There's something about Proud Mary
I found an excuse to refer to John Fogerty and his Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Proud Mary" a couple weeks ago in connection with the headline on a New York Post column by Mac Owens. I referred to the song as "great," which was too much for John Hinderaker. He entered a brief dissent:
Familiar, yes. Beloved by bands who play at wedding receptions, yes. Less annoying in CCR's original version than in Tina Turner's cover, true. But "great"? Uh-uh.The issue raised here is important, but of course there's no arguing with taste. Ike and Tina Turner may in fact have ruined the song, or at least made it so familiar in an atrocious version that it's difficult to hear with fresh ears. I only wanted to add a few notes on the subject before leaving it.
Creedence Clearwater was a blue collar Bay area anchored by brothers Tom and John Fogerty. They paid their dues touring for nine years in various incarnations of the band that became Creedence before "Proud Mary" hit paydirt for them in January 1969. ("Proud Mary" was backed with "Born on the Bayou," another great rootsy song sounding like it had been retrieved from an archive somewhere in the Louisiana swampland.) In the heyday of the hippie ethos and radical chic, Fogerty ingeniously formulated a downriver idyll of freedom and benevolence at the heart of America.
The song of course struck a chord with its allusion to Huckleberry Finn. Here is part of one paragraph of Huck Finn from chapter 7 that virtually encapsulates the book as well as the spirit of "Proud Mary":
I got out amongst the driftwood, and then laid down in the bottom of the canoe and let her float. I laid there, and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky; not a cloud in it. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed it before. And how far a body can hear on the water such nights! I heard people talking at the ferry landing. I heard what they said, too -- every word of it. One man said it was getting towards the long days and the short nights now. T'other one said this warn't one of the short ones, he reckoned -- and then they laughed, and he said it over again, and they laughed again; then they waked up another fellow and told him, and laughed, but he didn't laugh; he ripped out something brisk, and said let him alone. The first fellow said he 'lowed to tell it to his old woman -- she would think it was pretty good; but he said that warn't nothing to some things he had said in his time. I heard one man say it was nearly three o'clock, and he hoped daylight wouldn't wait more than about a week longer. After that the talk got further and further away, and I couldn't make out the words any more; but I could hear the mumble, and now and then a laugh, too, but it seemed a long ways off.A bad joke heard at a distance, repeated over and over, then simply the sound of muffled laughter, while Huck floats down the middle of the river lying on his back with daybreak approaching...it doesn't get any better than that.
"Proud Mary" opened the door for the remarkable string of beautifully crafted hit singles Creedence then reeled off, all written by Fogerty: "Bad Moon Rising" b/w "Lodi," "Green River" b/w "Commotion," "Down on the Corner" b/w "Fortunate Son," "Travelin' Band" b/w "Who'll Stop the Rain," "Up Around the Bend" b/w "Run Through the Jungle," "Lookin' Out My Back Door" b/w "Long As I Can See the Light," "Have You Ever Seen the Rain" b/w "Hey Tonight," and "Sweet Hitchiker." At the end of the road, appropriately enough, was "Someday Never Comes."
The striking thing about this string of hits is how dominated they are by metaphorical expressions of foreboding and populist, chip-on-the shoulder bitterness punctuated by the occasional idyll, but with hardly a girl in sight. That's a tough act to pull off in pop music; I can't think of a body of work quite like it. I find myself sympathetic to Fogerty's foreboding, his resentments, his daydreams -- foremost among them, "Proud Mary."
UPDATE: Reader Gary Waltrip writes:
Although I am chagrined by John Fogerty’s support of John Kerry in the 2004 election, I agree with you that CCR was a great group. They were a rock band from the San Francisco Bay Area, San Leandro if I remember correctly. My father had a music store in the late 1960s at the corner of Union and Foxworthy in San Jose, California, and the CCR were customers. But they were not then called the Creedence Clearwater Revival. They were called “the Golliwogs.” Well, it was a little dumb but leading in the general direction of the kind of clear water where golliwogs generally live.And check out the site of guitar tech Tom Spaulding, with its reports from the road on the Fogerty tour this summer. Tom's site is Caught Up In the Fable.
At that time, John Fogerty was in the army, and his brother Tom and the bass player, Stu Cook, came to my father’s store to buy Rickenbacker guitars, made famous by the Beatles. My father was a Rickenbacker dealer, and sold guitars to some famous bands, like the Jefferson Airplane. Tom bought a Rickenbacker six string and Stu bought a solid body bass, both of them red, or “Fireglow,” the official name for the color. They put their “Golliwog” card on our bulletin board where a hundred other unknown bands had done the same. I remember helping my brother Ted adjust the neck of Stu’s bass while he and Tom looked on. They told us that when their singer got out of the army, they were going to make a record. “That’s great,” we said. We heard that all the time. They also bought some speaker columns for their vocals, but later could not pay for them (they didn’t have the money), so my dad took them back and sold them to someone else to protect their credit.In a few months the band had changed its name to the CCR and had released a remake of the old rock song “Suzie Q” and it was doing quite well. An album followed, and it featured a blurry shot of the band holding their red Rickenbackers – the ones they bought from my dad. Later we laughed over “Lodi,” and the words, “Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again.” We had been to Lodi and understood the sentiment.
The group has always been special to me because of the personal connection, but beyond that, they were just plain good! One of the best Rock groups of all time, right up there with the Eagles and Beatles.
JOHN adds: I can't resist noting that John Fogerty starred in one of the great moments in litigation history. After his run with Creedence ended, he was out of music for a while. He then embarked on a solo career with a new record company. His old record company owned the copyrights to all of his old CCR songs, and they actually had the temerity to sue Fogerty for copyright infringement. They claimed that his new material infringed their copyright on some of his old songs.
The case went to trial, and Fogerty's lawyer put him on the stand--with his guitar--for direct examination. Fogerty put on a tutorial on rock and roll music for the jury. He explained how rock and roll songs are constructed, and, singing and playing periodically, illustrated basic concepts like bridges and backbeat. He talked about his own song-writing techniques, and explained the ways in which his new material was different from the old. Asked to respond directly to the record company's complaint, he said sheepishly, "I guess it's true that I sound a lot like myself." As I recall, it took the jury only a few minutes to rule in Fogerty's favor. As a lawyer, I'd pay money for the fun of walking Fogerty and his guitar through that examination.
DEACON adds: John or Scott may have to correct me, but I believe that Fogerty's litigation battles caused him to write Zanz Kant Danz, which he had to change to "Vanz Kant Danz" when "Zanz" took offense. I also have a vague recollection that Fogerty wrote a song that included the lyric "Where do you live? Century City" referring to how much time he had to spend on litigation matters in Century City, the heart of L.A.'s entertainment law practice. But I may be confusing Fogerty with another singer or group.
Here is one account of the dispute between Fogerty and Saul Zaentz that, as I understand it, was the source of both the litigation and the song.
FINAL UPDATE: The last word on Proud Mary goes to reader Jerry Hurtubise:
I loved CCR's music, and count some of the hits as all-time classics. Tolerated their epic Proud Mary until Ike and Tina Turner ruined it, whereupon it became one of the songs on my Ten Most Detested Songs list.To that end, when my wife and I signed a contract for a band to play at our wedding, we added a clause that specified "The song Proud Mary, in any form, is to be played at this event only upon the direct request of the groom."
When my father, who was footing a significant portion of the bill, got enough bourbon in him and requested the song, they pointed to me, and I was forced to relent. Great band, great party, and they did a decent job with that detestable song, Proud Mary.
