Trivia / Creedence Clearwater Revival

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• Breakthrough Hit: In spades, if you consider Cover Version tracks by CCR, "Suzie Q"; otherwise, "Proud Mary". The Cover Version of Dale Hawkins' "Suzie Q" in late 1968 was followed by the original "Proud Mary" early the next year. They'd already been together almost a decade at that point. They'd managed some regional hits in Northern California when they were still The Golliwogs,^note notably "Brown-Eyed Girl" — not the Van Morrison song — in 1965, which also became a big hit in Miami but those songs really put them on the map.
• Breakup Breakout: John Fogerty has had a fairly successful solo career in the decades since CCR split, most notably scoring with his 1985 album Centerfield, which topped the Billboard album chart and spawned hit singles with the title track, "The Old Man Down the Road", and "Rock and Roll Girls".
• Black Sheep Hit: Downplayed. "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" and "Someday Never Comes" are in the band's typical music style, yet they both don't really use the typical CCR formula and have uncharacteristically personal lyrics for a John Fogerty song (the former about his crumbling band, the latter about his crumbling family life).
• Creator Backlash:
  • Doug Clifford called his 1972 solo album Cosmo a "terrible record... and I don't see—-why it would even be relevant."
  • John Fogerty confirmed he told Asylum records to destroy the master tapes to his mostly unreleased 1976 album Hoodoo. ^note  "You Got the Magic", which was the intended album opener, was released as a single, but it stalled at #87 on the pop charts. The B-side "Evil Thing" was intended as track 2 on Side 2. They never did, but Hoodoo is still unreleased to this day.
• Creator's Favorite Episode:
  • While John Fogerty has never been very consistent about his favorite song in his career, he once cited as such "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?". Otherwise, he stated to be fond of "Green River" and, among his solo career songs, he stated to love "Joy of My Life".
  • Tom Fogerty's favorite CCR song was "Run Through the Jungle".
• Creator Killer: The infamous 1972 album Mardi Gras would be their last. While all of the band's members have highly conflicting, mutually hostile stories of what went down behind the scenes, the general gist of it is that Tom Fogerty, Doug Clifford, and Stu Cook thought that John Fogerty was wielding too much power in the band, and came together in what John called "the night of the generals" to confront John and demand more authority over songwriting and composition. Eventually, John decided that he, Doug, and Stu (Tom having left the band by then) would each write a third of their next album. The tensions were visible for all to see on the finished product, a half-baked, half-formed mess that left none of them looking good and which everybody involved clearly wanted to just get finished so they wouldn't have to keep dealing with each other. Mardi Gras was seen as their weakest album, and got much less radio play than their previous efforts. "Sweet Hitch-hiker" was still a Top 10 hit, but is easily their least-remembered hit these days (the album's other single, "Someday Never Comes", gets more play). Their final concert ended with them getting pelted by coins and walking off, incinerating what was left of the goodwill in the band and ending it for good. To this day, the surviving members are not on speaking terms with each other.
• Hostility on the Set: It's common knowledge that conflicts between the members of Creedence Clearwater Revival permeated the Troubled Production of their final album, Mardi Gras (1972), but the precise details are a matter of dispute. Either way, the tension eventually led to the breakup of the band after the album's release:
  • The part of the story that everybody basically agrees on is that Doug Clifford and Stu Cook were not big fans of John Fogerty's leadership — either because Clifford and Cook were envious of all the attention Fogerty received or because Clifford and Cook were fed up with Fogerty's dictatorial I Am the Band tendencies, depending on the source. It was because of John's egotism that his brother Tom quit CCR before the recording of Mardi Gras.
  • According to Clifford and Cook, Fogerty tasked them with composing their own individual songs for Mardi Gras, despite their reluctance to contributing more to the album than they were used to. To hear it from them, this was Fogerty's attempt to set them up to fail and be seen as inferior musicians; to reinforce this point, Fogerty did not involve himself in either of their songs.
  • In his autobiography, Fogerty states that it was Clifford and Cook's idea to individually contribute to the album, and that they basically forced him to give them greater power in the band's creative process.^note Fogerty refers to this incident as the "night of the generals" When Mardi Gras was released, Fogerty says, his bandmates blamed him for their songs being panned by critics.
  • No matter how exactly things went down, the failure of the album heralded the end of CCR not long afterwards, and the surviving members have literally spent the decades since suing each other.
• Reality Subtext:
  • In his memoir, John Fogerty says that "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" was his comment on the band's strained relationship and what he (correctly) saw as their impending breakup.
  • Their final single, "Someday Never Comes", reminisces over a narrator growing up to leave his family just like his father did to theirs. In addition to the band breaking up, this was directly inspired by the messy divorce between Fogerty's own parents, as well as his present relationship with then-wife Martha Paiz falling apart (it's unclear when they did split up, but some sources say they managed to stay together for another 10 years).
  • In general, many of the tracks off Mardi Gras in general transparently allude to the mutual animosity everyone in the band faced during its creation. "Lookin' for a Reason" (by John) is all about being disillusioned with his "dream" and wanting to get the hell out of his mess, while "Sail Away" and "Take it Like a Friend" (cowritten by Stu and Doug) respectively target a demanding "captain" they're sick of taking orders from, and a domineering tyrant who abused everyone around him and is having a meltdown from having lost control of them. Gee, wonder who that could be about?
• Similarly Named Works: 14 years after Stu Cook wrote/sang "Sail Away" on Mardi Gras, John Fogerty would write/sing an altogether different "Sail Away" as the closing track from Eye of the Zombie.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: Creedence Clearwater Revival were one of the pioneers of Southern Rock, and their songs still remain widely heard today. They lasted a grand total of four years (though unlike most bands of this nature, they also pumped out seven studio albums).
• Troubled Production: Mardi Gras broke a long-standing pattern for the band by coming out two years after their last, instead of the usual six months or so (1969 alone saw the release of Bayou Country, Green River and Willy and the Poor Boys). Over the course of those two years, John Fogerty's I Am the Band attitude caused the other three members to openly revolt and demand more control. Then Tom Fogerty quit anyway, taking with him 25% of the band. Then, for reasons that still aren't entirely clear, the decision was made that the next album would be an equal split in contributions between the three remaining members: Stu Cook and Doug Clifford would have to write, sing and produce their own songs, instead of John having full control. (Fogerty claims the other two demanded the chance to write their own songs; Cook and Clifford originally said Fogerty asked them for help because he was so burnt out, then pivoted to insisting that it was more of an ultimatum, intended to punish them; and both sides have clear motives to paint themselves as the wronged party and the other as the asshole(s) who doomed CCR.) The resultant album was, unsurprisingly, an absolute mess that crashed spectacularly, the band broke up not too long afterwards, apart from a couple of very short-lived reunions, and Cook, Clifford and Fogerty would cheerfully piss on each other's graves to this day. ^note  Well, Cook and Clifford have usually got on reasonably well, but yes, they did fall out a bit in The '80s when Cook played bass in Southern Pacific, and Clifford lobbied to be the drummer, but the job went to Keith Knudsen, who was a bit of a mild enemy to Clifford at the time. They got better, of course....
• Write What You Know: Mostly averted — California boy John Fogerty wrote a lot of songs about riverboats and bayous... They're pretty convincing, though: Unless you've looked up where they actually came from^note all four band members were born in California, you probably think CCR hailed from somewhere in the Mississippi delta.
• Written for My Kids: John Fogerty wrote "Lookin' Out My Back Door" for his then three-year-old son, which explains its especially lighthearted, Sweet Dreams Fuel tone.

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