Creedence Wrote a Song for Everyone

Travelin' Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall, 1970

Populism is a dirty word these days, corrupted into a synonym for bigotry and demagoguery. But populism is actually just solidarity with working people. Creedence Clearwater Revival was a populist band: a large, defining swath of their songs is about working people: the go-to is the fiery classic "Fortunate Son," about the notorious socioeconomic disparities between who got drafted to fight in Vietnam and who didn't, but populism is embedded in everything from deep cuts such as "Don't Look Now," "Effigy," and, yes, "The Working Man," to big hits like "Down on the Corner," "Proud Mary," and "Born on the Bayou."
Actually, populism is built right into every song Creedence ever played. Everything about them was literally workmanlike, from leader John Fogerty's trademark plaid flannel shirts to drummer Doug Clifford's brick-sturdy drumming. Going against the prevailing trend of the time, there were no paisley shapes in Creedence's recordings, no lysergic indulgences of any kind. The guys in the band weren't druggy or drinky — because they had a job to do. As the narrator of Travelin' Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall, the obligatory Jeff Bridges, notes, "Creedence never bought into the idea of turning on, tuning and dropping out. For them, it was always about the work. And to reflect their identification with the working man, they called their rehearsal place the Factory."
And, just as it was embedded in CCR's entire way of being, populism is embedded Travelin' Band, an evocative, edifying documentary about the band's two-week April 1970 European tour. (It's on Netflix.) Wall-to-wall with rich archival footage, the film opens with a 35-minute backgrounder on the band while it follows them on tour, closing with their complete 50-minute April 14th show at London's Royal Albert Hall, the first of a triumphal sold-out two-night stand.
The band touches down at Heathrow Airport on April 7th and then visits various European cities: Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Paris. The first soundbite goes to bassist Stu Cook, and his observation about the Old World is as hippy-dippy as it is tautological: "Each country is definitely each country, man!" he exclaims. The bright-eyed and bushy-faced Clifford sagely adds, "Things are physically different, and the people are, you know, mentally different."
The whole band was from the working-class East Bay town of El Cerrito, where they'd known each other since high school. For the most part, they weren't affluent kids, which would explain why, even though they were in their mid 20s, this tour was the first time that Clifford, as well as lead singer and main songwriter John Fogerty and his rhythm guitarist brother Tom Fogerty, had been overseas. The Fogertys' dad worked a Linotype machine and their mom was a schoolteacher; Clifford's father was a machinist, his mother was a cosmetics clerk. (Cook had been out of the country before — his father was a fairly well-to-do lawyer and Cook was the type of kid who took classical piano lessons.)
For John Fogerty, the connection between populism and music came early: he's said that he made that crucial connection when he was a kid and saw Pete Seeger perform and lecture at folk festivals, and through Seeger discovered Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill.
And then it became personal. Travelin' Band... notes that after years of work, the band was starting to become a regional success — but then in late 1966, as the Vietnam War was escalating, John Fogerty enlisted in the Army Reserve to avoid the draft, and Clifford joined the Coast Guard. That derailed the group's hard-won progress but it inspired one of its key artistic foundations. This was just as the San Francisco rock scene was exploding, which meant that Fogerty missed out on 1967's Summer of Love — instead of wearing love beads on the Haight, he was wearing a dog tag on a parade ground. The experience was a formative influence on his music: Fogerty has said that many of the Creedence songs that mention social inequality "certainly... are references to my time in the military." He wrote his first classic, "Proud Mary," the day he got his honorable discharge papers.
Standing on a breezy street corner in Rotterdam, Cook notes that they get a rousing reception everywhere. "I think that, to me, this tour proves that that rock & roll music, after 15 years... somebody's taking it serious somewhere," he says. "You get the same reaction in Rotterdam that you get in Oakland that you get in LA, that you get in Omaha. Like, there's something happening." Yes, what was happening was the globalization of popular culture. And it was in no small part achieved with music that could not have been more quintessentially American.
Creedence was then one of the biggest bands in the world and the Royal Albert Hall was — and still is — the most prestigious venue a rock band could play in Britain, and yet Creedence's stage is utterly unadorned. Besides the band, there's nothing up there but some honkin' big amps, a very modest drum set and some microphones; there are no blobby Joshua Light Show projections or even spotlights; in fact, the lights don't perceptibly change throughout the band's triumphant set. Neither of the Fogertys even uses any distortion pedals. And it's here that the virtue of recording without studio magic and psychedelic geegaws becomes apparent: their live shows sounded a lot like their records.
Fashionwise, there are no tie-dyed T-shirts or psychedelic dashikis: as he does virtually throughout this documentary, John Fogerty wears a plaid flannel shirt although, perhaps in his one concession to showbiz, he sports leather trousers — so it's workingman up top, rocker dude from the waist down, which is utterly fitting. Cook, the bougie one, does sport Lennonesque granny glasses and a wild iridescent shirt, but the other two wear utterly normal circa 1970 young person's clothes. None of them has a good haircut. There's no preening or rooster-strutting or guitar-thrusting or even between-song banter — not even a "Hello, London!" They just play their songs. "They're not stars," wrote one reviewer at the time. "They're craftsmen."
And, to please the people, they play the hits. By this point Creedence had a lot of them: literally half the show is composed of singles that made the US Top 3.
Despite how the documentary presents the band's set, "Born on the Bayou" was actually the opening number that evening. So the first words that John Fogerty sang that evening embrace good ol' populism: "Now, when I was just a little boy/standin' to my daddy's knee/My papa said, 'Son, don’t let the man get ya, do what he done to me.'” And then, as ever, Creedence's medium carries a lot of message: succinct and compact like all of the band's best work, the song's rootsy economy contrasts strikingly with more flamboyant contemporaries like Cream, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. Creedence could never play like those bands; instead they made that elemental approach into a statement.
"Travelin' Band" is an outlier in the everyman-oriented CCR canon: it's about being a rock star. But still they retain their humility: they might be "flyin' 'cross the land," but they're still "tryin' to get a hand." Also in the song, their luggage gets lost, which is really not groovy.
They tear through "Fortunate Son" blazingly fast — and who could blame them, it's a barn-burner. The song is a valuable key to John Fogerty's worldview. In Travelin' Band, Fogerty tells very keenly interested interviewer Ralph J. Gleason that he never wants to write anything that appeals to only one side of the political spectrum: anybody from "left-wing radical crazies" to "super-Birchers." Accordingly, "Fortunate Son" angrily protests how privileged kids somehow didn't get drafted, which makes it a class issue, not a political one. The song isn't so much anti-war as it is anti-injustice.
But "Proud Mary" is where it all comes together, an object lesson in how deeply the everyperson's sensibility was ingrained in Creedence's music. The narrator stops "workin' for the man every night and day," hits the road and finds a job as a dishwasher in Memphis, then pumps propane in New Orleans, and in the process discovers that people of modest means are more generous than their more prosperous neighbors. The song is easy to play and sing, like a folk song, and being able to cover songs like "Proud Mary" with relative ease must have given countless bands the confidence to make their own music. This all made a huge impact on the next generation or two of musicians, from Bob Seger to Bruce Springsteen to the Minutemen to Nirvana (who briefly were a Creedence cover band).
They finish up with a three-song sprint, starting with a couple of supercharged covers that pay tribute to key influences: Little Richard's "Good Golly, Miss Molly" and Ray Charles' "The Night Time Is the Right Time." And then, in the closing rave-up "Keep on Chooglin'" the workingman makes one last and triumphant appearance: "Here comes Louie, works in the sewer," John sings, "He going to choogle tonight."
And if we're talking about gruntworkers, let's talk about Tom Fogerty: for the duration of the song's eight and a half minutes, he contentedly plays the same chord, effectively becoming a washboard player with his strumming hand and a vise with the other. Tom was a killer rhythm guitarist and an unsung keystone of the Creedence sound; watching him play on this song underscores what a huge role he played in Creedence's burly, implacable groove. His brother John's epic harmonica and guitar heroism on this finale gives in to the typical self-indulgence of the era, but even then, underneath it all, there's still a whole lotta chooglin' goin' on.
The crowd at the Royal Albert Hall reportedly gave Creedence a 15-minute standing ovation, waiting, along with audience members George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton, for the band to come back for an encore. But, per an edict that John Fogerty had handed down earlier that year, Creedence didn't do encores. Which makes sense: after all, any self-respecting working person knows you don't work overtime for free.