Creedence Clearwater Revival

Creedence Clearwater Revival never had a number one.

Five times they reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and five times they stayed there. Nobody has piled up that many second places without ever getting to the top.

And the strange part is what stopped them, because they are songs that have their own story in this very collection.

The five that fell one step short

"Proud Mary", in March 1969. "Bad Moon Rising", in June of the same year, held off by "Get Back" by the Beatles.

"Green River", in September, blocked by "Sugar, Sugar", the song by a cartoon band that did not exist.

"Travelin' Band" and "Who'll Stop the Rain", in February 1970, beneath "Bridge Over Troubled Water".

And "Lookin' Out My Back Door", in October 1970, behind "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", by Diana Ross.

It is a cruel way of measuring the size of a band: for two years they were the second most popular group in the United States, week after week, and the first was always somebody else.

Californians singing about a swamp they had never seen

They sounded like Louisiana. Like mud, like the river, like the deep South.

They were from El Cerrito, a suburb next to Berkeley, in the San Francisco Bay, and John Fogerty had never set foot in the bayou when he wrote "Born on the Bayou".

He imagined the whole thing. He built a landscape out of records, out of the names of towns and out of an idea of what things should sound like down there, and it came out so convincing that half the world took it for a documentary.

"Fortunate Son", and the door he did have

The song says what it says: the sons of the poor went to war, and the sons of senators found a way not to go.

So it is worth not dressing up Fogerty's case, because dressed up the song loses and told in full it gains.

Fogerty was not in Vietnam. In 1966, the same day his draft notice arrived, he enlisted in the Army Reserve.

That was exactly one of the ways out. Not the most obscene one — no senator father required — but it was a way out, and he took it, and most of the boys being sent to the front did not have it.

"Fortunate Son" is not the song of somebody who came back from hell. It is the song of somebody who saw from the inside how the lottery worked and wrote about the trick knowing he had slipped out through a crack. That makes it more uncomfortable, not less.

In this collection the song turns up where you least expect it: in the profile of Elvis Presley, who was the exact opposite, the famous man they did send.

The rain on a sunny day

"Have You Ever Seen the Rain" sounds bright and is not.

Fogerty wrote it in 1970 about what was happening inside the band while everything looked fine from outside: complete success and, underneath it, the fights with his brother Tom and with the rest.

That is the image. It is raining, and it is sunny, and both things are true at once.

Years later he said he had stopped singing it sadly, and that now, when he plays it, he thinks of his daughter and of rainbows.

It has been recorded by Johnny Cash, the Ramones, Joan Jett, Boney M. and Rod Stewart. And in 2016, on a Latin American tribute album called "Quiero Creedence", it was sung in Spanish by Juan Gabriel, a few months before he died, under the title "Gracias al sol". Andrés Calamaro took part in that same record.

The trial for plagiarising himself

The band broke up in 1972 and that is where the long part began.

Fogerty had signed a contract as a young man that handed Fantasy Records the publishing rights to everything he had written. For years he refused to play the Creedence classics live, because every time he sang them the money went to the man he felt had stripped him of them.

In 1985 he came back with a solo album, "Centerfield". And then the unheard-of happened: Fantasy sued him for plagiarism.

The argument was that a new song of his, "The Old Man Down the Road", copied "Run Through the Jungle", which was also his but whose rights the label held. They were accusing him of stealing from himself.

The trial was in 1988. Fogerty took the stand with a guitar and showed the jury how he wrote, where those figures came from and why everything of his sounds like everything else of his.

He won. And in 1994 the Supreme Court also recognised his right to recover his lawyers' fees.

But it is worth not closing the story as a complete victory, because it was not. He never got his rights back in a court. He got them back in 2023, by buying them: he paid to own his own songs again, more than half a century after writing them.

Tom Fogerty died in 1990, at forty-eight, from complications of a contaminated blood transfusion. The brothers never managed to fix it.

What to remember

Creedence is proof that a chart position measures nothing.

Put on "Proud Mary", "Green River", "Bad Moon Rising" or "Have You Ever Seen the Rain" and you will hear rock without a single note too many, played by four guys in two or three years of a run almost nobody has had.

Five times second and not once first. And today they play in more films, more bars and around more campfires than almost any of the songs that beat them.

Remember them like this: the chart says who sold most that week. It does not say who is still playing fifty years later.

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Sources

Creedence Clearwater Revival, an American band formed in El Cerrito, California, in 1967, made up of John Fogerty (vocals, guitar and author of almost the entire repertoire), his brother Tom Fogerty (guitar), Stu Cook (bass) and Doug Clifford (drums). They never reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 despite placing five singles at number two — "Proud Mary" (1969), "Bad Moon Rising" (1969), "Green River" (1969), "Travelin' Band" / "Who'll Stop the Rain" (1970) and "Lookin' Out My Back Door" / "Long as I Can See the Light" (1970) — the greatest number of second places without a number one in the chart's history; among the songs that kept them from the top were "Get Back" by The Beatles, "Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Simon & Garfunkel and "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Diana Ross. Their style, known as swamp rock, evoked the deep South and the Louisiana bayou even though the band was Californian and John Fogerty did not know the area when he wrote those songs. Fogerty did not serve in Vietnam: he enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1966, the same day he received his draft notice, and was discharged in 1968. "Have You Ever Seen the Rain", from the album "Pendulum" (1970), was written about the band's imminent break-up at the height of their success; it has been covered by Johnny Cash, Ramones, Joan Jett, Boney M. and Rod Stewart, among many others, and Juan Gabriel recorded a Spanish-language version, "Gracias al sol", for the Latin American tribute album "Quiero Creedence" (2016), in which Andrés Calamaro also took part. The band split in 1972. Fogerty had assigned the publishing rights to his work to Fantasy Records; in 1985, after the release of his solo album "Centerfield", the label sued him claiming that his song "The Old Man Down the Road" plagiarised "Run Through the Jungle", from the Creedence catalogue, so that he was being accused of plagiarising himself. At the 1988 trial Fogerty testified with a guitar before the jury and won the case; in 1994, in Fogerty v. Fantasy, the United States Supreme Court ruled that he could recover his lawyers' fees. He did not recover his rights through the courts: he acquired them in 2023 by buying a majority stake in his publishing catalogue. Tom Fogerty died in 1990, at the age of 48, from complications of a contaminated blood transfusion. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. Elvis Presley, The Archies, Simon & Garfunkel, Ramones, Boney M., Rod Stewart, Juan Gabriel and Andrés Calamaro have profiles of their own in this series. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of their work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Billboard, Wikipedia, Rolling Stone, Britannica and other coverage.