My first exposure to the music of brothers John and Tom Fogerty, along with the rock steady rhythm section of bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug "Cosmo" Clifford — or Creedence Clearwater Revival as they were collectively known — came at the beginning, in 1968.
My father's military career had just relocated our family from a rural town in Washington State to the island of Oahu in Hawaii. There would be much culture shock in store over the next two years we lived there, dropped from a small town into the multi-racial microcosm of the islands — at the tail end of the sixties, I might add — as we were.
As a pre-teenager about to enter junior high in Hawaii, the first shot in that cultural upheaval came on the radio. There was an AM station there called KKUA that was formatted like most top forty stations, except they placed an emphasis on "heavy groups" like the Airplane and Iron Butterfly, over the bubblegum pop I was used to hearing on Seattle's KJR. The first song I heard on KKUA was all eight minutes of Creedence's "Suzie Q."
They also played "I Put A Spell On You", a psychedelicized remake of a song by a guy named Screaming Jay Hawkins who I'd learn more about as I got older. Both were from Creedence's first album, which I ended up buying.
It was these two songs that set the tone for the album's gritty feel of a darker, bluesier sort of take on the acid rock that was so much in vogue at the time. Another highlight of the album was another non-original song, Wilson Pickett and Steve Cropper's "Ninety Nine And A Half." Fogerty's songs weren't center stage for this band yet. But that would all change soon enough.
By the time of Creedence's second album Bayou Country later that same year, the band had changed nearly as much as I had. In my case, I'd taken up with a group of the other "hippie kids" I'd gotten to know, and began doing things like skipping school and smoking cigarettes (among other things). For Creedence, the band had grown into a much tighter, confident-sounding group and John Fogerty's original songs were now front and center where they belonged.
Outside of Fogerty's songwriting itself, the thing that was, and is, still most amazing about Bayou Country was the sound. These guys were from the Bay Area, but you'd never know it hearing the deep Cajun feel of songs like "Born On The Bayou." Fogerty's guitar tone to this day remains something that can only described as, well, "swampy."
Article comments
1 - Joanne Huspek
What a blast from the past! I remember Creedence with fondness, too. I learned to play guitar by them. Their songs were the easiest to play, all nice three-chord progressions that could be spiced up by even a dummy like me with just a twist of the wrist.
I'm going to have to get this one!