Modest origins
CCR’s classic rhythm section to revisit hits one more time
A few years after Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1993 induction into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, Douglas (Cosmo) Clifford and Stu Cook got together to jam in Lake Tahoe.
This wasn’t really planned. But Clifford, who played drums for CCR, had a house up there and a studio and was hoping to convince his old bass player to relocate to the area. He had heard Cook was thinking about moving from Los Angeles back to California’s Bay area, where they had both grown up. So he invited Cook and his family to spend a week in Lake Tahoe.
Inevitably, a jam broke out. The two musicians had been prevented from performing at the actual Hall of Fame ceremony due to their ongoing and epic feud with CCR singer, principal songwriter and leader John Fogerty, who opted instead to play with Robbie Robertson and Bruce Springsteen at the induction (guitarist Tom Fogerty, who was also estranged from his brother due to the long-standing feud, passed away in 1990).
“When the week was over, (Cook) was buying a house,” says Clifford, in an interview with Postmedia. “Next thing you know, we were jamming in my studio with bass and drums. That gets a little boring. We needed the rest of the parts and what better songs to play than the original Creedence songs?
Nobody was doing it, including John Fogerty. We told him what we were going to do and said if he wanted to join that would be fine and if he didn’t that would be fine. He didn’t.”
“He sued us and all the love that was happening there,” Clifford adds with a laugh. “We won. Twenty-five years later, here we are.”
Such was the modest origins of Creedence Clearwater Revisited, a band that has now officially been around 20 years longer than the one that inspired it. Even if interviewers are considerate enough not to bring up the legendary bad blood between Fogerty and his former cohorts right out of the gate, it’s such an integral part of rock and roll lore that it will eventually make its way into any story about the bands.
Fogerty was clearly not pleased with CCR’s former rhythm section hitting what he calls the “oldies circuit.” In his 2015 memoir, Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music, the singersongwriter wrote “Acting like one-hit wonders, so desperate in their old age that they’ve got to get together and fool the public into thinking this thing is somehow the remnants of Creedence Clearwater Revival” about the outfit. Clifford, for his part, says he hasn’t read the book, ruefully adding that he doesn’t read “fiction.”
But one of the key points in bios and interviews about Creedence Clearwater Revisited that Cook and Clifford always emphasize is the importance the two had in defining CCR’s original sound, a simple but energetic and danceable mix of soul, pop and swamp-boogie that efficiently propelled F ogerty’s urgent and melodic bursts of songwriting genius forward.
Clifford doesn’t downplay Fogerty’s hooks and lyrics, of course, but he strongly hints there is more to CCR’s success than the songwriting.
“It’s a couple things,” Clifford says, when asked what is behind the band’s enduring appeal. “It’s good songs to begin with and really good grooves. That would be the rhythm section. What the rhythm sections do, especially in rock and roll, is give the songs a certain feel. It’s more of a feel than sometimes a sound, which I think is vitally important and particularly how it relates to the lyrical content. We spent 10 years working this kind of music and stayed with it. We started when we were 13 and had our first hit when we were 23.”
In fact, CCR had no less than 13 top 40 songs between 1968 and 1972, an impressive accomplishment that has yet to be matched by any American band. So Creedence Clearwater Revisited set to reclaim the glory in 1995, offering reverent renditions of classics such as Proud Mary, Down on the Corner, Bad Moon Rising, Have You Ever Seen the Rain, Fortunate Son and dozens of other memorable tunes that captured the spirit of the late 1960s and early 1970s.