Creedence Clearwater Revival – Self-Titled

Creedence Clearwater Revival was a rarity, an American band that gained massive popularity and used it to produce statements — musical and more — against the popular progressive rock grain of their moment. Some of that phenomenal popular success (15 singles in the Top 10, when that still meant something) was a result of their out-of-sync stance — as alternative in its way and as Americana in its origin as any music.

This new box set, which includes among its six CDs all nine studio and live LPs they made, plus a full disc summarizing their virtually unknown pre-fame years, offers a new chance to get past the familiar hit singles and hear Creedence as a rock band with milestone albums — and to hear them in clean new 20-bit remasterings. That famously misunderstood line does not sound like “There’s a bathroom on the right” this time out! (Well, maybe in the live versions.)

If, as the pre-CCR disc shows, John Fogerty and company had played a thousand anonymous bar-band dates, stuck in Lodi with overwhelming British Invasion influences, they evolved a sound at once more rooted and more their own. It was built on American-grown greasy R&B, on appropriating country picking as hard and accurate as rockabilly, and on harder pre-metal blues riffs — distorted, strained and left gooey by the likes of Bo Diddley.

In a decisive act, mainly of pure will (“Everything we loved was from there, so we figured we were from there”), these California boys learned and digested the sounds and textures of the real and imaginary deep South, especially from places where rock ‘n’ roll was born in its glorious impurity — Memphis and New Orleans. They did this convincingly enough that they were regarded as a Southern band, even in the South — putting a serious dent in anybody’s theory of the necessity of “authenticity” in your raising.

Fogerty had the blues shouter voice to take full-tilt Little Richard rock ‘n’ roll and pretty damned well match it. Creedence also brought an appreciation for hard honky-tonk singing and playing (later made more explicit on John Fogerty’s Blue Ridge Rangers), built into the white soul aspect of Fogerty’s vocals, in their reverence for rockabilly and pickin’, and in Doug Clifford’s inclusion of the overlooked, Waylon Jennings-like “Tearin’ Up The Country” on Mardi Gras.

The picked-guitar-driven instrumental sound — which built on that thunderous but subtle voice — added to ’50s rock ‘n’ roll a modern tone, putting 1968 electric fuzz to work in a new way. Their mid-’60s Golliwogs’ originals “Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Fight Fire” suggest that this sound owed something to the metallic mud Jimmy Page brought to Van Morrison recordings with Them; they also looked back to that hollow Big Beat of Gene Vincent. But most of it, to be marketed as “swamp music from the Bayou,” was a self-constructed stew with an aroma as advertised.

Listening to all of these recordings, you can see that it was crucial for CCR to imagine themselves to be Southern white boys, not R&B blackfacers, and there’s no mistaking that the band’s base was built on tight R&B. If John Fogerty’s “New Orleans Brooklyn Irish keep-on-boinin'” accent is an affectation, the impersonation is never driven embarrassingly far into minstrelsy.

CCR heroes (besides Little Richard and Elvis) reflected in their riveting and abundant covers include such at-home white soul guitar wizards as Scotty Moore, James Burton, Link Wray and Steve Cropper. Not for nothing did a memorable Creedence show captured here, at Oakland in 1970, pair them with soulmates Booker T & the MGs.

For Creedence fans, there’s special interest in what the box set’s pre-fame tracks are actually like. More cuts work than you might expect; all are revealing. The earliest incarnation (1961), Tommy Fogerty & the Blue Velvets, plays an utterly ingratiating Richie Valens variety of rock ‘n’ roll, with young Tom’s vocals sounding eerily like John’s much later on.

The longer-lasting Golliwogs touch all the mid-’60s bases. From Dave Clark/Gerry & the Pacemakers-style ballads in ’64, they move to Searchers/Rubber Soul Beatles/Zombies-flavored folk-rock, then suddenly turn tougher in the late-’65 Stones/Them/Standells garage-punk mode. The very first “John Fogerty-made” records in ’66 add the decisive notion of Motown and Stax/Volt-derived rock; the ’66 Marvin Gaye-influenced “Try, Try, Try” and the Otis Redding-influenced “You Better Get It Before It Gets You” are the first cuts that sound like Creedence prototypes. Their connection to the imaginary Southern geography across time gets made in the lyrics, and what comes next is…history.

With their still-astonishing breakthrough single “Proud Mary”/”Born On The Bayou” in 1967, they married the new swamp noises and that hard-driving rock ‘n’ roll beat to John Fogerty’s uncanny ability to write. And write he could, a string of two-minute epics that spoke to American working-class experience and history, evocative and very danceable hits coming one after another. Boy did it work.

The box set demonstrates one great benefit of contracts that forced LPs from hit artists at such rapid speed; when they were really hot, you caught a lot of a band at its absolute best. Creedence and Fantasy would push out six albums from mid-1968 to mid-1970, all lasting, and at least two in a row — Willie And The Poor Boys and Cosmo’s Factory — absolute classics.

Only the full albums, not hits packages, can show how CCR took their singles sound into the emerging rock and FM radio world: extended, tight rhythmic numbers, built on R&B ideas, with perhaps some disciplined bluegrass flourishes. They created instrumental extensions that don’t lose their way, or bore.

They called it “chooglin’,” and it’s amply demonstrated in the studio and live versions of “Keep On Chooglin'” here. They could take a standard such as “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” — already a Top 40 hit twice — and catch the attention of musicians everywhere. Rather than sliding off the beat or just noodling with it, they’d maintain one or several tight beats and riffs, rock ‘n’ roll style, sometimes shifting back and forth between them, as in the terrific “Pagan Baby” — revolutionary in its own way. If you first meet, or are reunited with, such album sequences as “Poorboy Shuffle”/”Feelin’ Blue” on Willy in this box, you’ll see a whole other powerful side of this band.

Live takes from The Concert and the later, sparser Live In Europe show how much room for ramping up the stakes there was in such explosive numbers as “Fortunate Son”, “Midnight Special”, “Down On The Corner” and “Travelin’ Band”.

The irony is that CCR seems, today, more attuned to their moment than any performing group of their era. Creedence appealed to the same frat boys who played the Box Tops “The Letter” incessantly at toga parties, and to the frontline grunts off in the Vietnam War that provides the context for much of this music. They managed to appeal to war protesters just as well. “Fortunate Son” rode the charts nailing the class differences between the drafted and deferred, just as the first draft lottery arrived to change that distinction — and increase their impact.

The explosive “Travelin’ Band” and ominous “Run Through The Jungle” were recorded in the weeks following the deaths at Kent State. The relatively melancholy Pendulum album, with “Have You Ever Seen Rain?”, sounds like a response to the energy-sapping aftermath.

Fogerty’s lyrics, delivered most directly in “Don’t Look Now (It Ain’t You Or Me)”, dared asked who (surely not the listener or the band!) suffered poverty, did the country’s work, and kept the important promises. He raised issues of American and generational responsibility when they were difficult, live questions — not after-the-fact bludgeons in the hands of Toms Hanks and Brokaw.

If you want to understand what happened in the actual lives of ordinary Americans in those tumultuous years, if you want to know how the war was, at home and in the bayou over there, and the feel of the protests — not imaginary trips to the Himalayas or Hollywood versions of the ’60s — these records show you. But that’s just a side benefit.

Creedence Clearwater Revival records, all here in one place, get played on the world’s jukeboxes, over and over. Creedence was both retro and outside of time in the psychedelic rock era. They didn’t pretend to change your life, but they knew your life, uniquely. They rawked you, outside the clock. And as this long-overdue box set shows, they still can.

Has there ever been a better American band — or a more necessary collection?