Even at the height of their influence, Creedence Clearwater Revival resisted the worst temptations of their age. They wore simple working-man flannels, sipped Pepsis before shows, and avoided the smack that killed Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. But nothing could save John and Tom Fogerty, Stu Cook, and Doug Clifford from each other.
on A Song For All, John Lingan tells what he calls “rock and roll’s saddest story,” following Creedence from their school days, to their meteoric rise in the late 1960s, to their acrimonious breakup in the early part of the ’70s. The book, however, was mostly unnecessary after the 2015 release of frontman John Fogerty’s memoir. Blessed Son, which tells everything a fan or fellow singer could ever want to know. Worse, as is often the case with today’s biographers, Lingan spills a lot of ink on morality. He measured Creedence’s success by its political implications, judging the band against current beliefs about the environment, sex, and race. What began as a historical context ended in a kind of humiliation. The music happens on the sides.
Lingan breathlessly recounts how the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was passed by Congress in 1968, the same year the CCR recorded the “Green River.” He reproduced feminist writer Ellen Willis’ pablum about abortion rights the following year, then noted how the band released “Bad Moon Rising.” While Creedence wants you can hear echoes of black artists like Little Richard in their work, Lingan wants you to know: The band STOLE that voice. He spoke of them being “awkwardly in the thrall of Black culture” along with other white musicians who “belonged” to black art, citing the early success of composer Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain.” And as for the separation, John Fogerty was stubborn, very stubborn, and could not share the responsibility with his brother or friends — never mind their little skill.
Telling the story this way not only drains the band of its artistry, it dilutes the personal drama. It avoids the real reason players quit: anger.
Beginning the book with the band’s 1970 concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Lingan places himself firmly on one side of that divide. (He didn’t interview John Fogerty, talking to Clifford and Cook instead. Tom Fogerty died in 1990.) Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Eric Clapton were apparently in the audience, but earlier in the tour told Fogerty is the band they don’t agree with. longer performing encores. Lingan placed the reader backstage, heard the chants of the audience and saw Fogerty unmoved as his bandmates pleaded for a comeback. For Lingan, the episode showed the tightrope that Fogerty kept on everything: He wrote all the songs, produced all the records, and recorded all the background vocals because he believed his colleagues would in the band can’t sing. Now, he rejected his idols. And he doesn’t seem to care.
Except Fogerty cares—about the music. He sometimes belittles his bandmates in their studio (aptly named Factory), but his knowledge truly dwarfs theirs. He is exact. When recording their cover of the Lead Belly song “Cotton Fields,” Fogerty was so upset that Clifford wasn’t spending time on drums that he kicked everyone out of the studio. He cut all the late beats from the tape recording, then drove to the drummer’s house in a rage and threw the snippets in his face. Fogerty recounts the episode in his memoir, saying he can still hear the soft drums on the final track. Lingan did not mention it.
The rest of the band knew they were riding on the coattails. Fogerty’s quality control and business approach to producing hit singles yielded three platinum albums in one year. And because their songs are not overly determined by political events, they enjoy a wide fanbase: an “unusual array of high school students, truck stoppers, heads, etc., ” like Voice of the Barangay critic Robert Christgau wrote. Bob Dylan and Elvis both chose “Proud Mary” as their favorite song in 1969. Even Joplin stumbled halfway through the book. “I love you all,” he sobbed, dead drunk. “You don’t play that stupid psychedelic shit.” Hippies love Creedence, but soldiers love them. A squadron in Vietnam was playing their music in the jungle at night when they launched attacks on Charlie, Fogerty shared in his memoir. “I’m not trying to polarize hippies against their parents,” Fogerty said. Music “has to come together, no matter how corny. You know everybody has to be able to sit back and tap their feet, or say, ‘Wow! That’s the right thing!'”
Creedence fed off the youth energy of the counterculture, but they weren’t really a protest band. It’s ironic, then, that Lingan describes their most popular song, “Blessed Son,” as a “turning away from middle-class values, whether it’s leaving a good job or mocking the military.” In other passages, he opposes this reading. Unlike their rock ‘n’ roll peers, all four men were married by the time the band hit paydirt in the late ’60s. Fogerty even picked up aspects of military life when he served in the Army Reserves. During an interview with a left-wing journal, he worried openly about the disappearance of “gender differences” in the workforce between men and women, admitted that he was “also a capitalist,” and spoke of about songwriting as an expression of “what I am. look from the middle.”
As he wrote about the breakup, Lingan revealed the bandmates’ jealousy of their frontman. Things start to fall apart when Tom does a power grab. He pushed a paperback writer to profile the group. The shameful product, filled with many descriptions, greatly undermined the role of Tom, presenting him as the older brother of a more talented brother. The realization hurt. “Even in his own vanity project,” Lingan wrote, “Tom’s worth is questioned.” Months later, he tried another “great publicity stunt”: a journalistic junket that made Clifford and Cook look alike crazy, according to Lingan. After their next-to-last album Pendulum broke, Tom quit the band.
In the decades since their last album, the commercial failure Mardi Gras, Clifford and Cook admit that Fogerty set them up for the fall. He had them write their own music without help. Lingan leans into this narrative: “He can pull a rug when it suits him. He can throw out new regulations that don’t make the band better, don’t make him better, just change the rules of game.” But Fogerty remembered differently. He was exhausted, forced by the label contract to produce an impossible number of songs. In his memoir, he wrote of the pair only knowing how bad their songs were on tour. People find these songs funny. When the band returned home, they split up for good.
For Lingan, Creedence failed because Fogerty could not collaborate. His book is a kind of opposition to Blessed Son, blaming the other bandmates for their egotism. The reader may get an additional lesson: Even artists learn their limits.
A Song for All: The Restoration Story of Creedence Clearwater
by John Lingan
Hachette Books, 384 pp., $32
