David Cantwell, in the (hold your breath!) The New Yorker, celebrates Creedence on the upcoming 50th Anniversary of the band’s demise and the imminent release of a long-lost live recording from 1970.

When Creedence Clearwater Revival broke up fifty years ago this fall, they were critically respected, hugely influential, and popular almost beyond belief. Billboard credits the band with nine Top Ten singles in just two and a half years, from early 1969 to the summer of ’71—an amazing stat, but one that still undercounts the band’s success. The fanciful twang of “Down on the Corner” and the blue-collar rage of “Fortunate Son” were each tremendously popular, but, because they were pressed on flip sides of the same 45, Billboard counted them as only one hit record. C.C.R. also has the most No. 2 hits—five—of any band that never scored a No. 1. In 1969, as John Lingan notes in his new book, “A Song for Everyone,” Creedence Clearwater Revival even reportedly achieved “something that no other group had done in America since 1964: They outsold the Beatles.”…

They emerged from a transformative Bay Area music scene that included Sly and the Family Stone and Jefferson Airplane. But, because they performed notably sober and straight, and were all married—and especially because they favored two-to-three-minute-long pop gems, tightly rehearsed, rather than improvised jams—they were perceived as squares even in their own scene. Hip crowds at the Fillmore jokingly referred to them, Lingan writes, as “the Boy Scouts of Rock and Roll.” When the critic Ralph J. Gleason referred to the band as “an excellent example of the Third Generation of San Francisco bands,” they felt disrespected again: they’d been performing together in the area, first as the Blue Velvets, then as the Golliwogs, since the late fifties. Look closely at the cover of their 1970 album “Cosmo’s Factory,” and you’ll see an embittered, handmade motivational poster tacked up in their rehearsal space: “3rd GENERATION.”

But even admiring critics acknowledged that the public image of the band wasn’t equal to their greatness. “For all Creedence’s immense popularity, John Fogerty has never made it as a media hero, and the group has never crossed the line from best-selling rock band to cultural phenomenon,” Ellen Willis wrote in this magazine, in 1972. Willis attributed this partly to the fact that Fogerty projected “intelligence and moderation,” rather than, for instance, “freakiness, messianism, sex, violence.” (This was also, she noted, “probably the main reason I have come to prefer him to Mick Jagger,” and partly why C.C.R. had become her favorite rock-and-roll band.) …

C.C.R.’s brief window as a working band coincided with the years in which rock music was busy splintering, innovating, into all sorts of new subgenres: progressive rock, psychedelic rock, country rock, glam rock, bubblegum, hard rock and heavy metal, funk, power pop, jam bands, and sensitive singer-songwriter types. Creedence’s backward-glancing approach may have seemed derivative; their chief heroes weren’t Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix but Little Richard, whose sound they swiped for “Travelin’ Band,” and Chuck Berry, whose comic storytelling Fogerty channelled for “It Came Out of the Sky.” But the truth is that, by retooling old-school rock and soul for a new era, they helped invent another new subgenre, one that is perhaps less-heralded but still thriving: roots-rock. A large swath of the artists we now term Americana might fairly look to Creedence as forebears.

RTWT

HT: fellow Boomer Vanderleun.