Nevertheless, it was still a thrill to play their first gig at the legendary San Francisco Fillmore in the summer of ’68, supporting Paul Butterfield and Steppenwolf. And that was John’s real skill, to be able to write songs like that.” “You told the story and then you were done.
“We’d been brought up on Top 40 radio, where the song was the thing, not the guitar solo,” says Cook. The hippies’ heaven in Haight Ashbury was as alien to them as it was to their parents. They mostly had wives or steady girlfriends, and spent the fabled summer of love in 1967 ploughing away on the local circuit.
Radio stations in the US were looking for snappy commercial rock to counteract the rising tide of mind-expanding music whose spiritual home was just 20 miles across the San Francisco Bay.īut to Creedence – living in California’s answer to Woking – it was a world away. The group eventually got their break with an edited version of Dale Hawkins’s Susie Q that spread by airplay and only just missed the Top 10. They launched the band by re-releasing The Golliwogs’ last single, Porterville, with a new label stuck on the record. We rehearsed every day in a shed in Doug’s garden.” The shed was nicknamed Cosmo’s Factory. “We had a real work ethic about the band.
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“We considered ourselves pretty professional already,” says Cook. They also renamed the band Creedence (“after a friend of Tom’s”) Clearwater (“from a beer commercial”) Revival (“a statement of intent”). It took a lot of fortitude, particularly as he was the older brother and leader of the band, to give it up for his younger brother.”Īfter a temporary halt while Clifford and John Fogerty found ingenious ways to avoid the draft for the Vietnam war, they decided to go full-time in late 1967. That gave them a distinctive sound of their own and they decided to pursue it. It was around this time that John Fogerty started writing songs, initially along with his brother Tom and then on his own as his style came together. “But we had to go with it because that was the name on the record label.”Īt this point the band’s style was heavily influenced by British bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and particularly Them. “We were shocked, particularly when we found out what it meant,” says Cook. Except that when they saw a copy of their first single they discovered their name had been changed from The Blue Velvets to The Golliwogs. The label asked if the band had a singer, because they were interested in signing a rock’n’roll band.
They hastily recorded an instrumental demo of their own and took it to Fantasy, which specialised in jazz records.
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“We were fledglings,” says Clifford, “but Tom already had the vision of a career and making records.” When they watched a TV programme about how a small independent label had an unexpected instrumental hit, they were interested to discover that the label, Fantasy, was just down the road in Berkeley. They started out with Clifford’s friend Cook on piano he switched to bass around the time they hooked up with John’s brother Tom, who was four years older. Do you want to form a band?’ He said: ‘Yeah, but actually I play guitar’.” They were both 14 years old. So I went up to him and said: ‘That’s authentic Fats.’ He said: ‘Yeah. Cook: "“We were shocked, particularly when we found out what the band name meant,” (Image credit: Getty Images)Ĭlifford can still remember meeting John Fogerty for the first time in the music room at their Junior High School in El Cerrito, a dormitory town on the other side of the bay from San Francisco: “There was this shy kid playing Fats Domino on the piano.
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