Song 181: “Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickie Song 181, Frog Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival Before we begin, I need to explain a choice made later in the episode. As long-time listeners will know, I do not use slurs on this podcast, but Creedence Clearwater Revival presents a problem for this policy. For several years, before choosing that name, they recorded under another name, the name of a type of children's doll, patterned after blackface minstrelsy. Now that term is not really known in America, but in the UK it is both the name of that type of doll and a racial slur against people of colour. The word is widely used among older generations without intention of offence to refer to the dolls, but it's generally censored or bowlerized in mainstream media these days. Terms like golly doll are used instead of the word in question. And to give an idea of how the word is viewed by younger people who are aware of its connotations, when I mention this problem, without mentioning the word, on a social media site, where my followers are mostly around my own age or slightly younger, some of the replies I got included looks at Credence Wiki page. They called themselves the what? Regrets looking at Wiki. Oh, I never knew that. I wonder what it was. Googles Jesus Christ! Just look this up and Oh, wow! Oh, oh no! Wanders over to Wikipedia expecting the name to be horribly outdated but ultimately innocuous. Scrolls through summary Oh, holy Moses, no! Just looked at Wikipedia and physically recoiled. And so forth. This is a term that has vastly different valences depending on the country you're in and your age. Some people find it inoffensive others find it truly shocking. I obviously can't do an episode on Credence without referring at all to the name that they recorded under for three crucial years in the band's development. But I also equally obviously can't repeatedly use a term that gets that kind of reaction. So what I'm going to do is a compromise that will likely please nobody, but is the best I can do under the circumstances. I will say that name in full once, when the band first take on that name. and from that point on will only refer to them as the group or the band until they change their name. In the transcript I will likewise print the name in full the one time I speak it but when using it to label music clips I'll star out the vowels. It's unfortunate that this is the kind of thing I have to do. The episode also contains some brief discussion though not in any depth of mental health problems and of death from AIDS related illness. Now that that's over let's talk about something more interesting. Plastics. I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Yes, sir. Are you listening? Yes, I am. Plastics. Exactly how do you mean? There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it? Yes, I will. Enough said. That's a deal. Here he is now. Yes, Ben. The youth culture and counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s had an odd relationship with the concept of plastic. These days, plastic is ubiquitous, for better or, usually, worse. We're all told to cut down on our use of plastic, both for environmental and health reasons, but it's essentially impossible to avoid. Almost everything we buy is made of plastic or comes in some kind of plastic container, and that's just how things are. But in the 1960s, plastic was still only becoming ubiquitous. Mass manufacturing of plastic items only really started after World War II and most people who could afford them had, for example, stereos and TVs with wooden or metallic casing rather than the plastic casing they come in now. Milk was still sold in glass bottles as was cola. Plastic was, to an extent, seen as a symbol of the future. a future of ubiquitous consumption and consumer goods. But anything that's seen as the future is a symbol both of hope and fear, and plastic symbolised mass production and conformity. The rejection of the way things were that characterised the hippie movement, and, more broadly, the counterculture and alternative lifestyles that led to everything from the Jesus movement to the Black Panthers, was a rejection of mass production and conformity, and of capitalism. This is a big part of, for example, the popularity of Tolkien's work among the same young people who in other ways aesthetically were a million miles away from a conservative Catholic Oxford Don in his seventies who thought that saying mass in English rather than Latin was an unacceptable concession to modernity. There was a general feeling that the post-war world, where the Western industrial democracies, especially America, were experiencing greater material wealth than ever before thanks to mass production had nevertheless lost something that made people human, a connection to the earth or to the past. This is something that was expressed in different ways, whether the Beatles seeking Indian wisdom, with George Harrison explicitly telling Donovan at one point that he preferred Hinduism to Buddhism because it was older, or just a fetishising of authenticity in music from about the point that music from Big Pink came out. The monkeys were considered bad not because of any in-heavened quality in their music, but because they were manufactured rather than authentic. They didn't come together organically, and they didn't appear to those who dismissed them to have any connections to an older tradition. And plastic became, to the youth culture of the 60s, a signifier of inauthenticity, of everything they were opposed to. Captain Beefheart protested the plastic factory as oppressing workers and dispoiling the environment. I'm going, be in the flower growing, boy, you're going to blow it. That ain't no place for me, old man, let me see. The Gold Coast Singers mocked the sale of cheap manufactured religious icons in plastic Jesus. Now we have words for you from our sponsors, the Pink and Pleasant Plastic Icon Company, Del Rio, Texas. I don't care if it rains or freezes, long as I've got my plastic cheeses glued to the last port of my car. You can buy him phosphorescent, clothes in the dark, he's pink and pleasant, take him with you when you're traveling far. Howell your friends, yes, you too can own one For only $1.98, no COD Jefferson Airplane talked about television as a plastic fantastic lover Here we go. The King's attacked conformists in Plastic Man. A man lives at the corner of the street And his neighbours think he's so full and he's weak Because he never swears and he always takes your boy in a hand But no one knows he really isn't And Frank Zappa, always at least as cynical about the young people buying his records as he was about the people they were opposed to, sings in Plastic People. We hear the sound of marching feet down Sunset Boulevard to Crescent Heights and there at Pandora's Box, we are confronted with a vast quantity of plastic people. Take a day and walk around. Watch the Nazis run your town. Then go home and check yourself. You think we're singing about someone else. But you're plastic people. And while I wouldn't be as harsh on the hippies as Frank Zappa was, I wouldn't be as harsh towards anyone as Frank Zappa was towards his own audience, frankly. It is always worth thinking about the inherent contradictions in any viewpoint. And for example, for all that the counterculture wanted authenticity, its existence did also depend on the very mass culture and consumerism that it decried. The authentic music they wanted came on LPs. Albums were for real music, and singles were for commercial rubbish. But the LP itself was and is made out of vinyl. a type of plastic, and the format would not exist without plastics. It's always worth thinking about material reality, as opposed to just thinking about ideas and art, because the two always go hand in hand. Just ask Jack Sheedy. Sheedy was a Dixieland trombonist, decades after the commercial peak of that style. He was one of the Moldy Figs, the less successful American equivalent of the British trad boom. And in 1948 he started his own label, Concord Records. primarily to put out recordings of his own music for the small mouldy fig scene in San Francisco which at the time was one of the few places with any kind of Dixieland scene at all A good man is hard to find You always seem to get the other kind Just when you think you've found a real true path You look around and find a fool with some other gal Sheevy's initial releases didn't sell well and his band is now a footnote to a footnote. Even on webpages about the San Francisco traditional jazz scene of the 40s and 50s the only mention of his band is that it was the first to play at Club Hangover before better known musicians like Muggsy Spanier and Earl Father Hines played there. but he put out a couple more singles by his own group and also by a new trio. That trio made music that was very different from anything Sheedy played and from most other jazz. Their leader, Dave Brubeck, did not have the normal background for a jazz musician and instead had studied briefly with Schoenberg. Though he hadn't enjoyed the experience, he'd got into a screaming match with Schoenberg over whether something sounding good was a good enough reason to do it. with Brubeck claiming it was while Schoenberg insisted on vigorous theoretical justification, and for a longer time with the avant-garde composer Darius Milhoe. Brubeck had done some earlier work with an octet, but had slimmed down to recording with the trio in acknowledgement of the economic realities of having a larger band. Sheedy agreed to record the Dave Brubeck trio as a favour to his friend Jimmy Lyons, one of the most prominent jazz DJs on the West Coast, even though it wasn't his style of music. The session was almost a disaster. The Bay Area was already at the forefront of the tech world because of its connections with the military, and Ampex, the company that manufactured the first ever tape recorders in America, who had made them for Bing Crosby as we talked about way back in the episode on How High the Moon, was based there, mostly so it could sell to the military. After the first couple of machines they made for Crosby, most of their sales were for recording telemetry information from guided missiles. But because they were based in the Bay Area, The San Francisco studio in which Concord Records recorded had access to one of the very earliest production tape recorders in the US and it was decided to try to record the tracks on the new machine. Unfortunately, after two hours, the engineer gave up in defeat, having wasted most of the session time because he didn't know how to work the machine. They switched the cutting directly to disc instead and managed to get a handful of tracks cut in the last half hour of the session. The End be almost the last thing ever to be recorded for Concord Records. The little label only released six singles in total, with the two Brubeck singles cut in that half-hour period being the third and fourth, and Sheedy's band being one, two, five and six. The label folded, unable to pay its bills, and so Max and Sol Weiss, the owners of the pressing plant, took possession of the masters. They knew nothing at all about music and didn't even particularly like jazz. They were plastics manufacturers, not music people, and even the record pressing wasn't their main business, it was just a sideline to their more general plastic moulding work. But they knew that Brubeck's records had been selling, even if Sheedy's hadn't, so they came to him with a proposition. He knew about music, they had the equipment to make records, how about they worked together, a 50-50 split? They agreed to start a new label together, named Fantasy Records. This was supposedly named after the famous pulp magazine, according to multiple sources I've read. But there's a problem in that as far as I'm aware there was no pulp magazine just titled Fantasy at the time. There was one in 1938 that ran only three issues. However, both A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction started towards the end of 1949, and that was the year that Fantasy Records was apparently started, though they didn't get round to releasing anything until 1950. Fantasy was clearly in the air, anyway. Everything was going to be released on the new vinyl, rather than old-fashioned shellac. And when they started doing albums, rather than just singles, the Weiss Brothers Plastics experience meant that they could release the records in distinctive colours. Mono albums were pressed in transparent red vinyl, and when stereo came in, those were in transparent blue. Some of the singles were released on blue or pink vinyl, too. This was truly unusual for the time period, unlike today, when about half the vinyl released as in a coloured version, and made fantasy's releases very distinctive. Brubeck recorded for fantasy for several years, first with his trio and then with a quartet, adding his friend Paul Desmond, a sax player who had played in Azalea Roctet. Rubeck also acted as a talent scout for the label, bringing in other musicians from the West Coast jazz scene. He suggested that Fantasy sang Jerry Mulligan. ¶¶ The label was selling enough that they started a subsidiary, Galaxy, which was the name of a pulp magazine of the time, which released the first recordings as a leader by Brubeck's former percussionist, Carl Chader. Jazz was never the most commercially successful music, but fantasy managed to make real money from releasing it. Max Weiss later explained their technique for making money out of a not especially lucrative genre, saying, In those days, with a group like Mulligan, we would go into a recording session, sidemen got $40 each. The leaders got double. In a three-hour session, according to the union, we had to get 15 minutes of music. When Brubeck or Chader or Mulligan were in a session, in three hours, if we didn't get an hour and a half of music, everyone thought something was wrong. For every additional 15 minutes of music we used, we had to pay them another $40 and $80. So, in order to break even on a jazz artist, if we sold 5,000 units, we were very, very happy. Today, an average album costs anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000 in studio time. Today, these guys aren't rehearsed, they listen to it while doing it. So, I mean, the market was different. Those figures, incidentally, are the union scale that musicians would get for playing the session. The leader, whose name was on the record, would also receive royalties. But you can see the logic. 90 minutes of music would make the three albums. Even if Weiss was exaggerating somewhat, and I suspect he was, you can still see that if you got extremely good musicians in, and could cut a couple of albums in one three-hour session, you wouldn't have to sell all that many of any of the albums in order to make a decent amount of money. This was a business that was based on consistent sales of a large volume of product, not huge sales of a hit. Though, if they got a hit, of course, they wouldn't turn it down. Unfortunately for fantasy though, they did miss out on the biggest jazz hit of all time. Paul Desmond wrote that for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, but they recorded it for Columbia Records, not for Fantasy. Brubeck had got sick of the label's attitude towards the music. Not the word rate. After the group moved over to Columbia, they released an average of an album every 12 to 15 weeks to the next decade, but the fact that they put out whatever they recorded, whether or not Brubeck thought it was his best work. Apparently for at least one live recording, Brubeck didn't even know the gig was being recorded. The label secretly put microphones in the ventilation ducts at the venue, connected to a mobile recording studio in a van parked outside. But the real problem that caused him to leave the label was financial. He'd misunderstood his contract. He and the Weiss brothers had agreed that he would get 50% of everything, and he thought that meant 50% of everything the label made. but in fact it was only 50% of the profit made on his own records a far better royalty rate than one would normally expect actually but Brubeck was annoyed because he had been acting as a de facto talent scout and A&R man for the label and he resented doing that work and not getting paid for it. Brubeck's move from fantasy to Columbia did deprive fantasy of one truly massive hit but they did end up with a few other jazz records you might well have heard. The End we heard earlier. Guraldi had a distinctive piano sound and very physical style of playing which came from having small hands. He couldn't do the octave stretches that other pianists would do, and would have to hop his hand quickly across the keyboard to reach notes that other musicians could reach without moving. Guraldi only remained in Cheda's band for a short time, cutting just one album with them. But Ralph Gleeson, who was at the time the jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and who wrote the liner notes for that album, became the biggest booster of Guaraldi's own new trio when they formed. Saul Zantz, Fantasy's new marketing manager, signed Guaraldi's trio initially for just one album. While the Weiss Brothers were not from the music world, Tull Zantz was very much from that world. He'd started his career working for Norman Grant, helping with the jazz at the Philharmonic shows, and doing tour management for Duke Ellington, among others. He was so much a part of the jazz world that a few years later, in 1960, he would marry Charles Mingus' ex-wife Celia. For a wedding present, Mingus gave the two his record label, Debut Records, which would become one of the first of many labels to be absorbed by fantasy over the years. By the time Gavaldi's album was actually released, Gavaldi was back in Cal Chader's group, having in between also been briefly the pianist for Woody Herman's band. musicians don't tend to remain in one band very long. Gharaldi got dropped by Fantasy after releasing his second album, because his sales were poor even by jazz standards at the time. But he was constantly in demand for sessions with other musicians, playing on a bewildering variety of records in the late 50s and touring constantly, even going to the UK as part of one of the exchanges organised by Chris Barber and the National Jazz Federation, coming over here with Woody Herman and a small band, while Chris Barber and his band toured the US. He also played with Jimmy Witherspoon, Ben Webster and many others. Rollin' boy, don't jump the joy Can't live, and this baby boy Don't rave me none Christmas for the time Gavaldi's eventual return to fantasy records was more or less out of desperation. Gavaldi was very impressed with the film Black Orpheus and its unusual score in the new bossa nova style, which had not previously been heard in the US, and he wanted to do an album of jazz variations on the music. He tried various major labels, but they didn't bite. And eventually he went back to fantasy, the label that had dropped him previously. I have perfect pitch and natural rhythm. And just by one listening, maybe four or five bars, usually five bars, I can spot whether a record's going to make it or not. And I listened to this tape. What was it called? Black Orpheus. and we were certain I speak in the editorial we that this was going to make it Fantasy unlike the larger labels were willing to take a chance on the idea of a jazz album inspired by Black Orpheus but there was a problem the Black Orpheus material would only fill out one side of an album Gualdi suggested that for the other side they could cut an old classic everyone could play in their sleep since I fell for you the recent pop hit Moon River and two of Gualdi's own songs Almaville and Cast Your Fate to the Wind That last track was released as a B-side, but DJs flipped the record, and soon Cast Your Fate's The Wind was a top 30 hit on the pop chart. Quite extraordinarily for a jazz instrumental. This from a label that a few months earlier had taken out a full page ad in Billboard to boast 13 and a half years without a hit. And the success of Cast Your Fate's The Wind had two lasting effects on American popular culture, whose ripples are still felt today, both of them, oddly, to do with documentaries. Firstly, the filmmaker Lee Mendelsohn was looking for someone to score a documentary he was planning to make on the comic strip Peanuts, to be titled A Boy Named Charlie Brown. He first asked Dave Brubeck, and then Cal Chader, and both turned him down. But then he was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge and heard Castro Fate to the Wind on the radio. He knew Gualaldi was the man for the job And Gualaldi released a soundtrack album titled Jazz Impressions of a Boy Named Charlie Brown with a cover and gatefold illustrated by Charles Schultz The documentary never actually sold to TV. But in the process of trying to sell it, Mendelssohn more or less accidentally got commissioned to produce an animated Peanuts Christmas special. And of course, Gavaldi was chosen to score that too. And Gavaldi's music for A Charlie Brown Christmas has been a major part of American Christmases for the ensuing 60 years. But it's the other effect we're talking about today, because Castro Fate to the Wind being an actual chart hit was so surprising and unusual that Ralph Gleeson, who, as well as being a music journalist, also presented a jazz show on local TV, decided to do a three-part documentary titled An Atomy of a Hit, looking at how a hit record was made. It's that documentary we heard earlier, with Max Weiss talking about how Gavaldi came to the label with the Black Orpheus idea and that documentary while it didn't have much of a viewership at the time, indirectly led to six multi-platform albums three films that won the Oscar for Best Picture innumerable lawsuits and a feud that lasted more than 50 years because among the small audience for Anatomy of a Hit were the four members of an unsuccessful band, Tommy Fogarty and the Blue Velvet Come on, baby. We're gonna rock all night. Come on, baby. We're gonna rock all night. Come on, baby. Until the raw daylight. Come on, sugar. You know I'll be so fine. Come on, sugar. One of the most profound experiences of John Fogarty's life, one that shaped literally everything, happened when he was four years old. He talks in his autobiography about what was nearly the first object I would have realised was my possession, mine alone. It was in fact his second possession. The first, according to the book, was a doll of a black baby. And he says of that, I've often wondered if that somehow predisposed me to love black music, black culture. but the second possession was something he consciously remembers being given by his mother a record one aimed at children of his age he says of that record, long gone now for all I know the artist could have been Fred Myrtle and the Boneheads but I sure do remember the songs I'm from Alabama with my banjo on my knees I'm going to Louisiana, my true love for the seas It rained so hard the day I left, the weather it was dry Just and so hard I froze to death Susanna, don't you cry Oh, Susanna, don't you cry for me I've come from Alabama with my banjo on my knees Oh, Susanna, don't you cry for me I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knees The two songs on that record, which I suspect was the Al Jolson one we just heard, as Jolson released a single of these two tracks in 1950 and was one of the most popular entertainers in the world, were Oh Susanna and Campdown Races. And that record simultaneously introduced him to three things. It helped teach him the concept of ownership. It was his first exposure to the music of Stephen Foster, who he now cites as his most formative influence as a songwriter. And most importantly of all, it taught him that there was such a thing as a songwriter. His mother explained to him that the two songs on the record were written by a man named Stephen Foster, the first time he ever came across the idea that songs were written by specific people. John was the third of five Fogarty brothers, and his older two brothers were both lovers of R&B music, so he absorbed the music they listened to, mostly on KWBR from Oakland. The Fogartys grew up in El Cerrito, a suburb in the Bay Area. They'd listen to G by the Crows and similar popular music, but KWBR would also play people like Howlin' Wolf and Bo Diddley, and gospel music by the Swan Silvertones and the Staple Singers, and young John absorbed all of it. He also absorbed the music his parents would play. He talked specifically about them loving the Mildfathers record When You Were Sweet Sixteen and singing along with it, a poignant memory later after they divorced. I love you as I love you When you were sweet When you were sweet Sixteen I love you as I never loved before From the age of eight, he wanted to be a rock and roll singer and specifically he wanted to be a black rock and roll singer. He made up in his head a doo-wop group called Johnny Corvette and the Corvettes and he says in his autobiography Everyone in my mind's band had matching jackets like the turbans or the five satins or the penguins. I was Johnny and we were black. I meant no disrespect, I was just a kid fantasising about what he loved. So in my mind, the grown-up version of me and my group was black. He became even more interested in music as a source of comfort when his parents divorced. In his autobiography, he references the Beach Boys song, In My Room, to describe how he felt at this point. And he grew to love the white rock musicians of the time too, like Elvis and Bill Haley. But his big inspiration at the time became Carl Perkins. Because of Perkins' voice, and because he realised that Perkins wrote the songs and played lead guitar, as well as just singing. Had so many children she didn't know what to do. They were doing all right till she took them to town. The kids start picking them up and putting them down. Now all your children wanna rock, mama. All your children want to roll. They wanna roll, wanna rock, wanna bop, telepop. All your children want to rock, rock, rock, rock. But Perkins was a lead guitarist was a big thing for Fogarty at that point. because to him the guitar was at least as important as the vocals. He started listening to records like Gene Vincent's Bebopalula for Cliff Gallup's playing, to Dale Hawkins' Susie Q for James Burton, and a little later to Dwayne Eddy and Freddie King. Perhaps surprisingly as well, he also loved Charlie Christian's playing on records like Flying Home. He says in his autobiography, I'd say there's a whole lot of Charlie Christian in how I play. Just the feel of that swing, the way he riffs off the melody. Parts of keep on chewling a reference in Charlie. In my head, when I go Americana, and I hear that soft chew happening like shortening bread or down by the riverside, and I'm trying to keep things just real simple, I'm probably in some way referencing Charlie Christian. The Pockety Brothers' mother seems to have had a big influence on John's tastes. She was the one who got him to listen to Benny Goodman, and she was also a big fan of folk music, and would every year take her younger sons the older brothers wouldn't go to the annual Berkeley Folk Festival where they'd get to the performers like Pete Seeger who John later called the greatest entertainer I have ever seen and Ramblin' Jack Elliott Jesse Fuller and Alan Lomax He also learned through these festivals about Hugh the Ledbetter whose music he loved because it sounded like the blues music he was hearing on the radio and John was also getting into country music more When he bought Great Balls of Fire The B-side was Jerry Lee Lewis' version of Hank Williams' You Win Again. I believe of you. I just can't go. John started to listen to as much Hank Williams as he could, and branched out from there to other country music. He started trying to teach himself both the guitar and the piano. He got guitar lessons from Bobby Olivier, the DJ and promoter who organised the Berklee Folk Festival, but who was also a teacher of folk guitar though by all accounts he only had a handful of lessons and mostly taught himself by listening to records often slowing 45s and 78s down to 33 so he could figure out parts. He also had a musical accomplice in his older brother Tom. Tom was four years older a young adult while John was in his early teens but he shared a lot of John's musical tastes and they were both harmonised to Everly Brothers records like When Will I Be Loved and sometimes Tom would sit at the family piano and play Bobby Freeman's Do You Wanna Dance and sing in an imitation of Freeman's voice while John played the bongos. Well, do you wanna dance in the old fire? Tell me I still love a man, oh baby Do you wanna dance? Well, do you wanna dance in the face? At this time, John somewhat idolised his older brother, because Tom was a great singer who could sound just like Bobby Freeman, and he was the lead singer in a vocal group called Spiderweb and the Insects, who had had an actual record contract with Bob Keen at Delphi Records, the same man who had signed Sam Cooke and Richie Ballins The record ended up not coming out and the tapes have apparently disappeared but that was hardly the point Tom was the closest thing to being a rock and roll star in John orbit He even knew Bobby Freeman's piano player. One day, John walked into the music room at his high school, and started fooling around on the piano, playing a few of his favourite songs. Things like Do You Wanna Dance, Bill Dogget's Honky Tonk, and Fat Stomino and Little Richard records. After a short while, another boy came in, attracted by the music. They got talking about all the records they loved, like Link Wray's Rumble, and Doug Clifford invited Fogarty to join his band. Or, at least, that's how it was from Doug's point of view. Fogarty reports thinking to himself, Am I joining his band? No, he's joining my band, and unilaterally deciding he was the leader. Though, at the start, there was not much of a band. Doug played drums, but didn't yet have a full drum kit, just a snare drum he balanced on a flower pot and played with pool cues he'd turned into drumsticks in the school's woodshop. He played his drum along to a friend of his, Stu Cook, who was from a richer family, so rich that they could actually afford to get the piano tuned regularly, and who played piano and trumpet, though neither very well. There's some dispute as to the order in which things happened, whether Doug and John played together and invited Stu, or whether the first time John played with Doug it was as part of his already existing playing with Stu. And, like a lot of things to do with this band, which version of the story is told has a certain amount of political significance to their later infighting. But what's definitely the case is that Doug Clifford and Stu Cook were already friends and playing together, and that Clifford was the one who met John Fogarty and suggested they jam together. As the group which John christened the Blue Velvet already had a keyboard player in Cook, John stuck to guitar, though he would become the kind of multi-instrumentalist who could at least get a tune out of pretty much any instrument. Once Clifford had saved up enough from mowing lawns and similar odd jobs to buy his own full kit, the Blue Velvet started performing at local dancers, performing sets largely made up of the instrumental hits of the time like Red River Rock, Rumble, and songs by John's latest guitar god, Dwayne Eddy. John loved a lot about Dwayne Eddy's music, but one thing he was particularly impressed by was that Eddie's titles were always evocative. With a title like Rebel Rouser, you didn't really need lyrics, you knew what the song was about anyway. The Blue Velvets started getting quite popular around El Cerrito, where they were the only real rock band. El Cerrito was only 20 miles from San Francisco, but it was a world away culturally, and even San Francisco in the late 50s wasn't the same as San Francisco in the late 60s. At the time, instrumental rock music was still very popular, the kind of music that would, a year or two later, turn into twangy surf instrumentals. And while they'd do the occasional vocal, they were not really set up for it. None of them were great singers, and they didn't have a microphone, and nor did most of the places they played. This was the kind of set-up where they'd turn up with John's guitar and amp and Doug's drum kit, and use whatever piano was at the church hall or wherever the dance was, with nobody involved even knowing what a PA was at all. That changed when Spiderweb and the Insects split up. Tom Fogarty was 18, and the rest of the Insects were a year or two older. He was very serious about wanting to make a success of their music, and offered to pay for a recording session for the group so they could release their own single and started at gigs. The rest of the band didn't want to know. If they weren't going to get paid for the session itself, why would they want to turn up? Tom wanted to build a future. He didn't want to be stuck in a dead-end job like most of the people around him. He wanted to be a star. He had the looks and he had the talent, but time was running out. He was 18 and about to graduate from high school and he'd have to get a proper job then. He needed musicians who were taking things as seriously as he was. And oddly, his little brother's group seemed to be doing just that. John Fogarty was the kind of obsessive, driven personality we see a lot in stories like this. The one who drives his bandmates to doing better by insisting they play it right. and writers always his way and who can play everyone's instruments better than they can play themselves and will show them exactly what he means. Almost every successful band has one member like this and he, and it's almost always a he is very rarely the most loved member of the group by the other members but it's the kind of drive that is often necessary for success, if not always for an enjoyable experience playing together. Tom started joining the Blue Velvets on stage, sitting in for a couple of songs at their shows and the band were immediately impressed by how much better they went down with a good-looking singer who knew how to work a crowd. The band members were good musicians, but they were very far from being charismatic. John actually hated looking at the audience and would turn away from them whenever he could. Tom got the Blue Velvets to go into a recording studio with him to record a demo of two songs he'd written. He was a songwriter as well. What couldn't John's big brother do? But there was little label interest at first. but the trio continued playing school dancers in church halls and even a couple of county fairs and at one of the county fairs they met a black R&B singer, James Powell who had a recording contract with a tiny label, Christy Records Powell was looking for some musicians to back him on a session for a single and the Blue Velvets, just the original trio not Tom who didn't play an instrument, eagerly agreed Doug played drums, stew piano and John played electric guitar but also borrowed a stand-up bass for the session and overdubbed that. You are my heart's desire. And you set my soul on fire. Oh, very angel. You, very angel. I'm longing to go home The record didn't do much, but it was still an actual record. It even got played on KWBR, the group's favourite radio station. And best of all, Stu Cook had a project in science class to build a homemade radio. When he turned it on in class, Beverly Angel happened to be playing. There would be more records, and soon. Tom Fogarty had kept pushing for a record deal, and it had eventually paid off. Tommy Fogarty and the Blue Velvets, as they were now known, got signed by a small San Francisco bass label called Orchestra Records. They were very new and had only released one previous single, Me and My Shadow by Dougie's All-Star Banjo Band. I'd been unable to track a copy of that down, but found a copy of a later single by that group on YouTube, and while the All-Star part might be questionable, they were, definitely, a banjo band. The first single the Blue Velvets released was one written by Tom, Come On Baby. On this, they didn't have a bass, but John played a bass line on the bottom strings of his guitar, then overdupped lead on the high strings. That got the group some encouraging remarks from Casey Kasem, at the time a local DJ, not yet a national figure. But encouraging remarks were all. It sold practically nothing. The next single, Have You Ever Been Lonely, was a standard bit of 1961 pop, clearly patterned after artists like Del Shannon. Have you ever been lonely? Have you ever been blue? Do you know the feeling when your lover has not been true? Do you know what a broken heart and the tears when you must part can do? Oh, what they can do First you cry The songwriting credit for that, though, wasn't Tommy Fogarty, but was, rather, Johnny Fogarty. They released one of the single and orchestra records, Now You're Not Mine, a Johnny Fogarty song, backed by Yes You Did, a Tommy Fogarty song. But that record wasn't even credited to the right band name. The label referred to Tommy Fogarty and the Blue Violets. That would be the last Tommy Fogarty and the Blue Velvets record to be released, in June 1962, and was also more or less the last record that the orchestra label released. By this time, the group were close to graduating from high school, and Doug and Stu were thinking of going off to college, while Tom was already married and working a day job. John had taken some work at a recording studio in Berkeley, where he worked as an assistant doing whatever little odd jobs needed to be done but learning how to create effects like slapback echo and occasionally sitting in as a session musician when someone needed one. The Blue Velvets continued playing gigs all through 1963 a handful a month with Doug and Stu commuting from their college at San Jose State every weekend and they continued rehearsing regularly but they were getting nowhere. But John and Tom, particularly were desperate for a way out of the rut they found themselves in. One story that various people have told about the band in 1963 sums up where they were. By this time, the group had decided that Booker T and the MGs were their model, and they were playing Green Onions at a school reunion dance. After the performance, a black man came up to the group and told them they had played it pretty good, but there was something missing, a phrase he repeated several times. The group took this to heart because, like many young white men who fetishise the music of black people but don't have many in their social circles, they believed that black people had more soul than white people. And then, in the beginning of 1964, two things changed for them almost back to back. First was the same event that changed everything for all America. Oh yeah, tell you something I think it won't go straight When I say that's not true I want to hold your hand I want to hold your hand I want to hold your hand The Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show affected everyone who cared even slightly about popular music, but it caused two big changes for The Blue Velvet. The first was that there were no longer going to be Tommy Fogarty and The Blue Velvet, They were just going to be the Blue Velvets. You didn't perform as singer and backing band anymore. You had to be a unit. And part of that was the other change. Tom was no longer going to be the group frontman. He was going to be integrated into the group. They realised that the only line-up that would matter for a while was the Beatles one. Two guitars, bass and drums. Tom could play a little guitar, though at this point he could still only play open chords, what John later disparagingly called cowboy chords. and so he was now the group's rhythm guitarist, while Stu was told he had to switch from piano to bass. And the other change came a little over a month later. When a guy makes a record in the Middle West, he hasn't got a record company within arm's reach to do something about it. He has to go to New York, he has to go to Chicago, he might go to Los Angeles. It was Vince's good fortune, but he was in San Francisco, and San Francisco had a record company, Fantasy Records. They had made two albums by Vince and neither of them had sold very well. Fantasy is operated by Saul and Max Weiss. Saul's role in the company, he's the president, Saul's role in the company is to say no to Max. And Max's role in the company is to do things to annoy Saul. Anatomy of a Hit, the three-part documentary that Ralph Gleeson made about Vince Givaldi, had its first broadcast on the 18th of March 1964, and the Blue Velvets were watching. They were amazed. there was a record label that had actually released hit records in San Francisco not all the way downstate in LA they could just go there and talk to them Fantasy's one hit single had been an instrumental so they recorded a demo of some instrumentals and they took the demo to Fantasy Records where Max Weiss told them that they were going about things all wrong by now, another month later the Beatles had the entire top 5 on the charts to themselves and Wise told them that if they wanted to have hit records they couldn't be thinking of instrumentals. They wanted to be doing songs like that. Oh, and ditch the name. Get a name that sounds like you might be British. So they went away and workshopped some new material. John and Tom decided they were going to be a songwriting team like Lennon and McCartney though they would much later differ sharply over how much the two of them contributed with John later claiming that Tom made no or minimal contributions to the songwriting, and he'd just been added so they could be more like Lennon and McCartney. The two also took on pseudonyms. John chose to be Toby Green, while Tom was Ran Wild. The group themselves would now be The Visions. They came back to fantasy with two new Green and Wild collaborations, both very consciously modelled on Beatles tracks. The song chosen for the B-side, Little Girl Does Your Mama Know, was straightforward enough. A genre exercise, it was modelled on this boy, and that in turn was firmly in a genre that the now-Visions have been playing for years. Though Little Girl also picks up on the repeated I can't hide from I want to hold your hand and uses that to get out of the middle eight. But the A-side, Don't Tell Me No Lies, is quite a remarkable assimilation of the Beatles' style, given that they've only been aware of the British group a few weeks. Max Weiss was excited by the record, and so with the group in it eventually came out towards the end of the year. They were less infused, though, when it came out with yet another name on the label. Weiss had decided to give them a more British name, and landed on a name that he explained to them was the name of a kind of voodoo doll that British people had. So it was a British name. And so, for the next few years, Tom and John Fogarty, Stu Cook and Doug Clifford were, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to say it, the Gollywogs. They didn't like it either. Not for the racial reasons, but because it was a stupid word and nobody they spoke to knew what it was and then they had to go into a whole half-remembered spiel that Max Weiss had given them but fantasy records knew how to make a hit and they didn't so they went along with it. They went along with other ideas that Weiss had too. They wore white wigs he told them to wear. They're described by most people who saw them as Afro wigs but white rather than black but from the one photo I've seen of them they look exactly like a white version of the Russian hat that Weiss who by now had fully embraced the beatnik lifestyle could be seen wearing in the clip from the Gavaldi documentary. These were coupled with cheap-skinned waistcoats in a similar style to those Sonny Bono wore polka dot shirts and patchwork tartan bell-bottomed golf pants. The visual effect did not have the effortless stylishness of the Beatles. While they were waiting around for the record to be released Doug and Stu were still off in college and only commuting to play weekend gigs with the band so John started sitting in with another band the Apostles on the guitar and when they got a residency in Portland, Oregon he went along with them for a few weeks and two major things happened there first he got a taste of the Pacific Northwest garage scene we talked about in the episode on Louie Louie seeing harder edged garage rock bands like the Kingsmen, Paul Revere and the Raiders and particularly the Sonics See you next time. The other change came from the fact that Mike Burns, the group's keyboard player and lead singer, was, according to Fogarty, literally tone deaf. Partly through desperation, and partly because he was free from the social pressure of audiences he'd grown up with and was playing for strangers, Fogarty started to take some lead vocals. He'd never thought of himself as a singer, though he added a few harmonies when required, but in his methodical way he would take the shows and listen back to them afterwards, making notes of how he sounded, and trying to teach himself how to sing like the black singers he liked, every night trying to make himself more like James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and especially Little Richard. He was still not a natural frontman. He really disliked looking at the audience, and he would turn to one side to read the graffiti on the venue walls rather than look at them. and his singing sideways on from the audience later became a trademark of the group. But by the time he got back to El Cerrito a few weeks later, he had decided he was a singer. The group continued recording for fantasy records throughout 1965, and released four further singles that year. And over that year, you can hear the lead vocals moving over from smooth-voiced Tom to John's deliberately roughened voice. Those singles are mostly of historical interest, as you hear the Fogarties and given later events presumably mostly John slowly finding a songwriting style through imitation. Almost all their records are modelled on specific records by British invasion bands. You can hear them and think this is where they first heard the Rolling Stones this is where they heard the zombies and so on. An interesting one is their fourth single the second day side on which John sang Reed which is very obviously modelled on Gloria by them with some elements of them's version of Baby Please Don't Go thrown in. Rather astonishingly, John and Tom Fogarty had managed to come up with a Van Morrison knock-off titled Brown Eyed Girl, 18 months before Van Morrison himself recorded his own far more famous song of the same name. It may even be that Morrison heard the knock-off and filed it away for future reference, because the track was a regional hit, selling 10,000 copies, and by this point the band were doing moderately well, getting occasional prestigious gigs like a support slot for Sonny and Cher. Sadly, Wild Brown Eyed Girl, at the end of 1965, did fairly well. Their first single of 1966, which I think is by far the best of these early singles, was a flop. The group continued in a holding pattern through 1966, releasing a handful of singles, but they were in precisely the rut that they were looking to get out of. They were playing the occasional gig while Doug and Stu were at university expanding their minds. Both men became rabid Tolkien fans, and Doug got the nickname Cosmo because of how cosmic he was. But they were on the edges of the Bay Area, in the suburbs, not in San Francisco where the action was, and a whole scene was developing there that they weren't part of, and that they were partially defining themselves against. They were hicks from the sticks and didn't fit in with all these new bands called things like Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane. they were tightly rehearsed and played short R&B-influenced songs. They didn't jam. Tom was still working a day job, and John was making a living doing odd jobs around fantasy records, helping out and becoming very friendly with Saul Zant, the label's marketing manager, who he saw as something of a kindred spirit. They ended 1966 with a track called Walking on the Water, written by the Fogarty Brothers. Another massive step forward in their sound, with John Fogarty adding multiple layers of keyboards, and a lyric which for the first time seemed to be telling a story, one with clear religious imagery. This was the closest they would get to the heavy rock that was popular in San Francisco. I saw a man Walking on the water Coming right at me From the other side Holding out my name Do not feel free Be begin to run Found it in my brain I don't want to go Increasingly, the band were just cutting rhythm tracks in the studio and letting John take over from that point, performing multiple instrumental overdubs by himself. He had learned a lot from all his time in recording studios and was slowly learning all the techniques necessary to get the sounds in his head out and onto disc. Walking on the water had no chance of becoming a hit, though, because in January 1967 both John and Doug, who had dropped out of university, were drafted. They managed to pull a few strings and only get put in the reserves, as we've seen people like Dean Torrance do earlier. But it was much more urgent for Fogarty and Clifford because the Vietnam War was properly ramping up at the time. They weren't sent to Vietnam, but they did have to go and do military basic training in a barracks. Doug quite quickly became ill with the stress and was hospitalised and given a medical discharge, but Fogarty spent fully six months on active duty, and even after that point he still had to set aside one weekend a month for his military reserve duties. Once John finished training and was able to go back to full-time music, Tom called a band meeting at the Shire, the house where Doug and Stu lived, and which the band used for their rehearsals, which they named due to their love of Tolkien. They needed to make a decision. They had now been performing together as a quartet for nearly seven years, and they'd gone nowhere. And this was because, even though they thought of themselves as serious, they weren't committed. They needed to treat the band as a full-time job. Tom was going to give his notice at his day job. Stu would not do what his father wanted and go on to law school, and they would rehearse all day, every day. They'd have a band account that all the money from gigs would go into, and they would pay themselves a weekly wage of $20. Tom made the immense sacrifice here of putting his entire savings, $1,250, about $12,000 in today's money, into the salary pot to start them off, despite having a wife and children who were relying on his income. And Stu sold his car and threw that money in as well. They were going to be working men in a working band. Every day they would meet up and rehearse. The plan from this point on was to spend six weeks rehearsing each new single, so when they got into the studio they would know it backwards and sideways. and everyone would have their parts down perfectly, and they could cut the track quickly and know that they could reproduce it on stage. The first single they released that way, at the end of 1967, was a song titled Porterville. And as happens, more often than one would think in these situations, the band finally taking the plunge and deciding to sink or swim seemed to coincide with events that gave them the opportunity to do much, much better than they had before. Almost as soon as Portable was released, John Fogarty got a call from Saul Zant, his friend and mentor at the record label. Zant told Fogarty that he'd bought the label outright from the Weiss Brothers and was now in charge. He still had faith in the band and wanted to send them to a new contract with the label. He was going to lend the band $1,500 for new equipment because John desperately needed a new amp, and he was going to let them get rid of the ridiculous clothes and the even more ridiculous name. All the group's prayers had been answered. They signed the new contract, which was essentially the same terms as their old one, eagerly and without any legal advice. Fogarty has later claimed, though others have disputed this, that Zanz told them that if they became successful they'd tear it up and give the band a more favourable one. But in truth, despite the problems that came later, the contract was, if not perfectly fair, at least well within normal standards of the 60s. The royalty rate was 10%. Hardly wonderful, but on the low side of normal, rather than completely unheard of. And fantasy took Fogarty's publishing rights, which again was perfectly usual at the time. These are things that Fogarty would resent later, and to a certain extent with good reason. But they were no worse than the contract signed by 90% of new bands at the time. The other big issue that came up later was the amount of recordings required by the contract. It was a seven-year contract, and it called for the band to deliver 12 tracks a year for two years, and then 24 tracks a year for the remaining five. If the company wanted, they could ask for up to ten more tracks a year, and if the group didn't deliver the full amount one year, it would roll over into the next. A track here was defined as something under five minutes. If they recorded a six-minute track, it would count as two, an eleven-minute one would count as three, and so on. Now, remember what Max Weiss said earlier. In a typical three-hour session with a jazz group, they'd expect to get at least 90 minutes of music. Assuming the five minutes per track the contract allowed, that would work out as 18 tracks suitable for the contract in a three-hour period. You can see how, to a company that came up making that kind of music, the contract seemed pretty reasonable. It would be no more than two or three days' work a year to fulfil the contract. Even at the more normal rate of four tracks per three-hour session that was standard for pop music at the time, That would still be only 24 hours' work in the studio to provide everything that was required. And these are the kind of numbers that were perfectly standard for pop bands in the early 60s. In 1963, for example, The Beatles and The Beach Boys both released 32 tracks each. But that was the early 60s, when records were cut live with minimal overdubs, and when albums could be filled with cover versions of whatever the most recent hits were. This was only four years later, a blink of an eye in business terms, especially for a business based on as reliable a music as West Coast Jazz. But four years was an age in rock history. But at this point, the group were just happy that they had a deal, and that Zantz was taking them as seriously as they were now taking themselves. The next thing to do was to come up with a name. They started throwing ideas around. John came up with Whiskey Rebellion. Doug thought they should be Gossamer Wump. Tom suggested Creedence Newball and the Ruby, after a friend of his. It was eventually John who came up with the final name, inspired by a commercial for Olympia beer. It's the water, the natural artesian water of Tumwater that makes Olympia such a good beer. Ask for Oli, the small town beer that's made good. Fogarty was convinced, even decades later, that it was the Beach Boys, a band he admired a great deal, singing on that advert. It definitely isn't, it's some session singers doing an imitation of them. He thought about that commercial and the idea of Clear Water, and he combined it with the name of Tom's friend Credence, though he decided to spell the name with an extra E. And then he added Revival. The group was being revived, but it also had connotations of a revival meeting, fitting the vaguely religious subtext that had started creeping into John's writing. The group were also revivalists in that they were, in a sense, looking backwards musically. Much like the band, who were at about the same time working on music from Big Pink on the other coast. The newly named Credence Clearwater Revival were making music that was modern, even new, for which owed more to the music of five, ten or fifteen years earlier than to the music that was being made by the people around them. In their little suburban community, only twenty miles from San Francisco, but a million light years away socially, they had been largely cut off from the various musical scenes that had developed, and had built their own thing from elements of Dwayne Eddy and Wilson Pickett. Charlie Christian and Huey Ledbetter, Howlin' Wolf and Carl Perkins. But they were still a Bay Area band, and if they wanted to get any kind of success they would have to appeal to a Bay Area crowd. And that was going to be difficult, because they were making fundamentally different music. Credence weren't improvisers. They would come up with parts and play the parts the same way every single time. One reason they spent weeks rehearsing each song is because Pogarty wanted very precise arrangements. He'd been very influenced by watching the film The Glenn Miller Story. All right, take five, boys. Is it bad? I'll be out for weeks. You get more tough breaks. Just when you got a good sound, too. Well, that isn't what I want, but if we could have worked on it for a while, we might have been able to... You can't find another trumpet blower? No, not like Joe, not with his range. All the arrangements are the same, all with the trumpet lead. And this is the man that had a hurt his lip the day before you opened. What are we going to do, Glenn? Postpone the opening? Poor old little lady. Well, we're not going to postpone anything. We're going to open tomorrow if I have to stay up all night and rewrite the arrangement. Oh, you can't do that. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Hey, just a minute. I have an idea. Willie Schwartz could play those parts on clarinet. Why not? Huh? You see clarinet lead? Why not? Don, get me a whole lot of manuscript paper. Can you use your author, Si? Sure, sure. Clarinet lead, sure. And Don, call Helen, tell her not to worry, huh? Tell her I'm going to be working here all night. All right. Clarinet lead. And I can harmonize it real tight all on the same octave. Four saxes and a clarinet. He better stay up all night. Fogarty had decided he wanted to be like Miller and have every instrument in its own proper place. He was very concerned about things like creating the proper sense of space between the instruments. But Fogarty could not read music. So the way he'd rehearse the band was that he'd teach them the songs and let them come up with their own parts. Then, by his own account, during the rehearsal process, he'd slowly make suggestions to the other band members, saying, maybe you could do this, or try it like that. And by the end of the rehearsal period, they'd all be playing the parts that he came up with, but they'd think they'd come up with them themselves. Whether that is actually what happened or not I wouldn't like to say. It's not how the other band members portray matters. But there is a lot of bad blood between the other surviving members and Fogarty. Fogarty can't resist an opportunity at any point in his autobiography to have a dig at the other members, whether their work ethic, their general attitude towards him, or their musicianship, especially Doug's, and to claim that he did everything and was carrying the other three at all times. This might even be true. But it does make one wonder, then, why it was that he chose to work with the same musicians for a decade and a half, if they contributed as little as that, and he could have done the same with anyone. Just be aware, especially from this point forward, that for fairly obvious reasons all the books about credence tend to privilege the viewpoint of John Fogarty, since he was the group's lead singer, lead guitarist, and the writer of all their hits, and that that privileged viewpoint will necessarily come through in everything I say here. I try to give as much weight as I can to the others' accounts, but I also have to deal with the source material I have. So, what were they to do? Pogarty decided to combine the roots rock style that they were developing themselves and the jam music that the San Francisco bands were doing. But as he said himself, when the Deadwood jam, it seemed like they'd go off the path right away and then stay off the path. Either you like that or you don't. In my world, I couldn't have my music be as unstructured as that. It makes me uncomfortable. So to start with, he took Dale Hawkins as Susie Q, the rockabilly classic that featured his guitar hero James Burton, and which was closely based on the music of another old favourite, Howlin' Wolf, and which the group had started playing at live shows. Oh, Susie Q. Oh, Susie Q. I love you, my Susie Q. I like the way you walk. And then he carefully mapped out an eight-minute arrangement of the song. He couldn't read music, so he sat down at his kitchen table with several sheets of paper taped together as a road map, drawing graphs of where the record would peak and fall, who would come in where. As he put it later, there were parameters for how far out the song could go. I had to know darn sure what was going to happen because I didn't want people falling asleep the audience or the band the difference between our jams and say the dead in my band there was an arrangement but the idea was still to make a record that could get played on KMPX the freeform radio station that played records and live tapes by most of the San Francisco bands so Susie Q Credence spelled it differently from Dale Hawkins was eight minutes long and incorporated feedback sounds at Pogarty Stead were inspired by East West by the Butterfield Blues Band. The Creedence version of Suzy Q was long enough that it had to be split across two sides of a single, but with its psychedelicised arrangement touches, like the filter put on Fogarty's voice at points, it sounded enough like a KMPX record that the station started playing it even before it was released. The group also did a favour that paid off. After KMPX started playing the record, but before it came out, the DJs and other staff of the station went on strike. Credence played a free show for the striking workers, and when the strike ended and the star DJs moved en masse to the news station KSAN, they remembered who had supported them and playlisted the record. Suzy Q made number 11 on the charts, and the label wanted to rush out an album. The band's self-titled debut featured Suzy Q and two of their older songs, a re-recorded Walking on the Water, retitled Walk on the Water, which would become the only songwriting credit that Tom Fogarty would ever have on a Creedence record, and the single version of Porterville, plus three more John Fogarty originals, a version of Wilson Pickett's 99 and a Half Won't Do, and the group's next single, another 50s cover, this time a version of Screaming Jay Hawkins' I Put a Spell on You. I put a spell on you Cause you're mine You better stop the funny that you do I still watching Yeah I am Yeah That single, though, only went to number 58. Better than anything they'd done before Suzy Q, but not good enough not to cause worry that the group might have been a one-hit wonder. And not only that, but their one-hit had been a cover version. The album did slightly better, reaching number 52 on the album charts. The album had liner notes by Ralph Gleason, who by this point had switched his allegiance from jazz to rock, and was a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. The liner notes consisted of two long columns extolling the virtue of the San Francisco scene, with the only mention of the band themselves or their music coming in the last paragraph, where he devotes a whole sentence to them, saying, Credence Clearwater Revival is an excellent example of the third generation of San Francisco bands, which gives every indication, as this album demonstrates forcibly, of keeping the strength of the San Francisco sound undiminished. But John Fogarty had been working on his songwriting. He would carry a notebook around all the time, in which he would write down little phrases. He found the music easier than the lyrics, but both would essentially come the same way. He'd hit on a phrase, musical or lyrical, and spend weeks thinking about it and trying to connect it to other phrases he had lying around. It would take a long time, and he'd often have the music finished before the lyrics, which were increasingly more impressionistic than literal. Fogarty's new songs weren't especially the standouts of the first album, but he was improving quickly, and by the time the album came out, he'd already hit on the sound that would make the group's career. The first sign of it came at a soundcheck at the Avalon, when Fogarty hit on a riff that he insisted the band keep playing. He knew he had something. He kept playing that riff in the soundcheck and making mouth noises and singing odd words like Hound Dog, trying to find the shape of a song. The lyrics, when he finally wrote them later, were in his new impressionistic style and were an early example of a trend that soon became called swamp rock. This is different from the earlier genre of swamp pop, which originated in Louisiana and East Texas, but several of the musicians from that earlier genre became better known in the new one. Swamp rock is rock music with strong influence from country and soul music, particularly musicians from what Charles L. Hughes has referred to as the country soul triangle of Memphis, Muscle Shoals and Nashville, but also with a strong admixture of influence from swamp pop musicians and with lyrics focused on the Deep South, especially Bayou country, the area around the Gulf Coast. The music has twangy rockabilly-style guitars, a funky, soulful rhythm section, and radiates authenticity even when it's anything but. The style seems to have been developed pretty much independently by several musicians, most notably Credence and Tony Joe White, putting together various streams of music that were separately becoming popular in 1968. There was, of course, the band, and their country-soul-flavoured songs of the antebellum South, and the band influenced literally everyone at this point. but there were several other elements in play. There was a whole stream of music from musicians from Georgia centred around Tommy Roe and Joe South that combined bubblegum pop with country soul elements like South's Games People Play making sonic elements of country soul music popular. There was Ode to Billy Joe by Bobby Gentry, a surprise hit in 1967 with its swampy string sound and lyrics about Choctaw Ridge. This was the primary influence for Tony Joe White, who along with Credence was the first wasn't hit big with a swan fox style. Incidentally, I've never covered Ode to Billy Joe in this podcast because Taylor Mayhan Co. covered it so well in his country music podcast, Cocaine and Rhinestones, that I can just point people to that episode if they want to learn more about the song. You should listen to it. There was the blue-eyed soul pop of Acts Like the Box Tops from Memphis. And most influential on the more hippie side of Swamp Rock, there was Dr. John the Night Tripper and his voodoo songs in New Orleans. All of these had been hit in the year or so before Swamp Rock coalesced as a genre, and Fogarty would have been aware of all of them. The reference that came to mind when he was writing the lyrics to what became Born on the Bayou, though, was Bo Dibley's first album, and songs like Who Do You Love. When he was writing Born on the Bayou, that was what Fogarty had in mind, a mythical deep south of hoodoos and hound dogs and black cat bones. Where Tony Joe White wrote Swamp Rock songs like Poke Salad Annie after hearing Ode to Billy Joe and thinking he should write songs like that rooted in his own experience, John Fogarty had no experience whatsoever of Bayou country. Indeed, he seems never to have left the West Coast, and never to have ventured further south than L.A., before his time in the military, when he was stationed in Fort Bragg in North Carolina. By the time the song was recorded, the group had done some short tours to promote Susie Q, playing the Fillmore East supporting the Beach Boys, and playing in Honolulu supporting the Vanilla Fudge, another band who'd had a hit with a heavy cover version of an older song. They'd still spent almost no time outside California, though, and none in the areas John was now writing about. So Born on the Bayou wasn't about the real Deep South, but was a white man from California using his imagination to inhabit a world built out of the elements of songs by Bo Diddley and Howlin' Wolf. But as Fogarty pointed out, his first great influence, Stephen Foster, never went below the Mason-Dixon line until long after he'd written most of his successful minstrel songs. Born on the Bayou was a major step forward in Fogarty's writing, and would end up being the opening track of the group's second album, Bayou Country, the first to have the credit produced and arranged by John Fogarty. To a large extent, this followed the same pattern as the first album, and as the next few would. There would usually be at least one track that stretched out to seven or eight minutes. This time there were two, Keep on Chuglin and Graveyard Train. At least one cover of a song by one of John's heroes, to show the group's roots and tie them to a tradition of music, showed that they were authentic, this time it was good Golly Miss Molly, and both sides of at least one hit single, with the rest of the album being short, punchy songs that were written as if they were hit singles. The original plan was for Born on the Bayou, the first real fruits of John's new songwriting style, to be the A-side of the next record, but at the last minute, the record was flipped. Fogh Mary had a long gestation and was built up for many parts. The title was literally the first thing Foghety had written in his notebook for song ideas, but at the time it was just a title. He thought maybe Proud Mary was a domestic servant, a cleaning lady, someone who wore a uniform and did undervalued work for rich people but still had a pride. That was the mental image at the start. But he only had those two words, Proud Mary, a title. But that was worth noting down. As he said to Dwayne Eddy later, When it came time for me to write songs, I used that lesson I had learned from you. It was simply, if the title can mean so much without lyrics, the title must be important. If you can have a cool title like Ramrod or Rebel Rouser or 40 Miles a Bad Road, Heartbreak Hotel, Honky Tonk, Bad Moon Rising, on top of everything else, you're really setting off in the right direction. Separately, he had a basic chord sequence he'd been working on, and a riff that was inspired by Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. He thought that riff sounded something like a paddle wheel, but didn't have much else. And then he got a letter he'd been waiting for for a long time, his official discharge papers. He was no longer in the military reserves, didn't have to go to the one weekend a month camps that had kept disrupting his career even after he was out of basic training, and he was totally free. The phrase, left a good job in the city, came to him, fitting the feeling if not the fine detail of what had just happened to him. They fit the chords he'd already been playing with. He started writing a lyric with that line, and brought in the thought about the paddle wheel, Big Wheel Keep On Turning. And then he finally realised that Proud Mary wasn't a woman, it was the name of his ship. Before he had even finished the song, Fogarty was convinced that he had written his first true classic song. A song that wasn't just good, it was great. I was a job in the city Waking for the man every night and day And I never loved one minute of sleeping Waiting about the way things might have been Be sweet and keep on playing it Proud man, I keep on playing it Rolling, rolling, rolling on a real world It was so great he couldn't let the band ruin it. Up to this point the group had been, well, a group. If there were backing vocals on a record, the other band members would provide them. But Fogarty had a particular idea for how he wanted the backing vocals to sound on Proud Mary, and the group weren't getting them exactly the way he wanted. He wanted them to sound like gospel groups. He named the Swan Silvertones, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and the Sensational Nightingales as examples in his autobiography. And the group's rougher harmonies sounded too punky, had too much attitude. So he wiped their vocals. Fogarty would wipe everything if it wasn't exactly what he wanted. Ever since he'd bought a Buddy Holly album posthumously cobbled together from Holly's demos, he'd been firmly against the idea of letting anything that wasn't the master take survive, in case it got released later by an unscrupulous record company. And so Credence are about the only major band of the time where we don't have massive box sets of outtakes and demos and alternate versions. Fronkity replaced the group's vocals with himself, Multifact, getting exactly the parts he wanted to get. When he finally got the vocals done, the group's road manager told him, it sounds like the ink spots. Fogarty later wrote, I wish he'd said the Mills brothers, but the sentiment was exactly right. But the group were, understandably, upset. And they got more upset when Fogarty, in an Italian restaurant the other three members had retreated to, laid down the law. From that point on, he was properly taking charge. Things would be done differently from now on. He was the only one writing the songs, and from now on it was going to stay that way. None of the others were to bring in any new material. They could still sing backing vocals on stage. He didn't want to change anything about their live performances. But on record, it was more important that things be done right, because the records were permanent. So from this point on, the other three were going to be confined to just playing the basic rhythm tracks. John was going to do any instrumental overdubbing, and all the vocals, by himself. And their input was not wanted. As far as John was concerned, he was actually doing them all a favour. He was going to take on more of the work, but not get any more of the money. And what did it matter who did what as long as the job got done? They were on the verge of the big time. And he couldn't let the others blow what they'd been working for for a decade at this point, by making a record that was less than exactly what Fogarty heard in his head. That didn't mean that they weren't still a gang together, all working for the same goals. It was just that he was going to be the one deciding what those goals were. The other band members didn't see things that way. After all, it was only a few short years since they had been Tommy Fogarty in the Blue Velvets. John, who until recently had never sung a lead vocal, who still wouldn't look at the audience face on while he was singing, and who every time he took a guitar solo would turn around and look at Doug, and half the time wouldn't look him in the eye, had somehow taken over as frontman from his older, better-looking brother with the better singing voice. And now he wasn't even going to let his brother sing backing vocals, or write any songs, even though Tom had been writing songs before John. Was this really what they had worked for? And while he was talking about how it was his vision that had got them on the chart, They were all very aware that up to this point they had not actually had a hit with any of John's songs. Their only hit had been a cover version, but that was about to change. Rolling, rolling, rolling on the river Proud Mary made number two on the chart. Weirdly, Credence got to number two many times, but never had a number one record, which some have suggested is down to them putting out records with B-sides that were strong enough that the airplay got split. The album it was from, Bayou Country, made the top ten on the album charts and just kept telling, eventually going double platinum. The group got on the Ed Sullivan Show The other three may not have liked John's tactics but they had to admit they'd worked And while Proud Mary didn't make number one it was in many ways the biggest song of 1969 Everybody recorded it and they kept recording it and often having hits with it First up was Solomon Burke who recorded his version almost as soon as Credence's record came out and had a top 20 R&B hit with it that spring Looking for a job in the city Working for my man every night and day And I never lost a minute of speed Worrying about the way things might have been Big wheels keep on turning I'll never keep on burning You're just rolling, rolling, rolling on the river Phil Spector produced a version for The Checkmates Limited which became a UK Top 40 hit Amen Corner, a UK pop sensation at the time with a run of top 10 hits, recorded this as an album track. For without the waves It's not helpless The true kids are turning Private kids are first Rolling, rolling Rolling on the river Elvis started doing it regularly Performing it in Vegas every night and on two of his hit live albums Left a good job in the city, working for the man every night and day. And I never lost one minute of sleep, and when I run away, things might help them. Big wheels keep on turning, trying to keep on burning. Oh, I'm rolling, rolling, rolling on a river. Even Leonard Nimoy recorded the version. I left a good job in the city, working for the man every night and day. And I never lost one minute of sleeping, worrying about the way things might happen. Big wheel, keep on turning. Rod and Mary, keep on burning. It became a song that's obsessed Brian Wilson in the same way as Be My Baby and Shortening Bread, and as late as the mid-90s he was cutting multiple as-yet unreleased versions of the song. Now if you come down to the river Bet you're gonna find some people who live You don't have to worry If you got your money People on the river are happy to give. Pull it out, pull it out, pull it on the river. Pull it out. But most famously, Solomon Burke suggested to Ike Turner that it would be a good song for Tina to sing, and Ike and Tina Turner had a worldwide top-five hit with their cover version, less than two years after Credence's original came out. I can't believe it's going to burn it Burn it, roll it, roll it Roll it on the river All right, roll it Roll it, roll it Roll it on the river River All right, roll it on the river Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah All right, all right All right, roll it Fogarty had done just what he said. He had written a classic, a standard, a song everyone knew, and he'd made them stars by doing things his way. Fogarty's need for control did not just extend to the records. He decided that the reason they'd waited so long for success was that they had listened to and relied on other people. So he was going to do all the band's business dealings himself from now on. As he said at the time, I wouldn't trust anybody else. I don't dig it because it's a hassle for me, answering the phones instead of somebody else or spending time thinking about things, but I've always had to do it, so it's not an extra burden at all. I'm glad I do now. It's every bit as involved as songwriting or being a musician or a singer learning a song, whatever. You've always got to be thinking about direction. I use myself as a manager, sort of, to oversee everything else I or the band does. And one of the things Fogarty made sure the band did was not to rest on their laurels, but to get back to work almost immediately, working on the next hit record. For the next couple of years, regular as clockwork, there would be a new Creedence hit single every three months, and often both sides of the single would chart. Fogarty was convinced that in order to maintain any kind of success, you had to have a new single ready when the last one started dropping down the charts, so people wouldn't move on to the next thing and forget about you. He also insisted that both sides of every single at least have hit potential, thinking of artists he wanted to emulate like The Beatles and Elvis, whose B-sides were often better than other bands they said. For the next single, Fogarty once again started with titles he'd written down. The B-side, Lodi, was the name of a place in California that Fogarty had never visited, and he had made a note of the title several years earlier. Indeed, he'd been horrified a year or so earlier seeing Quicksilver Messenger Service performing a song that he thought was also titled Lodi, thinking he'd missed his chance. And I'll weep and I'll fall But I'll ride on Codine, yeah And it feels one more time Thankfully for him, he'd been mishearing Codine as Lodi and the title was free to use. He conjured up a story of a musician stuck playing the kind of gigs that Fogarty had once worried to be reduced to himself. Just about a year ago I set out on the road Seeking my fame and fortune Looking for a pot of gold Think I'm afraid and think I'm worse I guess you know the tune Oh, you're stunk in a low tide That didn't chart, but it did become a perennial on classic rock stations. The A-side, Bad Moon Rising, took its title from the conversations about astrology that were everywhere in the counterculture at that time. But Fogarty's lyrics, rather than astrology, were inspired by the film The Devil and Daniel Webster, and a scene of natural, or unnatural, disaster in that film from which only the protagonist who has sold his soul to the devil is saved. The plot of that film, incidentally, is about a man desperate for success who signs a seven-year contract that brings him prosperity but also brings out the worst aspects of his own personality alienating him from family and friends and who eventually tries to use the legal system to get out of the contract he now wishes he'd never signed. I see trouble on the way I see there is waves of lightning I see bad times today Don't go around tonight But if I'm gonna take your life They're on a bad moon Fogarty later said that he knew the song was a hit even before he'd finished writing the lyrics because one of the band members' wives heard them rehearsing the backing track and kept humming the guitar lick that comes in from the second verse on. That was, as Fogarty freely admitted, inspired by Scotty Moore's playing on Elvis' I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone, and the whole track is a conscious evocation of Elvis' son period. Compare Moore's playing... Wallin' out well You just don't care Fallin' out Fallin' for you It's a frozen for me The hurricanes are burning I know the end Bad Moon Rising again made number two in the US, and actually became a number one hit in the UK, where generally Credence weren't quite as big as in their home country. It's around this point that the group started to develop a reputation that would be both a blessing and a curse, that they were a band that didn't have an identifiable base, a band that everyone liked, but didn't necessarily love. They didn't fit in with the San Francisco crowd, because they didn't jam or take psychedelic rugs, and they were all hard-working family men who saw the whole thing as self-indulgence. but nor were they as political as bands like the MC5 or the folk rock bands. They were quite proud that while they were personally opposed to the Vietnam War, they were making music that both sides of the cultural divide could enjoy, and they were moderate liberals who might have personal objections to Richard Nixon, but that didn't mean they were going to go out and support a Marxist revolution. The formulation the band members themselves came up with was credences like burgers. Other bands might be foie gras or caviar or some exotic cuisine, but everyone enjoys a good burger, and there were towns where it's just the thing to hit the spot and their job was to make the very best burgers they could. It seems to be around this point the problems first started to surface between John Fugherty and Saul's Ant and there are two very, very different stories about what happened which are fundamentally incompatible. Everyone has agreed that at the start Fogarty wanted to renegotiate the group's contract primarily because he felt the 10% royalty rate they were getting was too low and also because he decided he wanted to own the publishing for his songs. Fundamentally, he felt agreed that the band were only getting 10% of the money when in his words Credence made up 90% of the label's sales Which, at that point in time, is probably, if anything, an underestimate. Fogarty likes to portray fantasy as a single artist label, and that's slightly unfair. During the period when the Weiss Brothers had owned the label, fantasy put out a lot of records, and a lot of them were jazz classics by very prestigious artists like Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor and others. But it is true that for a while, when it became clear how big Credence were, and how much more successful they were than any other artist on fantasy, The label essentially pivoted to all Credence all the time. They seem only to have put out five albums in 1969, of which three were new albums by Credence, with the other two being a spoken word album of beat poetry by Lawrence Perlinghetti and an album by Billy Joe Beacote, a folk singer who, according to the one article about him I can find on the internet, apparently quit music to invent the two-wheel drive bicycle. It's very unlikely that these two records sold in the kind of numbers that are remotely comparable to Credence's millions. And so Fogarty was justified in his belief that his band deserved a better rate. Unfortunately, Saul Zanz was also justified in his belief that a deal is a deal, that you shouldn't sign a contract if you don't like it, and that the money he was making was his reward for taking a chance on a band who'd spent a decade going nowhere. Both men would essentially stick to these positions for the rest of their lives, an irresistible force meeting an unmovable object. But, at least at first, Zanz was willing to negotiate a little. and here's where the story breaks down. The story as told by Zanz and all the members of Credence who are not John Fogarty is that Zanz offered to give the members of Credence 10% ownership of the company not just of their records as a goodwill gesture and that Fogarty Unil actually turned it down since he wouldn't get his publishing back. Given that Fantasy Records went on to buy up the catalogs of Prestige Records one of the most important jazz labels in the world the post-Atlantic Stacks catalog including records like Isaac Hayes' Shaft soundtrack and Specialty Records who put out among others all of Little Richard's important work this would, if true, have been a calamitous financial decision. When Zantz eventually sold the label in 2004 it was worth at least $80 million and the company it merged into, Concord Music Group recently reported they turned down offers of $6 billion. I don't know about you, but if I was in a band and one of my bandmates turned down 10% of that on my behalf, I'd be a tad peeved. Fogarty, on the other hand, vehemently insists that the offer that was made was not a gift of 10%, just stock options on 10% of a planned initial public offering of 11% of the stock. In other words, 1.1% of the total stock which they would have to buy themselves, albeit at a preferential rate, in return for signing an extended 10-year contract. According to Fogarty, all four band members decided democratically that they weren't going to do this, after taking legal advice. I honestly have no idea which of these stories is true, and given the personalities involved, both sound very plausible. I mention both possibilities here because which version of this you believe to be true colours everything that follows. Either Fogarty took a quixotic stand on a point of principle, and in doing so not only cut off his own nose to spite his face, but the metaphorical noses of his bandmates, too. Or, Saul's aunts made a not very impressive offer that wasn't worth them taking up, and so they didn't. One decision they did make, though, was to do something else aunts suggested, and have their money paid not to them, but to a tax shelter company in the Bahamas, effectively raising their income by 30%. That was a decision that would come back to haunt them. All this didn't stop the group from continuing to turn in product that would make a lot of money for fantasy, and quite a bit for them. For the next B-side, Commotion, Fogarty was inspired by the Benny Goodman Orchestra and the fast tempo of their legendary version of Sing Sing Sing. Fogarty took that and combined it with the train rhythm that you get on so many old country records and the rockabilly feel he'd used previously on Born on the Bayou to produce a B-side that made the top 30 in its own right. Keep it going, they don't stay away Cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha Go up in the wild Go up to your yard Show what's going on I don't see Come come on, get it, get it, get it down Come come on, get it, get it down The A-side, meanwhile, was a title that Pogarty had had for a long time. It came from him going to the drugstore soda fountain as a small child, and looking at the labels of Green River Syrup. Sue Cook plays both electric and stand-up bass on the track. Parts Fogarty is very insistent that he, rather than Cook, came up with, while Fogarty does a James Burton impression on the guitar. The track once again went to number two, kept off the top by Sugar Sugar by the Archies, and it became the title track of their third album, their second of 1969. The album, which had the A and B sides of both their two most recent singles, went to number one, and is Fogarty's personal favourite of Creedence's albums. The group then embarked on a summer of playing festivals, including a headline appearance at Woodstock. The group came on stage much later than planned, after The Grateful Dead, and didn't really enjoy the experience. Fogarty vetoed their performance from appearing in the film or album of the show, as he thought it substandard. though listening to it now it sounds fine and better than some sloppy performances that did make it into the film The next Credence single was a double-sided hit, though as Billboard changed their methodology for counting two sides of the same single as it was going up the charts, we don't have separate chart positions for the two tracks. The B-side, Down on the Corner, gave the album that came along with it their third of 1969, its title, Willie and the Poor Boys. The group were getting a reputation as a singles band, a band who put all their best material out on their singles. Fogarty thought this was a good thing. Again, Credence being a hamburger, they were for everyone, and making music that you would hear on the radio. But as far as the tastemakers of the time were concerned, singles bands were fundamentally unserious, and the only bands that mattered made albums, not singles. And this might have affected the plans for the album, at least for a short time. There was apparently some thought to making the album a concept album, as if it were made by another band, Willie and the Poor Boys, a name that came to Fogarty after seeing a commercial for the Disney adaptation of Winnie the Pooh, and thinking of the phrase Winnie and the Pooh Boys. The concept was thrown out after he'd written two songs, the other being Poor Boy Shuffle, but down on the corner paints a portrait of the fictional band as versions of his bandmates' personalities as Fogarty saw them. Willie was himself out front playing the harmonica. Poor boy was his brother Tom, because to Fogarty's mind Tom was rapidly sinking into self-pity and complaining about everything. Blinky was Stu, because he was myopic, and Rooster was Doug, who Fogarty thought spent too much time on tour looking for women to sleep with. Down on the corner, out in the street, laying up on fire as a flame, stringing his daddy feet. Rooster hits the white road, people just gotta smile. The A-side, Fortunate Son, was one of the few times that John Fogarty got explicitly political in his songwriting, and was also one of his most personal songs. Fortunate Son was about the Vietnam War, which Fogarty opposed, but it was also about class politics and privilege. Fogarty had become enraged by news stories about David Eisenhower, the grandson of the former president, marrying Julie Nixon, the daughter of the current one, and thinking about how some people had everything handed to them on a platter while he had grown up in poverty and had to work hard for everything he earned He also thought about how many of the sons of powerful people were getting deferments of managing to avoid the draft while people without powerful families were being sent away to die. Incidentally, Fogarty has often elided these two things when discussing the song, giving some people the impression that David Eisenhower himself was a draft dodger. That's slightly unfair to Eisenhower, who, much like Fogarty, went into the reserves, Naval in Eisenhower's case, but served three years' active duty rather than Fogarty's six months, though he was never sent into active combat. The result was one of Fogarty's most passionate and most straightforward songs, partly because rather than agonising over the lyrics for weeks, as he usually did, he wrote them in one 20-minute burst of angry creativity. And that passion helped cement Credence's popularity among the troops who had been sent off to fight. Thank you. The song still has a great deal of personal meaning to Fogarty. In 2015, he titled his autobiography after it. And he was utterly infuriated in 2020 when Donald Trump, a man who was precisely the kind of person that Fortunate Son had been written against, started using it in campaign values. The double-sided single went to number three, slightly worse than the previous two singles, but still a vague hit by anyone's standards. The Willie and the Poor Boys album made the same position on the charts, the third album of the year to make the Upper Reaches. That album, whose cover photo was meant to, according to one biography of the band I used in researching this episode, channel Alan Lomax, saw them reach further back to the obligatory cover versions than previously, all the way back to Hugh D. Ledbetter for versions of Midnight Special and Cottonfields. When I was a little bitty baby That song was probably brought back to the group's mind by the Beach Boys' recent cover version of it, and there's some slight influence they detected in the arrangement, but Cledence's version owes more to Buck Owens' 1963 country version of the song, with Fogarty imitating Don Rich's guitar part quite closely. More and more country influence would creep into Fogarty's music over the next couple of years. By the end of 1969, the group should have been celebrating, having had four massive hit singles and three equally successful albums in one year. But tensions were starting to felt within the group about Fogarty's leadership. Some of this was normal creative friction. Tom Fogarty was increasingly resentful of not being allowed to write or sing, given that for years he had been the group's frontman and main songwriter. But some seems to be almost willful provocation by Fogarty. For example, one story Fogarty tells in his autobiography, as if it reflects well on him, is about the recording of Cottonfields. In Fogarty's telling, Doug Clifford did not play the song the way Fogarty wanted. Fogarty never has a single good word to say about Clifford's drumming, and Fogarty and the engineer had to salvage the track by making 30 or 40 edits to the tape to fix Clifford's timing, with Fogarty then adding extra acoustic guitar to smooth over the edit. This is perfectly plausible. Every artist has a story about a record that had to be salvaged in the edit because one musician just could not get the part right. And it must have been a hugely stressful job for Fogarty to supervise the editing, which of course would require thirty or forty physical cuts to the tape, any one of which could have destroyed the track and rendered all their work useless. If this is the case, I say if, not because I doubt it, but because it's something that only Fogarty has said, and everything with this band is contentious enough that taking the word of any one source might be problematic, then they did an astonishing job of the edit, because I've listened to it multiple times with good headphones listening for signs and can't find any. When I was a little bitty baby My mama would rock you But then, at the end of the edit session, Fogarty collected up all the bits of tape that had been edited out, stuck them in an envelope, drove round to Clifford's house, and handed it to him saying, There's your drum track. This kind of attitude from Fogarty was not making him hugely popular with his bandmates, and this got worse when his need for control and his own particular vision of artistic purity led to decisions they thought were counterproductive. The one that caused the most resentment in the group was when Fogarty decided they were no longer going to do encores, ever. From Fogarty's point of view, this made sense. Encores were meant to be a special thing that only happened when the show was really good, and that was cheapened by making them something that you did on a routine basis. And it was just fake, inauthentic, to go offstage knowing you were going to be coming back on. You should just go out there and play all the songs you intended to play, and then leave. The rest of the band thought this was absolute madness and it caused resentment in audiences as well. Credence's shows were already shorter than the multi-hour shows that were becoming commonplace as bands like The Grateful Dead or Led Zeppelin would stretch out songs to 20 minutes or more with extended jams. With the exception of their one extended track per album most Credence songs were under five minutes and the hits people came to the show for were often under three and they played them just like the record on stage so they would do a 10-15 song set that would last under an hour. When fans realised that they weren't going to come back on stage, many became furious but Fogarty wouldn't budge and the other three could hardly encore without their lead singer. None of this stopped the group from continuing to work as hard as ever, but the next single showed signs of these tensions in several different ways. Who'll Stop the Rain, the more popular of the two sides, had a weariness to it that was very different to anything the group had released up to this point. It also, for the first time since Porterville, featured the other band members on backing vocals as a sop to their desire to be more involved. Listening to it, much like listening to their live recordings, it's hard to see why Fogarty thought the others were incapable of singing the harmonies on other records. the ground Could be a truly agent Trying to find the sun And I wonder Do I wonder Who'll stop the rain? Fogarty seems to have been trying in his own way to make some concessions. The album that included Who'll Stop the Rain was titled Cosmo's Factory, as a tip of the hat to Doug Clifford, the band member who was least happy with Fogarty, That album shows the signs of Fogarty being stretched almost to breaking point in retrospect. There are four cover versions, and two extremely extended tracks. The seven-minute album opener, Ramble Tamble, and an eleven-minute cover version of I Heard It Through the Grapevine, in much the same style as their earlier Suzy Q. The other three cover versions, though, were much more in the band's normal range. Soundalike, almost redundant covers of Roy Orbison's Ooby Dooby, Bo Diddley's Before You Accused Me and Elvis' version of Arthur Cloddop's My Baby Left Me They're specifically covering Elvis' version with Clifford doing an almost exact replica of DJ Fontana's drum part Other than Ramble Tamble all the originals on the album read the A or B sides of singles The other side of Who'll Stop the Rain was Traveling Band a song about the experience of being on tour on which John played saxophone and piano as well as his normal guitar 737 That song led to a lawsuit from the publishers of Good Golly Miss Molly, which was settled out of court by Sol's aunts buying the publishing company. That single took the group back to number two, and the next single, also included on Cosmo's factory, did almost as well. The group was so busy that they could no longer do their routine of intensively rehearsing the arrangements of the songs, and both sides of that single were written over a single weekend before the group recorded them on the Tuesday. Run Through the Jungle was inspired not by the Vietnam War, as most supposed, was actually by the spree killer Charles Whitman, and was a plea by Fogarty for gun control. The other side, meanwhile, was inspired by Marty Robbins' A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation. Fogarty took the riff from that. A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation I'm all dressed up for the dance A white sport coat and a pink And used it as the basis for Up Around the Band. That single went to number four. There was then a European tour, where fans at the Albert Hall got outraged that they only played 55 minutes with no encore. And then yet another single, the last one on Cosmo's factory. Looking out my back door is regarded by many as the closest credence got to a psychedelic lyric, but Fogarty insists that what some tried to claim were drug references were actually inspired by the Dr. Seuss books he was reading to his son. Musically, meanwhile, it shows Fogarty's increasing influence from country music, especially the Bakersfield sound of musicians like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, the latter of whom gets a name check. Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn. I'm like I'm in Thor, the troller, listening to my low ends. Do, do, do, do. Look out my back door. Memories and elephants are waving in the band. Won't you take a ride on the fly? Do, do, do. One west apparition divided by magician. Do, do, do. Looking Out My Back Door came out in July 1970 and went to number two. Cosmos Factory, released at the same time, made number one on the album charts and went quadruple platinum. In 18 months, the group had released seven singles that had reached the top five, most of them double-sided hits with both sides charting, and four top ten albums, two of which went to number one and all of which went multi-platinum. That's an astonishing success rate for a band that had been almost completely unknown up to that point. and the band had achieved everything they'd ever worked for. Most books about the band describe them at this point as the second biggest band in the world after the Beatles in 1969, and the biggest once the Beatles announced their breakup in early 1970. And while depending on precisely which metric you use, that's arguable, you could make a case that, for example, the Rolling Stones were bigger, and possibly Led Zeppelin. It's certainly a defensible position to take. But things were getting more and more difficult. Tom especially was beginning to feel like he needed to get out of the band, and that his contributions were not recognised. Even though he was now only the rhythm player and no longer the frontman, he was a good rhythm player. They were all good musicians, and they had a connection as a unit that could only come from playing together for a decade, and more recently spending every single day treating music like a job, and practising together every day without fail. and John seemed to have realised that he needed to do something to keep the band together. For a start, he agreed to let a book be published on the band. Inside Credence, at 84 pages, was basically a fan magazine by any other name but it did have chapters on all four band members and given them their time in the sun. There was a concerted attempt to present the band as a band not as John Fogarty and three interchangeable sidemen. They also hired PR people for the first time again to promote the band as more than just one man and they spent longer working on their next album than ever before. For the first time there was a break of more than three months between singles. Indeed the next single didn't come out until after the album it was from, Pendulum which came out five months after Cosmo's Factory and was given a big PR push. That album had been preceded by a band meeting in which the other three members had told Froggerty they wanted more say in the music and they wanted to write songs. Fuggerty, in his telling, had explained to them that they needed to get an album out for Christmas, and the others had agreed that they would do one more album of just his songs. They were also going to record it more loosely. They were going to jam in the studio. It was going to be their Sergeant Pepper, and they'd take a whole month to record it rather than the few days in the studio they normally took. The songs weren't up to scratch, apart from the single Have You Ever Seen The Rain, which was written about John's feelings about the tension between the the band members. The album was promoted with a big press junket in which the band members all talked about how excited they were for the next album, the one where they were going to write and sing songs themselves. And then Tom Fogarty quit the band anyway. He had simply had enough of being in his brother's shadow and wanted to make his own music. His first solo album, titled Tom Fogarty, featured Grateful Dead associate Merle Saunders on keyboards and former Mothers of Invention drummer Billy Mundy, and barely cracked the top 200. Though his non-album single, Goodbye Media Man, became a flute top 20 hit in Argentina. He released a string of solo albums over the next decade, as well as forming the band Ruby, and spent some time as a rhythm guitarist for the Saunders-Garcia band with Saunders and Jerry Garcia. Doug and Stu were his rhythm section on a couple of his solo albums, but he never had any real commercial or critical success other than with Saunders and Garcia. Tom's biggest success after Credence was an unusual one. At one point, Tom thought that Ruby must be huge in the UK because the band got big royalty checks from here. But they never had a hit or even sold many records here. Yet everyone in Britain of my age or older is familiar with the track BART in an unusual context. Here is Play Tennis, and that's in just over five minutes. The track was used on the BBC for several years whenever they put up the test card, pages from CFAX, or there was a few minutes break between programmes. For a while, it was touch and go as to whether the group would continue. Doug produced and Stu played on the sessions for an album by a folky, Mark Spelstra, which also featured Donald Duck Dunn, the bass player from Bucketheon and the MGs, who was a good friend of the group. And there was some thought for a while of having Dunn join Credence on bass, with Cook moving to rhythm guitar. Cook also produced an album by Clover, a country rock band who had later become known for backing Elvis Costello on his first album and for, in a later line-up, having two future members of Huey Lewis and the News. But eventually, they decided to continue as a trio. They took most of 1971 off from recording other than one single, Sweet Hitchhiker, which made the top ten. But they did tour to surprisingly good reviews given how important Tom's rhythm playing had been to the band. And in January 1972, they recorded an album titled Mardi Gras, or as it became known to many after John Landau's Rolling Stone review, Fogarty's Revenge. Fogarty decided he was going to show both his ungrateful band members and his demanding record label. Fogarty decided that if they wanted the band to be an equal partnership, it was going to be an equal partnership. The contract said he had to be lead singer and songwriter on at least a third of the material, so that was what he would do. He wrote two new songs for the album, to go with Sweet Hitchhiker, and sang lead on a soundalike cover version of Ricky Nelson's Hello Mary Lou. And he told Stu and Doug that they had to write and sing three songs each too. He would play guitar and nothing else. He wouldn't make arrangement suggestions, he wouldn't sing, he wouldn't do overdubs. If they wanted any of that stuff they'd have to do it themselves. The result was catastrophic. Landau's review ended, Pendulum was a disappointment, but it was honest and it was useful, just because it showed Fogarty reaching for new directions. On this album, he seems to have just given up. The result is, relative to a group's established level of performance, the worst album I have ever heard from a major rock band. The group did a brief tour and then split up. Or, rather, John Fogarty left the other two, who continued working together. They played on several of Tom's solo albums, starting with his second, Excalibur, which also featured Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders. and Doug recorded a solo album, Cosmo, with Sue as part of the band. Doug also produced Groover's Paradise by Doug Sarm, which they both played on. Both men would play on several Doug Sarm and Sir Douglas Quintet records over the years, becoming part of the rotating cast musicians who were in and out of his orbit. It was through Sarm that Cook ended up doing what became his most influential, though not commercially successful, work outside Credence, producing Rucky Erickson's cult classic album The Evil One The Evil One Some of you have heard the Patreon bonus for this episode might now be a bit confused, because in that I said Doug Sam produced Two-Headed Dog by Rocky Erickson. He did, but he produced the single version a couple of years before Cook produced the album. Cook and Clifford worked together, pretty much consistently, for almost the next 50 years. For the last 25 of those in a band called Credence Clearwater he visited, playing their old Credence hits to huge crowds. John Fogarty, on the other hand, went in a different direction. First he made an entirely solo album of country covers, playing and singing everything the way he'd always wanted to. He released the album under the fake band name The Blue Ridge Rangers, with his own name only mentioned as producer. The version of Jambalaya from that record made number 16 on the charts. But the album wasn't a success, not even making the top 40, and Fogarty blamed Fantasy Records, and Saul's Ants in particular. He now desperately wanted to get away from Fantasy Records. Fogarty's main issue was that the label still had his publishing rights and wouldn't give them back to him, but he was also burned out and suffering from writer's block, due to a combination of stress from the band and problems in his marriage. He simply couldn't produce the amount of work he'd been doing from 1968 through 1970, and looked at the hundred or so tracks he still owed on the contract, and saw that stretching out into the infinite distance. And Saul Zanz was simply not willing to negotiate with Fogarty. They had a contract and that was it. Zanz was more interested in the film business now anyway. He was in the middle of producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and he would later go on to produce such Oscar-winning films as The English Patient and Amadeus. His biggest success though would come from a film he wasn't directly involved in He bought the film and merchandising rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings from their owners in the mid-70s and produced the moderately successful late-70s animated Lord of the Rings directed by Ralph Bakshi who wanted to use Led Zeppelin for the soundtrack but was refused because then the soundtrack album couldn't be released on fantasy records Middle Earth Enterprises, the company he formed for those rights still holds the rights for the vast film and merchandising empire based around Tolkien's books. The standoff continued until 1975, when David Geffen at Asylum Records offered to buy Fogarty's contract from Fantasy, at least for North America. Fantasy still released with music everywhere else. Fogarty's self-titled first Asylum album was his first album of new material since 1971. The single Rockin' All Over the World made the top 30. I can hear where he goes All the boys Cause we're hitting the road If we go I can't know where the world Get away Get away Get away We're going crazy And we're going to be taking Oh I can't know where the world The song later became a bigger UK hit for status quo. But the album was unsuccessful, both critically and commercially. And Fogarty later said of it, By the time I entered my thirties I was slowly drying up. I kept trying and it kept coming out lousy. Suddenly I began to feel I could no more make a hit record than the guy down the street running a jackhammer. Creatively it went away and I knew it was gone and that was a terrible thing for someone who had been doing so well. He recorded a second album for Asylum, titled Hoodoo, but the label rejected it, and Fogarty agreed it was not worth releasing, and had the tapes destroyed. He would not release another record for a decade. That decade was mostly spent in litigation. Partly this was because the tax-shelter corporation into which the group had been having their royalties paid suddenly disappeared, as corporations like that are wont to do, and the group members had to spend years trying to get their money back. and part of it was that Fogarty still felt tied up with fantasy records because they still had the foreign rights to his new music and by now he absolutely hated them and Saul's aunts in particular. The band's permission was needed for any use of Credence's music in TV or films and for any repackaging of it on various artist compilations and the other three members, who had also lost all their money and had had less of it to start with than he had thanks to his songwriting royalties were quite keen to have their old records make money for them. If they could get a hundred grand for a credence song being used in a feature film, why wouldn't they? But John kept vetoing it, partly to preserve the integrity of his art, but partly because he didn't want Zanz making another penny off his work. These pressures broke down the relationships between Fogarty and the other three irreparably. At the start of the 80s, they were still at least vaguely friendly. They'd had to work together to try to reclaim some of their money, and there was even talk of a reunion, which came to nothing. They even played together twice, at their high school reunion, doing a set of the material they'd played as the Blue Velvet, and at Tom Fogarty's second wedding. But the fact that the other three wanted to make more money from their old work while John was vetoing it inevitably made them take common cause with Saul's aunt. In the early eighties, Fogarty gave up his veto on the recording's use, under pressure from the other three, and would complain bitterly about how his work was then misused in films and commercials. He also, to finally free himself from any connection to fantasy whatsoever, gave up all his royalties to his fantasy bank catalogue, meaning that from the early 80s on he didn't make a penny from those recordings, other than songwriting royalties, in return for no longer being signed to fantasy outside North America. Finally free of the contract, he released an album, Centrefield, on which, like his previous two albums, he played every instrument himself. The album was a massive hit, making number one on the charts, but brought two further sets of legal problems. The first came with a song about a dancing pig, titled Dance Can't Dance. Shortly after release, after legal advice, that song was changed to Vance Can't Dance, and the album reissued. But Fogarty was still sued by Zanz for defamation over the song. When Zanz died in 2014, Fogarty's response was to post a video for the song to Facebook. The other song that caused legal trouble was the top 10 single, The Old Man Down The Road. from the sky. We bring a strong man to his begging knees. Zant sued Fogarty over that track, claiming that it was plagiarized from a song Zant owned. Specifically, he claimed it was plagiarized from Run Through the Jungle. He argued that Fogarty had self-plagiarized, and that therefore Zant owned a new song. This went to court, and Fogarty was able convincingly to demonstrate that the two songs were different, and that the resemblance was just because he was John Fogarty and all his songs sounded like John Fogarty songs. He was also later able to recover the cost of the lawsuit from Zant, setting a legal precedent about the grounds for peripheralist lawsuits. The publicity for these lawsuits, and for Fogarty's claims about Zant, was not good for the other band members, who by this point were now communicating with John almost solely by letter. Tom wrote to his brother, saying in part, You have sabotaged and severely damaged my career and my source of income. Because you gave up your fantasy royalties, you felt you had nothing to lose by blasting soul, fantasy and credence in the press and on the radio. Not only in San Francisco, but in Los Angeles, New York, all over the US and in other countries. The problem is, Doug Stu and I haven't given up our share of the royalties, and by hurting fantasy's image, you have severely damaged the royalty income that Doug Stu and I are entitled to. You had no right to say those things, it's not your group. We own it. We own the name and the rights to the royalty income. The Fogarty brothers stopped speaking to each other, and didn't even properly reconcile when Tom Fogarty was dying of an AIDS-related illness in 1990. In one of their last conversations, when Tom was dying, he told John that Saul Zantz was his best friend. Fogarty, meanwhile, has repeatedly stated that Cook or Clifford were actually the ones who brought the similarity between the two songs to Zantz's attention, and suggested he sue over them. something both men have vehemently denied. Fogarty's follow-up album, Eye of the Zombie, was not the great success that Centafield was, either commercially or critically. And when he taught to promote it, he aggravated audiences by only playing material from his two recent albums, refusing to play the Credence songs because Fantasy still had the publishing. Eventually, he started occasionally adding the songs into his set list, after Bob Dylan told him, if you don't start doing it, people are going to only remember Proud Mary as the Tina Turner song, but he still wouldn't regularly play Credence material in his shows until the 90s. After Eye of the Zombie, there was another 10-year break in Fogarty's solo releases, this one caused partly by his increased drinking. He had a severe alcohol problem at one point, though he got it under control, and partly because of a sense of perfectionism. Fogarty has released seven albums in the last 39 years, but only three albums of New Material, in 1997, 2004, and 2007. The 2007 album was actually on Fantasy Records. Zantz sold the label and it was bought by Concord Music, a company owned by the sitcom writer-producer Norman Lear, and they negotiated a contract with Fogarty which would start them paying royalties on his credence records again. After that, he released the second Blue Ridge Rangers album of country covers, an album titled wrote a song for everyone where he duets with various celebrities like Kid Rock and the Foo Fighters on versions of his old Credence songs. Fogarty's Factory, an album of remakes of his old hits made with his kids strolling lockdown. And this year's Legacy The Credence Clearwater Revival Years, which he tried and failed to persuade the record label to subtitle Taylor's version, because like Taylor Swift, it's a collection of note-for-note sound-like remakes of the old records, as close as possible to how they sounded originally, made because he doesn't own the old recordings. Though in this case, given that it's released through Concord, the same company that still owns the Creedence Masters, one suspects that his problem isn't with who owns them as much as with who else would profit from them. The new record is a John Fogarty solo record and he'll get all the performance royalties while three quarters of the Creedence performance royalties would go to his old bandmates. Tom Fogarty, of course, died tragically young but Cook and Clifford continued performing as Credence Clearwater Revisited from 1995 until 2020 apart from a period where John Fogarty was suing them over their use of the name and they had to perform as Cosmo's factory. In 1993, when the group were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Cook and Clifford turned up expecting to play but were informed that Fogarty was refusing to play with them because they sided with fantasy records over him and Fogarty instead performed the Greedance songs with an all-star jam band. Fogarty now earns the publishing rights to those songs. He bought them back in 2023, more than 50 years after he signed them away. And at 80 years old, he finally has most of what he spent the vast majority of his adult life fighting for, valuing his integrity more than his relationship with his brother or his bandmates. Stu Cook and Doug Clifford, on the other hand, performed together in various forms off and on for 70 years. regarding any problems they had with their contracts as being essentially trivia. Both attitudes have something to say for them, and both are authentic expressions of who those people are, but they're clearly incompatible, and what's miraculous in retrospect is not that Creedence split up so soon after their success, but that they lasted together long enough to become successful at all, and that the combination produced as many tracks that still last as it did. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon Each week Patreon backers will get a 10 minute bonus podcast This week's is on Mendocino by the Sir Douglas Quintet Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favorite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500songs.com That's 500, the numbers, songs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. but more importantly tell just one person that you liked this podcast word of mouth more than any other form of promotion is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves thank you very much for listening