Last May, in the wake of her passing, video clips of the great Tina Turner performing “Proud Mary” went viral, and hearing it rekindled my lifelong interest in the songwriter behind the song and the band that performed it first—John Fogerty and his band Creedence Clearwater Revival. John Fogerty who? You’ll probably say.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, while most Pinoy baby boomers in their teens were into Beatlemania, I was an outlier. My taste in pop music then was maturing, and because my writer’s mind was developing at that time, my focus was more on words or lyrics, not just the melody. Then and now I cringe at rock songs with inane and hackneyed lyrics such as “She loves me yeah, yeah, yeah” or “Love me do,” Please please me” or “How do you do what you to me.”
This is why the songs of CCR caught my ears. They were something else, both the music and the lyrics.
Admittedly, Creedence Clearwater Revival was never as popular as other rock bands. Yet from early 1969 to the summer of ’71 as reported by Billboard, the band had 10 consecutive Top 10 singles and five consecutive Top 10 albums in just two and a half years, at some point even outselling the Beatles! They recorded and released some of the most influential blues-rock songs of all time. Sadly, CCR enjoyed just a few short years in the spotlight before the band imploded on itself.
Their music was categorized as “swamp rock,” whatever that means. But it was my personal kind of rock music mainly because of the intelligent and mature lyrics. As a rock lyricist, John Fogerty is to me one of the G.O.A.T., along with Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young.
I think I was the only one who liked the CCR among my college mates. They loved “Proud Mary” and “Fortunate Son” but were completely ignorant about John Fogerty and CCR.
Was it because they didn’t do drugs, nor lived scandalously? They were certainly not notorious. Their songs did not project “freakiness, sex, violence, satanism” unlike other rock bands. Not surprisingly, in the US, they were pejoratively labeled as “The Boy Scouts of Rock and Roll.” Their name even sounds like a Christian evangelical group.
But that is precisely why I like them. They are like a precious possession that needs to be treasured. It’s a source of pride for me to be one of the few in the Philippines who are familiar with Fogerty and the CCR.
“Proud Mary” was not the song that first endeared them to me. It was “Who’ll Stop The Rain?” Instinctively, I felt it referred to the looming nuclear threat and the anxiety brought on by the Cold War between America and USSR.
But I liked “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?” even better. It had an emotional resonance I couldn’t explain when I heard the words:
Someone told me long ago
There’s a calm before the storm
I know, it’s been coming for some time
When it’s over, so they say
It’ll rain a sunny day
I know, shining down like water
Beautiful! It so aptly describes the feeling of being down and out, and then picking you up with a hopeful promise that things will get better.
Those two songs, in particular, captured the socially and politically volatile atmosphere of the times. Furthermore, the repeated use of rain as metaphor stirred my budding poetic imagination.
Then, of course, there was “Fortunate Son,” a Vietnam War-era protest song. It’s about the everyday, common man forced to fight in the war when their number was called and takes a jab at the rich and privileged who were exempt from being drafted into the military because of their status. Ironically, it was used in the political rallies of Donald Trump, who used his privilege as a rich man’s son to avoid being drafted.
Perhaps because of the dire tone of their songs, CCR were said to be singers of doom. One music critic even likened John Fogerty to an Old Testament prophet like Jeremiah.
That’s not altogether true. Many songs in their repertoire are danceable, feel-good rock and roll tunes. There are plenty of sunny, sing-along choruses.
Take “Proud Mary.” That’s a jubilant song. Do you know that it is actually the name of a steamboat? The words describe leaving the bustle of city life in favor of a more simple and happier way of life rolling on an unnamed river. As I listened more to it, I thought this song is an upbeat take on the “Old Man River” song from the musical “Oklahoma.” Instead of the former’s heavy tone of someone resigned to his life “body all aching and wracked with pain,” Fogerty’s version sounds like an ode to joy.
It’s good to listen to their songs once again. This time, pay close attention to the words. With the recent pandemic and the continuing war in Ukraine and rise of populism and our current flirtation with authoritarianism and fascism, I find CCR’s songs as timely signifiers of our dangerous times. Some 50 years ago, Fogerty even warned us about the threat of climate-change cataclysm in “Bad Moon Rising.”
But is today’s digital generation interested? They’re more tuned in to pretty boy bands gyrating to dance-able songs with inane and undecipherable lyrics. KPop. P-Pop. Tiktok covers. This is the music frenzy of the times.
I long to see the day when our local songwriters would have the courage and the intelligence to write songs like “Fortunate Son” and rail against privileged sons and daughters enjoying political “silver spoons” handed to them by their fathers and grandfathers. It stings just knowing they never have to work for anything in life.
Among our local songwriters, only Yano, with such songs like “Santong Kabayo,” “Walang Perpekto” or “Di Kontento,” has the metaphoric imagination, sardonic mind and acerbic tongue to come up with such compositions.
Where are the rest of our songwriter/Jeremiahs? We need them to disturb the powers that be and assail the unstoppable social contagions of our time such as corruption, abuse, tyranny and destruction, inequality and prejudice?
Now more than ever, we need voices that will point out the “bad moon a-rising” in our country’s dark night. Or do we just stay acquiescent and in Fogerty’s words: “And I wonder, still I wonder, who’ll stop the rain?”