirvana, maybe Eagles sneak in there or Aerosmith, the Doors and Metallica upset the competition. If we’re talking about influence, it very well might be the Velvet Underground or the Ramones. But it’s hard to carry on those conversations while omitting a very easy choice: Creedence Clearwater Revival. Though the band was founded by John Fogerty, Doug Clifford and Stu Cook as the Blue Velvets at Portola Junior High School in El Cerrito in 1959, the group we recognize now didn’t exist for almost another decade, after Fogerty’s crew hitched their wagon to Fantasy Records and went by Vision and, later, the Golliwogs before settling on Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1967.

In those early days, the Blue Velvets played instrumentals and jukebox standards, recording three singles and getting radio play from Casey Kasem’s KEWB radio channel in Oakland. After Fogerty and Clifford were drafted in the military during Vietnam, Fogerty became the band’s de facto frontman—playing lead guitar, saxophone, harmonica, keyboards and singing lead vocals. The first CCR single, “Porterville,” didn’t chart anywhere, but it would wind up on an eponymous debut album that spawned two Hot 100-charting songs in 1968: “Suzie Q” and “I Put a Spell on You,” the former of which peaked at #11 and has since been certified Platinum. But few groups in North America, or across the globe, have had a peak like the one Creedence Clearwater Revival had from 1969 to 1971.

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It started with Bayou Country in January 1969, of course, which features “Born on the Bayou,” a Gold-certified single that didn’t chart, and “Proud Mary,” the song that went to #2 on the Hot 100 (and charted in 12 countries), got certified Platinum twice and is, undoubtedly, one of the most recognizable CCR songs ever—if not the most recognizable. But Bayou Country, despite it reaching the Top 10 on the Billboard 200, was an uneven affair. Aside from the two aforementioned singles, much of the seven-song tracklist is forgettable—save for a cover of Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly” and the beautifully-named “Keep on Chooglin’.” It was a great way to kick off the year, though, and Fogerty and the guys would return in August with another album: Green River.

There is no definitive “greatest” Creedence Clearwater Revival album, though Cosmo’s Factory in 1970 is a perfect album. But Cosmo’s Factory’s Achilles heel is that it’s a plateau of swamp rock goodness. The songs are all so level with themselves that the record’s highs aren’t nearly as remarkable as the highs elsewhere in CCR’s catalog. That is why my needle always points in the direction of Green River, a 29-minute outing with four of the band’s greatest successes ever—songs so undeniably good that, even if the other five tracks were awful, the album would still be a resoundingly enjoyable affair. But the other five songs on Green River are pretty good, too.

Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded Green River at Wally Heider in San Francisco from March to June 1969. Like Bayou Country, John Fogerty produced the entire album himself. Clifford would recall that what set the band apart from their contemporaries was their focus. “We went to see the local bands and they were so stoned they weren’t even in tune and they were really terrible,” he said. “We made a pact on the floor of the Fillmore, right then, where we would do no drugs or alcohol. We decided to get high on the music, or get out of the business.”

With that context, the band’s swamp rock sound makes too much sense. Their heaviness never once flirted with the tripped-out trends embraced by their peers, like Jefferson Airplane and the Mothers of Invention. Rather than lean into the acid rock that would define an event like Woodstock, which occurred a week after Green River’s release and featured the band on the bill, CCR bought into their own rockabilly and blues roots. CCR were allergic to the idea of jam music, opting to get in and get out. “I didn’t like the idea of those 45-minute guitar solos. I thought music should get to the point a little more quickly than that,” Fogerty once said.

Green River begins with its title track, a 150-second misnomer. Many associate the titular body of water with the Bayou in the American South, but Fogerty is singing about Putah Creek in Winters, California and got the idea to call it “Green River” because of a soda-pop flavor. Fogerty, who’d long been CCR’s primary songwriter, floods the tune with pastoral imagery. He sings about catfish, barefoot girls, bullfrog’s talking, dragonflies and skipping rocks while his and his brother Tom’s guitars jangle and clank. There’s a scoop of nostalgia that seeps into the song’s final verse, too, when Fogerty recalls “Cody’s camp,” where he spent his days “with flat car riders and cross-tie walkers.” “Old Cody Junior took me over, said, ‘You’re gonna find the world is smolderin’, and if you get lost come on home to Green River.’”

The B-side to “Green River,” “Commotion,” is far less melodic. Written by Fogerty as a means of capturing a portrayal of New York’s mania, the song is an early glimpse at a hard rock sound that would become far more punctuated in the years to come. “People keep a’talkin’, they don’t say a word,” he sings. “Jaw, jaw, jaw, jaw, jaw.” When he unleashes the “git, git, git, gone” line in the chorus, you can see his country boy confusion seep into madness. While the band leans on a rockabilly-inspired bounty of riffs, John reckons that not even a politician or a priest could quiet the noise and chaos of a busy, alien city. When CCR kick up the dust on “Tombstone Shadow,” they lean fully into their blues sound—Tom, Cook and Clifford chug along in the background, while John rips a sensual, serpentine guitar solo across the entire track while reckoning with “13 months of bad luck.” Every time I get some good news,” he contends, “there’s a shadow on my back.”

Green River’s first side concludes with its longest song: “Wrote a Song for Everyone.” A track that undoubtedly is the elder sibling—at least spiritually—to “Long As I Can See the Light,” which wouldn’t arrive until the summer of 1970, “Wrote a Song for Everyone” finds CCR softening their palette for five minutes. Carried by a splendid melody draped by thin hues of melancholic guitar, Fogerty wrote the track after having an argument with his wife. It’s one of few Creedence tunes that feels so universally applicable; “Wrote a song for everyone and I couldn’t even talk to you” is especially cutting, but the “Pharaohs spin the message, ‘round and ‘round the truth / They could have saved a million people, how can I tell you?” couplet is emotionally sticky, too.

Green River is notable, however, for the way its second side begins. The folky, delicious melody of “Bad Moon Rising” makes up some of the most enjoyable 140 seconds of any rock song ever, employing an opening guitar riff that is as recognizable as it is beloved. While “Bad Moon Rising” is apocalyptic for its use of doomy weather imagery, as Fogerty mentions earthquakes, lightning, hurricanes, overflowing rivers and, naturally, “the voice of rage and ruin,” it’s become associated with werewolves in the decades since. John Landis’s 1981 film An American Werewolf in London is to thank for that, as the song soundtracks the moment David Kessler (David Naughton) changes into a werewolf for the first time. But even so, “Bad Moon Rising” achieves a lot over just a few minutes, as Fogerty’s end-times prophecy becomes a lesson in living: “Hope you got your things together, hope you are quite prepared to die,” he sings. “Looks like we’re in for nasty weather, one eye is taken for an eye.”

The “Bad Moon Rising” B-side, however, is Green River’s best track. “Lodi” is syrupy and full of a breezy, country-rock soul that CCR would continue utilizing on later releases. Fogerty wrote “Lodi” about a down-on-his-luck musician struggling to make ends meet by gigging in the California town of the same name—a town name Fogerty picked because of its name, not because he had any relationship with it. Consistency is king in Creedence Clearwater Revival’s catalog, so the key-change that comes in the final verse of “Lodi” is a welcomed pacing switch that hypes up the drama without losing the song’s easy beat. It chugs along similarly to “Proud Mary” but rollicks with more tragedy. “If I only had a dollar for every song I’ve sung and every time I’ve had to play while people sat there drunk, you know I’d catch the next train back to where I live,” Fogerty reckons. Given that CCR were still a fresh band, it sounds like a cautionary tale Fogerty and his mates were hoping to avoid becoming a part of.

Green River closes out with a 10-minute end-cap of the American Songbook. “Cross Tie Walker” (a phrase that appeared in “Green River” 15 minutes earlier) evokes Johnny Cash two-steps with a baseline from Cook that contorts like a ballet dancer, as Fogerty sings about a train-hopping nomad, while “Sinister Purpose” lives up to the ambiguity of its title. Who Fogerty is writing about is unclear, though it’s hard to consider the track’s subject matter without the context of the Tate-LaBianca murders, which occurred just two days after Green River came out. “I can set you free, make you rich and wise,” Fogerty sings. “We can live forever, look into my eyes.” It sounds all well and good on the surface, but lines like “Did you see the last war? Well, here I am again” and “Knockin’ at your door, come and take my hand” sound charming in a terrifying way. Considering that “Sinister Purpose” as a title is a bit foreboding on its own, along with the fact that the track’s melody is a menacing, hard rock-driven earworm, there’s an unshakable feeling of worry. CCR captured the brutality well, and the subsequent, unrelated cultural unfurling adds a top-coat of emphasis.

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s resumé may not be as long as those of the Beach Boys or the Grateful Dead, but their peak was no doubt just as good. No American rock band had a better single year of music-making than CCR did in 1969, either. Beginning with Bayou Country in January and then, in December, unveiling Willy and the Poor Boys, one of the most consequential periods in the history of recorded music was bookended by magical fits of swampy, rockabilly labor.

Considering that, miraculously, an all-time album was released in the middle of that and it called to mind the country and R&B heyday of Sun Records and Atlantic, it only makes sense that the band’s third LP ends with them tumbling into a bluesy rendition of “The Night Time is the Right Time”—a song written by Nappy Brown, Ozzie Cadena, Lew Herman and popularized by Ray Charles in the decade prior. Fogerty’s voice is perfect for this moment, as his soulful croon turns over like an engine, spawning into this gargantuan, throat-shredding howl while his bandmates repeat “Why do they?” over and over behind him. Cue a muscular guitar solo from Fogerty and a throbbing, slow-burn bassline from Cook, and the banks of Green River fall gracefully into the water.

Time Capsule: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Green River

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