A Song for Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival
(Hachette, $32)
Creedence Clearwater Revival, in its heyday, was “popular almost beyond belief,” said David Cantwell in The New Yorker. The four-man band from working-class El Cerrito, Calif., scored 14 Top 10 songs from 1969 to 1971 and outsold the Beatles in the year Abbey Road was released. Yet while the music of John Fogerty and company has remained part of the fabric of American pop, “somehow, the sheer scope of what they accomplished has always seemed underappreciated.” John Lingan’s new book credits that in part to their being rock misfits. “Because they performed notably sober and straight—and especially because they favored two- to three-minutelong pop gems rather than improvised jams—they were perceived as squares even in their own scene.” But listeners of the time connected to a fatalism in Fogerty’s lyrics, and to the music’s “melody and groove.”
“Lingan isn’t the first to take on the band’s saga of dogged ascendancy and acrimonious disintegration,” said Brett Marie in Pop Matters. CCR fans already know that Fogerty and two other members were barely teenagers when they formed the band’s core, and that they’d been together a decade when they scored a 1967 hit with their cover of “Suzie Q.” Fogerty then knocked out a string of enduring hits, including “Bad Moon Rising” and “Fortunate Son,” before his controlling manner drove his older brother out in 1971 and caused the band to fold a year later. Lingan’s storytelling skill “rescues his work from being a mere retread,” though. Cleverly, he also frequently cuts away from the band to show how CCR’s music spoke to its era.
“If there’s a villain in this story,” said David Yaffe in Air Mail, it’s not Fogerty but the record-label boss who gained the trust of the young band members, then “robbed them blind.” Acrimony between Fogerty and his ex-friends also persisted for years. When CCR was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, Fogerty refused to perform with them. Still, a song like CCR’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” is forever. Though it originally evoked the war in Vietnam, “it could be about the sorrows of today and beyond.”