Out My Back Door

Revisiting Creedence Clearwater Revival

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2008 AT 4 A.M.

By Don Allred

When I was just a little boy
Standin' to my Daddy's knee
My Papa said "Son, don't let the man get you
And do what he done to me
'Cause he'll get you
'Cause he'll get ya now."

Well, I can remember the Fourth of July
Runnin' through the backwood bare
I can still hear my old hound dog barkin'
Chasin' down a hoodoo there...

Do it, do it, do it, do it

Behold! Fantasy has unveiled 40th-anniversary editions of Creedence Clearwater Revival's first six LPs, packed onto individual CDs with remastered, pungent-for-digital sound and three to five bonus tracks apiece, generally well-chosen. (Bayou Country needed them most.) Green River sports two officially "unfinished" but sturdy and intriguing instrumentals. Two "jams" (concise run-throughs) with members of Booker T. and the MGs are spread elsewhere: "Born on the Bayou" (appended to Cosmo's Factory) is rough, but deft organ accents highlight the pre-reggae profile of the skiffling "Down on the Corner," on Willy and the Poor Boys. You don't have to be a jamster to strut with a very live version of long, tall "Suzie Q" (which impresario Bill Graham wanted chooglin' well underway when the kids filed into the Fillmore---and, tacked onto CCR's self-titled debut, that was their hip FM radio passport). As presented here (they were opening for Jethro Tull!), Rockabilly Queen Suzi serves herself well by shaking off Creedence mastermind John C. Fogerty's cute little reefer-madness production touches.

On that debut, the gimmicks flaunted by the original studio "Suzie Q" are redeemed when Fogerty's mystical guitar arpeggiation (and penetrating wail) raise the freaked-out protagonist of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" from the cartoon tomb of ancient novelty hits, providing him a new degree of eerie, still crazy-horny dignity, psychedelically enough, although nobody ever rescued one-hit-wonder Jay himself. (Fogerty probably empathized with singer and song both, having already spent a decade in a pack of striving studio and club rats—CCR had only recently changed their name from the suits-imposed Golliwogs; then the mostly jazz Fantasy Records gave their warehouse worker John F. & combo a shot.)(Fantasy's Saul Zaentz never let him forget it, nor was Fogerty one to back down from a long, long-running feud.)

"Porterville," another CCR track and Golliwogs-era Fogerty original, spotlights a marginalized, sketchy-sounding character, locked in a legacy of shadowy offenses to which he's possibly contributed, although he claims he's also tried to pay off family debts. Our antihero rattles through the verses but flips "I don't care" as a chorus, and tosses chirpy, brittle guitar notes into the grinding jaws of his history-minded neighbors, as played by bass, drums, and two guitars.

Far down the line from "Porterville" (success-wise, at least), Fogerty—having established Creedence as solid boogie artisans and radiogenic rootsy artists, in there between, say, Savoy Brown and The Band---now also weightily and worthily tagged by some as a plaid wine, cosmically cotton-pickin' Spokesman for Today's Troubled Youth (not no "Fortunate Son" neither, at least Vietnam War-era draft-wise), a Berkeley-born MetaSoutherner (waving the plaid before fellow Cali sons Little Feat, Blasters, Les Claypool, more) who lets it all hang out, and in—gets off the social-commentary bus at the conclusion of CCR's death-of-'60s-"innocence" concept album Willy and the Poor Boys. Now he's merely listing (as opposed to describing) moments, fixating on small elements of statically, endlessly replayed footage. You see, last night, some of the People, some people, burned something or other in "Effigy." Fogerty sings: "Last night I saw the fire spreading to the palace door/Silent majority wasn't keeping quiet anymore"; eventually, his curtness, sadness, anger, recognition, timeliness, crossroads connections, and everything else are drawn into the charring downstroke of a penultimate guitar note, along a maybe-loosened, dead-enough string, just before a breath rises and falls with the title word/chorus one more time.

So what can a Poor Boy do, but try to fry endings to their core, get right back on the bus, and go flying through the electric skies of Cosmo's Factory before reaching Pendulum's stimulating therapy session? Here, he greets intractable differences and other old acquaintances, dances some, then leaves us with a mellow keyboard bouquet that flips into a circus blast: "Rude Awakening #2" indeed. Y'all remember to keep count now, y'hear?

See also comments on CCR reissues etc. here: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2021/05/ichabods-nashville-scene-2008-releases.html ----esp. ,,, "Proud Mary," it really is a song about a boat, a boatopia ("people on the river are happy to give"--but what they're gonna give you ain't all good, as the albums indicate--Huck Finn on a sonic raft, a barn door, grid, etc)(but Pendulum mostly drops the hoodoo stuff, and its social commentary could be as much about marriage truces etc as anything else, then going out for a night on the town)"Sweet Hitchhiker" has him zooming by her, turned on but caught up in wondering "How long can I last"--then he crashes, and watches her zooming by, he thinks she's thinking to herself, "How long can I last": could be sex, could be career, they were such a phenomenon---it's a funny song, as written and delivered; this and his other songs on that last album (Mardi Gras, whoopee) are ironic, as his bandmates finally got their own spud-say at the last minute. (h'mm, it's not part of this reissue series).