Doug Clifford is a very good drummer, talented and a nice guy. I’ve met him a few times.
How is it that they were screwed out of their copyright?
The usual way. They were young and naïve, and signed their rights away to a music biz sharpie. Who, as I understand it, Kant Danz.
In general, I agree with you, but since you asked, I’d actually rather hear “Suzie Q” or “Effigy” than “Fortunate Son”. (Maybe because I’ve heard “Fortunate Son” so many more times.)
Just as a side note: People who find this kind of exploitation repulsive should read the first few chapters of George R. R. Martin’s Armageddon Rag. The book opens with a manager not unlike Zanz getting his heart cut out as a sacrifice to eldritch powers , a scene I found strangely funny and fitting.
“Hated” might be a strong word for it. I just keep coming upon references to them, in articles and such, where they are cited as the type of band that authentic 60s hippies regarded with distrust or kept at arm’s length, although my personal awareness of them was that they were peers of CSNY, Three Dog Night and most other upper-tier bands of the late 60s-early 70s. Here’s a quote from another current thread, the one about “Why were Sha Na Na at Woodstock?”:
They’re clearly in the camp of what Ronnie Van Zandt called “the swampers.” They were also from San Francisco and had trendy hairstyles for the period. I’m just curious what it is about them that makes them from SF but not of it. Was it John Fogerty and Doug Clifford’s military service? Was it Bay area regional rivalry? Was it affecting a Southern Rock vibe in Psychedelia City? (The Grateful Dead, by comparison, was a former Jug band that affected lots of border town imagery, but they were pretty much the nucleus of the San Francisco scene.) What are the stylistic lines that kept them outside the SF scene’s good graces?
Band members including his older brother Tom all disliked John. You are right on the money about that. They are still suing each other and John would probably be suing Tom too if he were still alive.
I bought one of John’s post CCR albums and liked a couple songs, can’t remember what they were now, but even though he was most of the talent in CCR he was not it all. Kind of like cooking, where something indefinable comes from the addition of a few spices. John didn’t have that missing ingredient, that flavor, post CCR.
Just an opinion from the other Astoria out west.
Well, I chose those examples because they are two of my three favorite CCR songs–the third being “Born on the Bayou,” which is itself kind of jammy, just on a smaller scale.
Well, not every hip person in those days lived in San Francisco. Here in Houston I was on the scene & knew those even hipper. Even in California, let’s not ignore the fine groups coming out of Los Angeles.
Military service? Country Joe McDonald was a Red Diaper Baby who served in the Navy before getting into the scene. He sponsored Berkeley’s Vietnam Memorial, in later years. Were CCR too Working Class?
As I’ve said, some groups might have inspired more Deep Thought. Even beyond the SF scene, there were our local 13th Floor Elevators & Red Krayola. Or New York’s Fugs/Holy Modal Rounders scene. But everybody I knew* liked* CCR…
I’d like to see some of those references!
Crafting commercially-perfect pop gems in the era of SF psychedelic jam structures was seen as too poppy.
Think of them as the Green Day (also Bay Area East Bayers) or Stone Temple Pilots of their era. I also happen to love the songs of Green Day and STP. So it goes.
Indeed they do.
Every time I listen to one of their songs, I appreciate them more and more. They were one of the greats and I don’t understand why so many people have something bad to say about them.
That’s just, like, your opinion, man!
<obligatory Lebowski quote>
Well, now I’m interested. Let’s pick this apart.
Patti Smith has some influence, but mostly on the NYC women with guitars style. There are good ones of that, sure, but I’d be willing to bet only half - if that - could tell you much about Patti Smith.
Madonna, on the other hand, has influenced an enormous amount of downstream artists from Britney Spears to Lady Gaga. Color me surprised that there’s a wiki
page about it.
This isn’t to say that Patti Smith isn’t a good artist. Not at all. But there’s a habit in rock and roll criticism and groupthink that may elevate her - and others like the Velvets and some others - that place her too high on a pedestal she never really earned.
Yes, you can say that Madonna and others are ‘just pop’. Well and true, but pop music is a good thing. A lot of it is dreck, certainly, but a godawful amount of punk and such was dreck, too.
And hey, don’t forget that The Beatles were a pop act. Certainly at first they were. It was only in the last few years they got away from that. And a well-crafted 3.5 minute song is as much of a work of art - possibly more because of the self-imposed limitation - than any longer magnus opus.
Sometimes it feels as if we’re all dancing in circles about how many barely known bands are awesome (The Theory of Hipster Relativity!). As if knowing things others don’t somehow elevates us above the hoi polloi when mostly were just talking about the people Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau were creaming their jeans for during the 60s and 70s. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones broke 50 years ago. It’s as if the hippies were focused on the influence of Scott Joplin and such from the 19-teens.
My dad saw them live at Shea Stadium in the late 60s and had a few Creedence Albums. Cosmo’s Factory was a great album by any standard, and was certainly more than a collection of three minute pop songs. “Keep On Chooglin’” and “Heard It Through the Grapevine” are solid jam numbers. John Fogerty is a great singer/songwriter/guitarist, albeit with a limited idiom. They cranked out a lot of hit records, but I never thought of them as very poppy. A pop band would be writing love songs, not songs like “Fortunate Son” or “Green River”. Creedence was decidedly not Gary Puckett & The Union Gap or Paul Revere & The Raiders, yet I’ve seen them lumped in with both.
As to possible reasons why the hippie scenesters din’t grok to them (although they g t a lot of airplay on both AM and FM radio:
- They were from the unhip side of the Bay.
- Too popular to be cool. From 1968 to 1970, they were probably the most popular, best-selling band in the world not named the Beatles, and they were very prolific, releasing three albums in '69 alone. They can’t be good if the squares like 'em!
- Seen as non-authentic because their songs present as completely southern but they were not born on a bayou.
- They were too old to be part of the hippie generation. By the time they arrived as Creedence, they had already been playing together for years and years under several different names with minimal success. They weren’t kids rebelling against their parents.
I seem to recall that CCR was one of the most popular bands of that time. Almost everyone loved their music. In fact I can’t recall a single person that didn’t love their songs.
As for the hippies not liking them? Who the hell were the hippies? There really were not a lot of real hippies. But there were a lot of weekend hippies, and summer vacation hippies. In other words, wannabe hippies. You know, the same kind of people today that change out of their business suit Friday afternoon, put on their durag, their chaps and hop on their Harley and suddenly they’re tough bikers.
The hippies of the late 60’s were more common in the media than on the streets, so I wouldn’t put much credence in them not liking CCR.
As others have posted: "*This is the first time I’ve heard that CCR were widely hated ANYWHERE.
*
This is the first I’ve heard they were considered unhip.
To me, they are a true American rock 'n roll band.
Rolling Stone panned the first album at the time*, saying Fogerty was pretty good but the other two members were stiffs. A review of the second album said it was okay and then the magazine warmed up to them on the third album.
*ignore the dates on the bylines, they’re not accurate. The reviews are from 1968-69 when the albums were new.
Same here. I was in high school and college when they had their hits and I never heard anyone express any disdain for them.
I liked them a lot, and still do. The idea that they were “just pop” seems pretty strange to me. A lot of their songs, especially on Willy and the Poor Boys, had political commentary, especially from a blue-collar point of view. Besides Fortunate Son there were also songs like Don’t Look Now, Effigy, and It Came Out of the Sky.
I love CCR. Very unique band. 
[quote=“WordMan, post:50, topic:729743”]
Crafting commercially-perfect pop gems in the era of SF psychedelic jam structures was seen as too poppy. QUOTE]
Not by many. I grew up in the Bay Area and never met anyone with a guitar shoved so far up their butt that they didn’t like CCR.
Let’s forget CCR for a second- are some groups or artists who SEEM to fit perfectly in a given genre sometimes unpopular among other practitioners of that genre, who think (righty or wrongly), “They’re not REALLY one of us?” Sure.
To use one example… back in the Seventies, people who didn’t really pay much attention to the country or folk music scenes probably didn’t bat an eyelash at the proposition that John Denver was a country artist. Top 40 listeners probably heard songs like “Back Home Again” and thought, “Yeah, sounds kinda country to me.” But within Nashville, a lot of people hated John Denver, because he wasn’t part of the Nashville scene at all! When Charlie Rich opened the envelope at the CMA awards, and saw that John Denver was the winner of the artist of the year award, Charlie took out a cigarette lighter and burned the envelope.
Now, if Charlie just didn’t like Denver’s music, thought it was too corny or saccharine, I could understand. But I don’t think it was the music that riled Charlie- just the sense that Denver was “not one of us.”
Similarly, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s music SEEMS to me to fit very well with the early Sixties Greenwich Village folk scene. You’d THINK the crowd that liked Phil Ochs and Joan Baez and Peter Paul & Mary would embrace Simon and Garfunkel (and some did), but both Paul and Art say that a lot of the “pure” folkies hated them, because they weren’t really part of that scene- they’d grown up imitating the Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry, not Woody Guthrie.
So, it’s possible that SOME artists from the established hippie/psychedelic wing of the San Francisco music scene looked at CCR and sniffed, “You’re not really part of OUR crowd.”