The band who “pissed off” Bruce Springsteen
Every artist’s greatest challenge is getting their audience to relate to what they’re saying. Even though this one person may be writing songs from some random spot in the world, it takes a massive amount of talent to make millions of people worldwide connect with the same sentiment that they wrote about. While Bruce Springsteen had a handle on making songs that appealed to legions of working-class people, he was envious that one band was doing his job a lot better than he could.
When looking at his brand of heartland rock, few people can match what ‘The Boss’ can do. Squeezing as much life out of the E Street Band as he can every night, Springsteen is known for making his shows feel like spiritual exercises, all in the service to songs to sound like he was singing about everyone in the audience.
Across every album he made, Springsteen had made it a habit of writing about the lives of everyday people rather than the kind of generic love songs coming out of the meat market. As opposed to writing about the basics of rock and roll, Springsteen told slightly melancholic tales about people just struggling to make ends meet, painting them in a world where all of their dreams may be able to come true one day.
While Springsteen may have gotten his greatest inspiration from artists like Bob Dylan, the need to keep things simple was something John Fogerty had down to a science. Coming out in the late 1960s, Fogerty led Creedence Clearwater Revival through some of the biggest heights that any American band had ascended to, all while talking about simple topics like living on the bayou or wanting the hard times to blow away on songs like ‘Who’ll Stop The Rain’.
Even though Springsteen was fascinated with what Fogerty could do with just a guitar and his voice, he admitted to being jealous of how incredibly simple their songs were constructed. While Springsteen may have prided himself on using the bare essentials of rock and roll to create musical magic, it wasn’t until hearing various bar bands play their tunes that he started to understand how much of a role CCR played in the culture of American music.
Compared to Springsteen’s modern epics, Fogerty’s songs were far more breezy for people to pick up, with ‘The Boss’ recalling at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “I remember in the late 1970s I’d be watching some bands struggling through one of my songs in a club and then sort of glide effortlessly through a Creedence Clearwater tune. It used to really piss me off”.
Then again, any kind of animosity Springsteen had with Fogerty’s songs was out of nothing but respect. Even though Fogerty may have only used a handful of chords on some of his songs, it was the earnestness in his voice that resonated with the public, being able to speak to hippies and straights alike when tearing through songs like ‘Proud Mary’ or ‘Lodi’.
As Springsteen continued to work throughout the 1980s, though, there were a few tricks that he picked up on from one of his musical heroes, making songs that were far blunter on albums like Nebraska before embracing his commercial tendencies on Born in the USA. For all of the music that aimed to send a message, the songs of John Fogerty were always about bringing people together at every opportunity.
