Creedence Clearwater Revival

• 1. Introduction

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  In June 2025, a compilation album by Creedence Clearwater Revival reached its 750th week on the Billboard 200. Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits first appeared in 1976 and has never really left the chart. The Recording Industry Association of America certifies it 12-times platinum, which means at least 12 million copies sold in the United States.

  The band behind those songs enjoyed only four years of chart-topping success. It was a quartet from El Cerrito, California, built around the brothers John and Tom Fogerty, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford. Their ending was bitter. It left behind lawsuits, a ceremony where old friends sat in separate corners, and a decades-long fight over who controlled the music.

  Three questions run through this story. Why did a band so popular on the radio come apart so fast? How did four Californians sing so convincingly about bayous and the Mississippi? And what does it mean when the man who wrote the hits spends most of his life unable to call them his own?

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• 2. From Blue Velvets to Creedence

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  John Fogerty, Doug Clifford and Stu Cook met at Portola Junior High School in El Cerrito, California. They called themselves the Blue Velvets and mostly played instrumental covers of The Ventures and Duane Eddy. Fogerty sang a few jukebox standards on top. John's older brother Tom began by joining them on recordings and live dates, and the group became Tommy Fogerty & The Blue Velvets.

  Three singles followed, and the second caught the attention of Casey Kasem, who worked at the Oakland station KEWB. In 1964 the band signed with Fantasy Records, an independent jazz label in San Francisco. What drew them was Vince Guaraldi's instrumental "Cast Your Fate to the Wind", a national success for that same label.

  Fantasy co-owner Max Weiss had his own ideas about branding. He first renamed the group Vision, then Golliwogs, after a children's book character. The roles inside the band shifted too. Cook moved from piano to bass, Tom moved from lead vocals to rhythm guitar, and John became lead singer and main songwriter. Tom later put it plainly: "I could sing, but John had a sound!"

  The brothers also took pen names. Tom became Rann Wild and John became Toby Green. Both sides of the first six Golliwogs singles, issued between 1964 and 1966, carried the Wild/Green credit.

  In 1966, John Fogerty and Doug Clifford were drafted. Fogerty joined the U.S. Army Reserve and Clifford joined the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve. Fogerty has recalled drifting into a delirious trance during his service and narrating a story to himself. That story became the song "Porterville". By 1967 he had grown into a multi-instrumentalist on keyboards, harmonica and saxophone, and he was producing the group's recordings without credit.

  "Porterville" was the last Golliwogs single, and like every Golliwogs record it failed to chart. The identical recording soon turned up on the first album by a band with a new name.

  Saul Zaentz bought Fantasy Records in 1967 and offered the group a chance to record a full album. The members had hated "Golliwogs" from the start, so they chose a name themselves in January 1968. Interviews with the band twenty years later traced its pieces to three sources. One was Tom's friend Credence Newball, whose first name was bent into Creedence, as in creed. Another was a television commercial for Olympia Brewing Company that talked about clear water. The third was the four members' renewed commitment to the band.

  Rejected options included "Muddy Rabbit" and "Gossamer Wump". The one that survived as a starting point was "Creedence Nuball and the Ruby". Cook judged the final result weirder than Buffalo Springfield or Jefferson Airplane.

  Early in 1968 the band began playing around San Francisco at Deno and Carlo's, the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore West. Later that year they toured across the country and made their first New York appearances at the Fillmore East.

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• 3. A Run of Hits

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  Between 1969 and 1971, Creedence placed 14 consecutive singles in the U.S. top 10, many of them double A-sides. Five consecutive albums also reached the top 10. The run began with a cover.

  In 1968, a version of the 1956 rockabilly song "Susie Q" drew heavy airplay around the San Francisco Bay area and on Chicago's WLS-AM. It was the band's second single and its first top-40 hit, at number 11. It remains the only top-40 hit they did not get from John Fogerty's pen. The self-titled debut album arrived in May 1968 with a cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put a Spell on You", which reached number 58. It also carried "Porterville", released on the Scorpio label with the writing credited to "T. Spicebush Swallowtail".

  Bayou Country came out in January 1969 and reached number seven. The single "Proud Mary", backed with "Born on the Bayou", climbed to number two. "Proud Mary" became the group's most covered song, with some 100 versions by other artists. The best known is the 1971 version by Ike & Tina Turner, which hit number four two years to the week after the original peaked. John says he wrote it in high spirits after leaving the Army Reserve. The album also held "Good Golly, Miss Molly" and a nine-minute live closer called "Keep On Chooglin".

  In April 1969 came "Bad Moon Rising", backed with "Lodi", which peaked at number two in the United States. In Britain it spent three weeks at number one in September and October 1969, the band's only British chart-topper. The album Green River followed in August 1969. It was the first Creedence record to top the Billboard 200. Its title song also reached number two, and the B-side "Commotion" peaked at number 30.

  The band played the Atlanta Pop Festival in July 1969 and then Woodstock in August. They were the first major act signed to appear there. Their slot came in the early morning, hours after the scheduled start, and they followed the Grateful Dead. John said the Dead had put the crowd to sleep. Looking out, he saw a "Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud".

  Problems with equipment and lighting added to the mood. John vetoed the band's inclusion in the Woodstock film and soundtrack. Cook remembered it differently: "The performances are classic CCR and I'm still amazed by the number of people who don't even know we were one of the headliners at Woodstock '69."

  The album Willy and the Poor Boys arrived in November 1969, and its two reworked Lead Belly covers were "Cotton Fields" and "Midnight Special". On the 16th of November 1969, the band played "Down on the Corner" and "Fortunate Son" on The Ed Sullivan Show. By year's end they had reached number three and number 14. For 1969 as a whole, the band had three top-10 albums and four hit singles, with three more B-sides charting.

  In January 1970 the double A-side "Travelin' Band" and "Who'll Stop the Rain" appeared. "Travelin' Band" had a strong Little Richard feel, close enough to "Good Golly, Miss Molly" that the song's publisher sued. The case settled out of court, and the song topped out at number two. On the 31st of January 1970 the band recorded a show at the Oakland Coliseum Arena, later sold as a live album and television special. In February they landed on the cover of Rolling Stone, though only John was interviewed.

  In April 1970 the band prepared for a first European tour. For those dates John wrote "Up Around the Bend" and "Run Through the Jungle", and the single reached number four. In June they went to Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco to record Cosmo's Factory. It came out in July 1970 and spent nine weeks at number one in the U.S. Alongside it came "Lookin' Out My Back Door" and "Long as I Can See the Light", the band's fifth and last number-two hit.

  That made five number-two singles without a single number one on the Hot 100, more than any other group. Only Madonna with six, Taylor Swift with seven and Drake with nine have gone past that total. Elvis Presley and the Carpenters tied it. Local radio told a different story. On WLS-AM the band had three number ones and four number threes, and no number twos at all.

  Cosmo's Factory also held an 11-minute jam on Marvin Gaye's version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", plus a nearly note-for-note homage to Roy Orbison's "Ooby Dooby". It reached number 11 on the Billboard Soul Albums chart as well.

  Pendulum, released in December 1970, produced the top-10 hit "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?", with "Hey Tonight" on the flip side also a hit. John played Hammond B3 organ on many of its tracks, a nod to Booker T. & the M.G.'s, with whom the band had jammed.

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• 4. Bayou Sound, Californian Roots

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  NPR once said that Creedence "mythologized the American South with an exotic mixture of blues, New Orleans R&B, and rockabilly". AllMusic described a blend of punchy rock and roll, swamp pop, blues and country. Critics have credited the band with helping to pioneer swamp rock, roots rock and country rock. They also touched blues rock, Southern rock, Americana and blue-eyed soul.

  After the second album, the group committed to a swamp and blues sound, heard clearly on "Born on the Bayou" and "Proud Mary". The recipe included Fogerty's raspy vocals with a southern drawl, bluesy harmonies, cowbells and a twangy guitar.

  The lyrics were full of bayous, catfish and the Mississippi River. Yet the band knew these things mostly from other songs and stories rather than from living there. Romance rarely appeared. The writing dwelt instead on the Vietnam War, class struggle and repression. "Fortunate Son" became one of the best-known songs of the Vietnam protest movement, because it drew attention to the unfair draft.

  When the group arrived, nobody yet used the term "roots rock". One appraisal says Creedence essentially defined it. The band turned away from the psychedelic San Francisco scene around them and stayed with the working-class roots of its members. Its inspirations ran from Little Richard, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry to the soul makers at Motown and Stax.

  Bob Merlis wrote the essay for the band's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. He saw lyrics about "personal concerns about pride, rejection, and nostalgia for an American subculture that was fading fast."

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• 5. A Time Bomb

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  In early 1971, once Pendulum was recorded, Tom Fogerty resigned from the band. The other members felt John was too controlling and domineering, and Tom had had enough. His departure was made public in February. The remaining three briefly weighed finding a replacement, then carried on as a trio.

  By spring 1971, John was tired of hearing that Cook and Clifford were not allowed to write or produce their own songs. He relented and announced a "democratic" plan. Each member would write and perform his own material, three songs apiece for the next album. John would only play guitar on his bandmates' songs.

  Accounts differ on how Cook and Clifford reacted. Fogerty says they were excited at first, since they had asked for this freedom, and only soured after the record flopped. He also recalls refusing Cook's request to "fix" one of Cook's songs so it sounded more like other Creedence material. Other sources suggest the two resisted from the start, and allegedly John said they must accept the plan or he would quit.

  Still, the new approach produced the top-10 single "Sweet Hitch-Hiker" in July 1971, backed with Cook's "Door to Door". The trio toured the U.S. and Europe that summer and fall, with Cook's song in the live set.

  The final album, Mardi Gras, appeared in April 1972. It held songs by John, Cook and Clifford, plus a cover of "Hello Mary Lou", which Gene Pitney had written for Ricky Nelson. Each member sang lead on his own tracks. Critics found it uneven and disjointed. Rolling Stone reviewer Jon Landau called it "relative to a group's established level of performance, the worst album I have ever heard from a major rock band".

  Mardi Gras peaked at number 12, weaker than its predecessors, though it still became the seventh consecutive studio album to go gold. John's "Someday Never Comes", backed with Clifford's "Tearin' Up the Country", also reached the U.S. top 40.

  John later gave a blunt account of the whole story to the Swedish magazine Pop in 1997. He said he made the music alone. He wrote the arrangements, added the backing vocals and guitars, and produced and mixed the albums. The others, he said, showed up for rehearsals and the recording days. In his words, "Creedence was like sitting on a time bomb."

  He described the moment the problems began, when the band entered a real Hollywood studio for the first time. Cook and Clifford wanted to write songs, share opinions on arrangements and sing. They added backing vocals and tambourines to "Proud Mary", and John thought both sounded awful. He believed the band was a one-hit wonder at that point, and the next album would either break big or send them back to work at a car wash.

  He recalled telling the others over dinner at an Italian restaurant that he did not want to return to the car wash. In his view, the result was eight million-selling double-sided singles in a row and six platinum albums. He also said Melody Maker named them the best band in the world after the Beatles split.

  Away from the music, John had also come to see the Fantasy Records arrangement as a burden. He believed Zaentz had broken a promise to give the band a better contract. Cook, who held a business degree, blamed John's poor judgment for what he called the worst record deal of any major American recording artist.

  Despite all that, the band set off on a two-month, 20-date U.S. tour. Less than six months after it ended, Fantasy Records and the band announced on the 16th of October 1972 that Creedence Clearwater Revival was finished.

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• 6. Who Owns the Songs

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  In 1971, Fantasy Records built a new headquarters at 2600 Tenth Street in Berkeley, paid for by Creedence's success. Saul Zaentz also used the wealth to produce films, including the Best Picture winners One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus and The English Patient.

  Fantasy kept releasing compilations after the split. Creedence Gold came out in 1972, More Creedence Gold in 1973, and Pre-Creedence in 1975, which gathered early Golliwogs recordings. A live album called The Royal Albert Hall Concert appeared in 1981, but the performance was actually recorded in 1970 in Oakland, California. Later pressings were retitled simply The Concert. A second double album of their best material, Chronicle: Volume Two, followed in 1986.

  John's own path was harder. In 1973 he began a solo career with The Blue Ridge Rangers, a one-man-band collection of country and gospel songs. His old contract still obliged him to deliver eight more records to Fantasy. He refused to make them. The standoff ended only when David Geffen of Asylum Records bought Fogerty's contract for $1 million. In 1975 he released his one Asylum album, the self-titled John Fogerty.

  His next major success was Centerfield, a chart-topping album in 1985. When he toured in 1986, fans complained that he would not play Creedence songs. He also struggled with recurring vocal problems, which he blamed on testifying in court. His explanation for the ban was twofold. Playing the songs would mean paying performance royalties to Zaentz, who held the copyright, and revisiting them was too painful.

  Centerfield also pulled him into new lawsuits. Zaentz claimed that "The Old Man Down the Road" was a blatant rewrite of "Run Through the Jungle", Fogerty's own 1970 hit. In 1980 Fogerty had traded away his rights to the Creedence songs to cancel his remaining contractual obligations, so Fantasy owned that song. In effect, the label sued him for plagiarizing himself. A jury sided with Fogerty. A defamation suit from Zaentz over the songs "Mr. Greed" and "Zanz Kant Danz" ended in a settlement, and Fogerty edited the recording to change "Zanz" to "Vanz".

  On the 19th of February 1987, at the Palomino Club in North Hollywood, Fogerty broke his own ban. Bob Dylan and George Harrison, joined by Taj Mahal and Jesse Ed Davis, shared the stage and urged him on: "If you don't, the whole world's gonna think 'Proud Mary' is Tina Turner's song." At an Independence Day benefit for Vietnam veterans that year, he worked through the hits from "Born on the Bayou" to "Proud Mary". After pulling back from music in the late 1980s, he returned in 1997 with the Grammy-winning Blue Moon Swamp. He now tours often and plays Creedence classics alongside his solo work.

  Because Fogerty had signed away control of his early songs, Fantasy could license them freely. They turned up in many films and commercials. In an NPR interview he said people remembered Forrest Gump, a great movie, but forgot all the poor movies where Fantasy placed the music. He also named car and tire commercials, and a paint thinner ad that used "Who'll Stop the Rain".

  He was especially angry about "Fortunate Son" selling blue jeans. A reporter from the Los Angeles Times eventually called to ask how he felt, and he said he opposed his song being used to sell pants. Wrangler, to its credit in his telling, saw that he hated the idea and stopped, even though it had made its deal with the publisher.

  In 2004, Zaentz sold Fantasy to Concord Records. John Fogerty then bought a majority stake in the global rights to the Creedence songs he had written. In 2005 the label released The Long Road Home, a mix of Creedence and Fogerty solo classics. Revival appeared on Fantasy in October 2007. After that, and before Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again in 2009, he left for his own label, Fortunate Son Records, distributed by Verve Forecast.

  On the 13th of January 2023, Fogerty announced on Twitter that he owned the rights to the entire Creedence catalog worldwide, after a legal battle of 50 years. He had bought a majority stake from Concord, which had held the rights since 2004.

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• 7. Brothers, Bandmates and Near Reunions

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  Tom Fogerty released several solo albums, none of which matched the success of Creedence. His 1974 record Zephyr National featured all four original members on the track "Mystic Isle of Avalon", though John recorded his part separately. Another track, "Joyful Resurrection", sounds very much like the old band. His album Excalibur featured all four members of the Jerry Garcia Band, with Garcia on lead guitar. It has since become a popular cult album.

  Tom died at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, in September 1990. The cause was a complication of AIDS, contracted through a tainted blood transfusion during back surgery. He and John had barely reconciled. At the funeral, John said of the two of them: "We wanted to grow up and be musicians. I guess we achieved half of that, becoming rock 'n roll stars. We didn't necessarily grow up".

  Doug Clifford and Stu Cook, friends since junior high, kept working together as session players and in the Don Harrison Band. They also founded Factory Productions, a mobile recording service in the Bay Area. Clifford released a solo record, Cosmo, in 1972. Cook produced Roky Erickson's The Evil One and played bass in the 1980s for the country act Southern Pacific.

  Clifford produced Groovers Paradise, a 1974 Warner Bros. album by Doug Sahm, once of the Sir Douglas Quintet and the Texas Tornados. Both Clifford and Cook played on it, and Clifford kept performing and recording with Sahm through the 1980s.

  In 1995, after a long quiet stretch, Cook and Clifford formed Creedence Clearwater Revisited with several well-known musicians. John won an injunction in 1997 that forced them to perform for a time as "Cosmo's Factory". The courts later ruled in Cook and Clifford's favor, and Revisited toured the world until 2020.

  The original lineup played together after the split only once, at Tom's wedding on the 19th of October 1980. In 1983, John, Cook and Clifford played their 20th El Cerrito High School reunion, billed as the Blue Velvets. New rounds of lawsuits among the members, and against their former management, hardened the bitterness through the 1980s and 1990s.

  The breaking point came at the 1993 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. John refused to play with Cook and Clifford, who were barred from the stage. He performed instead with an all-star band that included Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson. Tom's widow Tricia had expected a reunion and had even brought the urn holding her husband's ashes. Cook and Clifford, seated with their families across the room, walked out as the performance began. They later wrote separate letters to the Hall of Fame's board calling it "hurtful" and "insulting".

  In a July 2011 interview with the Calgary Herald, John said he would at least consider a reunion. He noted that the old bombast was gone from his refusal. In October 2011 he called it possible, though the call might have to come from outside. Then Uncut magazine ran interviews in February 2012 with the other two. Cook said: "Leopards don't change their spots. This is just an image-polishing exercise by John. My phone certainly hasn't rung." Clifford said it might have been a nice idea 20 years earlier.

  In May 2013, Fogerty told Charlie Rose on CBS This Morning that a reunion was a possibility, though he doubted the others would budge. In September 2017, Clifford answered again: "It would have been great 20-25 years ago. It's way too late now."

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• 8. Rankings and Registries

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  Rolling Stone placed Creedence Clearwater Revival at number 82 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. In 2003, the magazine's 500 Greatest Albums list had three Creedence entries. Green River ranked 95th, Cosmo's Factory 265th and Willy and the Poor Boys 392nd.

  The next year, on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs, Rolling Stone put "Fortunate Son" at 99, "Proud Mary" at 155, "Who'll Stop the Rain" at 188 and "Bad Moon Rising" at 355. VH1 ranked "Proud Mary" 39th on its list of the 100 Greatest Rock Songs. NME placed "Bad Moon Rising" at 363 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

  "Fortunate Son", "Proud Mary" and Cosmo's Factory are all in the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2013, the Library of Congress added "Fortunate Son" to its National Recording Registry, which honors recordings that are culturally, historically or aesthetically important. Of every song the band recorded, the one about the draft is the one the nation chose to preserve.

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