“He was precise”: the songwriting icon Bruce Springsteen called a musical “prophet”
For Bruce Springsteen, rock and roll always meant more than just a few chords. Even though there was no danger involved, this music was a matter of life and death whenever ‘The Boss’ took to the stage, almost like he turned a small stage into a rock and roll church whenever he walked onto it, serving as the resident preacher of the good word Little Richard and Chuck Berry taught. There were other rock and roll converts out there, and Springsteen thought that John Fogerty was as close to saintly in the music world as anyone he had ever seen.
When Fogerty first started to see traction with Creedence Clearwater Revival, they never seemed like the kind of massive rock stars that everyone expected out of the 1960s. Whereas everyone else wanted to make songs about psychedelic bliss, Fogerty was always interested in writing pieces about easy living, always keeping it incredibly simple and taking the audience with him on a ride.
Although it’s hard to think that the same Haight-Ashbury scene would be interested in tracks about being born on a bayou and rolling down a river, it actually worked. For all of the rough and tumble energy that the band possessed, the power behind Fogerty’s songs made him one of the biggest writers of his time, turning in tracks that could please both hippies and soldiers.
Most may have seen Fogerty as just a good writer, but Springsteen was getting an education on writing songs. While the heartland rocker continues to have a streak of airing his own opinions, he knew that kind of writing had no place in his works, instead writing about the people he saw every day.
The Beatles may have covered ground that no one had covered before, but Springsteen was the one to take middle America and make it seem romantic. Suddenly, that riverboat Fogerty was singing about was soon replaced by a turnpike and a beat-up car, with Springsteen singing about ditching his nowhere town to find some kind of paradise.
If it weren’t for Fogerty, chances are Springsteen would have never made it over that line, though, saying at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “As a songwriter, only a few did as much in three minutes as John Fogerty. He was an Old Testament, shaggy-haired prophet, a fatalist. Funny, too. He was severe, he was precise, he said what he had to say, and he got out of there.”
When you look at Springsteen’s catalogue, you see that he seemed a slow learner in the second part of that lesson. While the first handful of E Street Band albums had songs that stretched well beyond the traditional single length, Springsteen would soon explode once he paired things down, turning ‘Born to Run’ into a mini-epic at just over five minutes.
Despite their differences, Fogerty seemed to carry on the tradition in a long line of songwriters that influenced what ‘The Boss’ does. Springsteen and Fogerty might not have the exact same genre all the time, but when you hear their tracks, you’re listening to the heart and soul of America.
