Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 166

Record label: Fantasy

Produced: John Fogerty

Recorded: RCA Studios, Los Angeles; late 1968

Released: January 5, 1969 (US) June 1969 (UK)

Chart peaks: None (UK) 7 (US)

Personnel: John Fogerty (g, v); Tom Fogerty (g); Stu Cook (b); Doug ‘Cosmo’ Clifford (d); Hank McGill (e)

Track listing: Born On The Bayou; Bootleg; Graveyard Train; Good Golly Miss Molly; Penthouse; Proud Mary (S); Keep On Chooglin’

Running time: 34.07

Current CD: Comet FANTASY8387

Further listening: Green River (1969); Willy And The Poor Boys (1970); Cosmo’s Factory (1970); The Blue Ridge Rangers – Blue Ridge Rangers (1973), essentially a John Fogerty solo album of country covers, lovingly rendered

Further reading: Bad Moon Rising: The Unofficial Story Of Creedence Clearwater Revival (Hank Bordowitz, 1998); Up Around The Bend: The Oral History Of Creedence Clearwater Revival (Craig Werner, 1998); www.creedence-revisited.com

Download: iTunes

In 1964, the Californian, Berkeley-based jazz label Fantasy decided the time had come to cash in on the beat craze and auditioned local instrumental group Tommy Fogerty And The Blue Velvets. Encouraged by A&R man Hy Weiss to sound more British, they became The Visions and then The Golliwogs, releasing singles on the label’s Scorpio subsidiary without much success. Then in 1966, key personnel John Fogerty and Doug Clifford were drafted. 18 months later, Fogerty returned home determined to quit trying to sound British and do something a little truer to his roots.

‘Rock’n’roll is Southern,’ he says today, ‘and that’s why I’m Southern. Because what I learned from was Southern. I rest my case.’ And there are few Southern rock tracks greater than the joyful, folksy chug of Proud Mary, with its utopian vision of Mississippi river life, the kind of song that sounds as if it has always been there. Freshly discharged from the army, Fogerty wrote the song as an expression of his overwhelming sense of freedom.

The group’s new style needed a new name and they became Creedence Clearwater Revival. A cover version of Dale Hawkins’ Suzie-Q attracted attention as a welcome antidote to the pretensions of acid rock and the sterility of bubblegum pop, and Fantasy switched them to the parent label. John Fogerty has since maintained that he steered the group every inch of the way from that moment on. ‘This stuff is hardly rocket science,’ says bassist Stu Cook, rebutting such claims. ‘It’s not as if we had two and a half brain cells and needed a guiding light to lead us through the key of E. We’d been together 10 years already. We learned how to play together. The Proud Mary bassline is mine for a start –

‘I could go on.’

‘Bayou Country is my favourite album because we had played those songs live and because we were still a band,’ continues Cook. ‘We still had an input at the mix, welcomed or not. Hank McGill got a great sound from my Rickenbacker on tape and it survived all sabotage attempts!’

The album is bookended by the two tracks that opened and closed the band’s sets: Born On The Bayou is a rocking, funky thing that announces Fogerty’s long-running obsession with Southern pop, while Keep On Chooglin’ is a rumbling, good-time salute to blue-collar pleasures. Vocally, Fogerty is superb throughout. His wonderfully rugged rendition of Little Richard’s Good Golly Miss Molly tips a nod to one mentor and the hypnotic Graveyard Train does the same to bluesman Howlin’ Wolf. Bayou Country represents the start of CCR’s golden period.