THE NEW YEAR is just a few weeks old and John Fogerty is driving with his wife and manager, Julie, along a stretch of California highway. But as the road unwinds ahead of him, his thoughts are drifting back several decades, to 1969, as he recalls in vivid detail the albums and events that made it a banner year for his band Creedence Clearwater Revival.
“Well, first of all,” Fogerty says, “I don’t think at the beginning of 1969 I had a business plan outlined that said, ‘Okay, we’ll release an album in January, we’ll release one in August, we’ll release another in October...’ I don’t think I had any plan like that. When you’re 22 years old, you can’t see that far ahead.”
In hindsight, however, CCR’s 1969 was remarkable and certainly without precedent in the rock and roll era. It’s when the quartet — Fogerty, his older brother Tom, Stu Cook and Doug Clifford — reigned as rock’s biggest act, kings on both the AM and FM dials, on the concert circuit and in critical circles. And, of course, CCR played the Woodstock festival that year, too. By some accounts, they were the very first band signed to the bill.
The tally was, in fact, three albums: Bayou Country, Green River and Willy and the Poor Boys. All three hit the Top 10 on the Billboard chart, with Green River making it to number one, and all were eventually certified multi-Platinum. They produced four top-five singles — “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Green River” and “Down on the Corner” — all of which have gone on to become pop music standards.
“It was certainly very special,” Fogerty says now, chuckling at his own understatement. “If I’m looking back, it was absolutely precious and mind boggling. But at the time it was all kind of mixed up in the feeling that if you work really hard and keep moving forward and keep pushing, you will find success. You will fulfill your dream.”
This story is from the August 2024 edition of Guitar Player.
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This story is from the August 2024 edition of Guitar Player.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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PRS
PREVIOUSLY PART OF PRS's Maryland-built guitar line, the SE NF3 was recently reissued in the company's offshore-produced SE series. The SE NF3 is so named for its Narrowfield Deep Dish (a.k.a. DD) \"S\" pickups. These unique PRS-design units have deeper bobbins to accommodate more windings and extra metal pieces between the magnets to yield a more powerful \"single-coil\" tone, while remaining noise-free because they are in fact humbuckers. A control set consisting of master volume, tone and a five-way blade switch allows the usual selections of bridge, middle and neck pickups by themselves and the neck-plus-middle and bridge-plus-middle combinations that allow the SE NF3 to veer into Strat-like territory in switch positions two and four.
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