The band Bruce Springsteen thought never got respect: “The sin of being too popular”
The music world has never been considered predictable. The entire taste of a generation is never set in stone, and as soon as one trend comes along, there’s no telling when another one will show up right after to take over the charts. While a new subgenre of rock and roll seemed to be birthed every few minutes during the 1960s, Bruce Springsteen thought that much more attention should have been paid to Creedence Clearwater Revival during their prime.
Then again, it’s hard to really justify the fact that a band with massive singles really needed to be given more attention. By the time The Beatles broke up in the late 1960s, CCR may have been one of the few artists with the most hits compared to the Fab Four, especially when you look at how far-reaching their music went.
Anyone can get on the charts by capturing just the right hook, but what John Fogerty was creating spoke to the everyman within all of us. Not everyone knew what it was like being born on a bayou or rolling their way down a river, but listening to songs like ‘Proud Mary’, you would have sworn that Fogerty was right there next to you on that riverboat strumming away on his guitar.
And given how much of a divide there was amongst rock fans in the 1960s, Creedence somehow managed to cross genre boundaries a lot easier than most would expect. The hippies had no problem accepting any brand of rock and roll, but Fogerty’s simplistic songwriting not only roped in the mainstream audiences, but also the rednecks, the working class, and even a fair bit of the country music crowd who could get behind breezy tunes like ‘Lookin’ Out My Back Door’.
In fact, there only seemed to be one subset that didn’t like them: the critics. Throughout every one of their major album releases, all they saw was a collection of songs thrown together with no real substance to them. If they took the time to actually dissect what Fogerty was saying, though, maybe they could have seen the magic that ‘The Boss’ did.
When inducting the group into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Springsteen thought that CCR never had the kind of accolades that they should have received, saying, “In their day, Creedence never got the respect they deserved. They committed the sin of being too popular when hipness was all. They played no-frills American music for the people. They weren’t the hippest band in the world; just the best.”
But no amount of critical praise mattered as much as their long-lasting impact. Listening back to ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain’ or ‘Born on the Bayou’, they are still just as relevant to today’s world, along with their interesting deep cuts like ‘Lodi’ or their conceptual pieces like Willy and the Poor Boys.
For a group that has made a collection of modern classics (and also Mardi Gras), Fogerty was far from the one-trick pony that people might have thought. He just knew what suited his group the best, and over those few years together, no one could have boasted such a strong lineup of classics.
