The 1965 song John Fogerty thanked God wasn’t a hit: “That would have been it”
Before Creedence Clearwater Revival became Creedence Clearwater Revival, they tried and tested a couple of other names to see which fit, a journey that seems almost too mad to believe in 2026.
The first was an idea suggested by Fantasy Records co-founder, Max Weiss, who named them Vision. The second was perhaps one of the most awful suggestions in music history, also suggested by Weiss, to call them The Golliwogs, which may well stand as the most damning reflection of the era’s truly despicable dark side.
Around this time, CCR fell into the roles that would remain across their career, with John Fogerty taking up the position of the band’s lead singer and primary songwriter. At first, this was because, according to Tom Fogerty, who’d previously taken up lead vocals, John had a specific sound that he recognised as the one that would drive them forward and set them apart from their peers.
However, while they had minor successes during this time, Fogerty believed that they weren’t really ready to become major players in the rock scene until later, when they’d changed their name and fallen more naturally into their respective roles as band members. Although they hated their name, they also hadn’t yet refined their sound, which, as Fogerty put it, meant that their potential “wasn’t showing up very well”.
Because of this, many of their earlier songs, including ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’, didn’t do that well, at least, not as well as many of their later hits under CCR, but instead of counting his losses, Fogerty sees this as a blessing in disguise. After all, he recognised that, had ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ actually been a hit, they would’ve fallen victim to the fate of other musicians with one-hit wonders, and never grown as artists beyond that.
As he explained to Rolling Stone, he was proud of the fact that they were more than capable in the studio, but the odds were against them. “We weren’t ready either,” he admitted, saying that, had ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ been more successful, things would’ve only been downhill from there, and they would have never gone back into the studio and “really tried to really make it tight”. He added, “We would have just thought, hey, it’s simple, and that would have been it.”
It’s true that, especially in the context of CCR’s story and several other bands who rose to fame around the same time, timing is everything. Especially as, as Fogerty said, they’d have had a lot more challenges to deal with than the controversial nature of their name had they made it during those earlier moments.
And when CCR finally arrived, they didn’t just release a bunch of successful hits; they appeared with purpose, becoming one of the biggest bands in the world simply because they knew how to make good, melodic-driven rock resonate. They might’ve still experienced their own versions of failure, or taken a natural course from the peak of success into a more complicated arena, but these experiences were inevitable the moment they officially got their first taste of real success.
And when they did break up, it wasn’t because they had already enjoyed one-hit-wonder-adjacent success or anything that wouldn’t withstand the test of time, it was because they’d already pushed their art to its limits, and burned themselves out on the flames of other challenges, like Fogerty’s desire to maintain full control, and the subsequent death of a band dynamic that could no longer sustain itself.
