Proud Mary

1

"Left a good job in the city"

No one does that anymore. During Covid a bunch of high-earners decamped to their country home, taking their job with them, but the concept of telling your boss to take this job and shove it and heading out to the country, that's history. As for the great resignation, many of those jobs were not that good.

But that was the ethos back in the sixties. You wanted to go on the road, you wanted to see things, and if you went to college you wanted to spend time in Europe, maybe flying Icelandic Airlines with a stopover in Reykjavik, then again you could fly from New York to London on Pan Am and TWA for two hundred bucks. And with your Eurail Pass... The goal was to do it cheaply for as long as you could. If you lived large, stayed in hotels with bathrooms in the bedroom, you were derided. You slept in hostels, you learned the code of the road from your traveling brethren, not all Americans, and you felt alive.

Today it's no longer a dream to drive cross-country. Hell, since the deregulation of airplane travel you can jump on a jet and be where you want to soon. For bupkes. As for all the places in between.... No one seems to care about them anymore, and interestingly those who reside in the places in between have contempt for these jet-setters. Furthermore, fluidity of residence used to be a thing. An American thing. You yearned to get out of your hometown. You moved where the action was, to try and live out your dream. I'm not sure people dream the same way today, the odds are stacked against them, moving up the ladder requires more than hard work. Have you been following the Kim Kardashian kerfuffle? Her advice to women was to work hard like her, to get ahead. There's been a ton of blowback. But what interests me most is the myopia of Ms. Kardashian. She obviously doesn't know how the other half, the majority, lives, oftentimes from hand to mouth, doing two jobs.

And shelter is so expensive that moving is a huge hurdle many can't jump. But when I came of age, you got out on the road and it was a melting pot of travelers. And you learned so much. One of my ski buddies paid for his winter by working on a fishing boat off the coast of New Jersey the summer before. I didn't know you could make that much money fishing, and my father told me from day one he didn't want me working with my hands. And then there were those with little dreams. It was a shock after college. They didn't want to go anywhere, and they weren't moving fast in any regard. A job at the phone company? Yes, one of the ski bums retired to do that. IN SALT LAKE CITY?? The City of Salt is completely different today, it's got high tech and a bunch of wealthy immigrant retirees. But back in the seventies it was a backwater.

2

"Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'"

Now if you rely on Wikipedia, you may get the idea that Creedence Clearwater Revival had traction on their very first album. But the truth was that whatever success it ultimately had was a result of people going back after the band's breakthrough. Then you might have heard "Susie Q" on FM radio, but not before, at least not on any station I listened to.

But the band broke with this track from their second LP, "Proud Mary," from "Bayou Country." And "Proud Mary" broke on AM radio, not FM, which was now ruling the airwaves of the metropoli. AM was for the car radio at best, assuming you were a hipster. And there was definitely a dividing line, between those in the know and those who knew nothing. Some people believe this dividing line still exists, but in truth we now live in a Tower of Babel society where no one knows everything and there are no elite hipsters, despite some people believing they are so. If you put someone down for their taste today you're ignored. It's not one coherent scene, there's a cornucopia of entertainment and no one knows everything, it's utterly impossible, there's just too much out there.

Now in truth FM radio skewed English. With a dose of San Francisco thrown in. "Proud Mary" didn't fit in. Roots music was still in the future. So we heard the song on AM radio and thought it was a novelty, I mean the band's name certainly sounded like that of a one hit wonder. But then came "Bad Moon Rising," a string of undeniable hits, and Creedence was now one of the biggest bands in the land, finally embraced by FM radio. But it was "Proud Mary" that broke the door down, that set the stage for what was to come.

3

My favorite Creedence Clearwater Revival song is the opening cut on "Bayou Country," "Born on the Bayou."

Now you have to understand it sounded like it was cut in the bayou. And since the rock press was not omnipresent and solidified, it took years until everyone learned that John Fogerty had no connection to Louisiana and the bayou. But somehow he had the feel. And the feel of "Born on the Bayou"...

"And I can remember the Fourth of July
Runnin' through the backwood bare"

You could picture it. Something like the bacchanal in "The Secret History". You have to remember, there were no cell phones. It was easy to be out of touch, and a great swath of American youth wanted to go up the country and what happened there...you had to be there to find out. There were drugs, nudity, sex...and deep discussions about life. It was the peak of experience. This was before you could Google nudity, and sex, when marijuana was still illegal, never mind hash and anything harder. The feel of "Born on the Bayou" was magic, it was the other. Today everything is nuts and bolts, zeros and ones, but in truth life is messy and when you acknowledge it you have a much better ride.

And my second favorite Creedence track is "Green River." Which in many ways is so simple, but those descending notes during the chorus...utter magic. It's like Fogerty has ripped open his chest and we can see inside. And just like in "Born on the Bayou," the lead guitar is simple, but stinging. This was long before acts saw a need to use the umpteen tracks on the recording machine to fill up the record such that listening to it was like looking through steel wool.

And, of course, "Fortunate Son" has become a political staple. It's almost bigger today than it was then. Let me explain, of course "Fortunate Son" was all over the radio, but this was back when we were all rebelling against the government, "Fortunate Son" was part of a movement, but stripped from its original context it resonates even more, especially in these days of income inequality when a president avoided the war with supposed bone spurs in his heels.

And then there's "Who'll Stop the Rain," which I didn't cotton to until I saw the movie so entitled. It could be Tuesday Weld's best performance, it was gritty and added gravitas to the title song, at least in my brain.

But none of these tracks is "Proud Mary."

4

At this late date, many consider "Proud Mary" an Ike and Tina Turner song. Their version was never a hit record, Ike and Tina hadn't yet crossed over to the white market, but when the band opened for the Rolling Stones in 1969, white rockers were exposed to a level of stage performance that was heretofore unknown by them. Tina Turner made love to the microphone and those who saw it never forgot it.

But as good as Ike and Tina's take was, it was different from the Creedence Clearwater original.

"Rollin', rollin', rollin on the river"

That was the feel of the original. Just like you can hear the gallop of the horse in the original Allman Brothers' "Midnight Rider" on "Idlewild South," you can hear the paddle wheel turning on that boat on the Mississippi.

And as the years wore on, laying back was a goal. Not taking life so seriously, slowing down and watching the river flow, Bob Dylan even wrote a song about it.

We did a lot of sitting around back then. We didn't have the world at our fingertips, handheld communicators were something from cartoons, science fiction. You didn't want to stay home, you wanted to go out, to hang, to talk to the people. And music was a big part of the experience, someone always had a guitar, and they'd strum and we'd sing along, everybody would join in on the chorus, they'd sing at the top of their lungs, with all the power they possessed, as they looked at their brethren, this was what it was all about. Sure, you needed money. But not much. Life was about experiences. Not to shoot selfies during, but to savor and store in your mental bank, so you could make context of the world at a later date.

Most of the tracks of the sixties and seventies have not survived. The boomers might remember them, but the younger generation is clueless. And then there are certain tracks that are sui generis, that are of no time and place, that exist in their own ether, locked in wax, that we can just marvel at.

One of these is "Proud Mary." It sounds as fresh as the day it was released. It's not dated whatsoever. So when you hear it today you don't worry about the way things might have been, you don't look to the past, you reside in the present. "Proud Mary" can still ride shotgun. It can still inspire. You can count on it.

John Fogerty may have been screwed financially, and I feel for him, but money pales in comparison to "Proud Mary." In years to come when newbies hear "Proud Mary" and the rest of Fogerty's canon they'll be stunned, they won't believe one guy could be responsible for so much. They won't care a whit about how much money he made. Music trumps money. John Fogerty wrote a song that's FOREVER!


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