LaRM day 94 (Creedence Clearwater Revival-Crosby, Stills & Nash)

So, today kicks off with a bunch of superb Creedence Clearwater Revival albums. I haven't got the first two, so we start with 1969's Green River. What timeless records Creedence made. In many ways between Creedence and the Band, this is where the Americana movement starts, with John Fogerty's rasping old-time voice and lodestone touching country songs. Where the Band traded in mysticalm, mythical evocations of America's rural past though, Creedence where more concerned about a more prosaic take on southern roots styling. Green River is a fantastic example of how an intellectual commitment can lead to some truly electrifying music. Of the massive hits Green River has the title track, 'Lodi' and most impressively 'Bad Moon Rising'. The lyrical concerns throughout are pretty gloomy (a lifetime of playing in small-town dives and sundry other literal and metaphorical apocalyptic visions of wasted futures), but the music is as bright and rootsy as it gets, the blues as filtered through a white southern sensibility, and the whole thing is as fantastic as everybody remembers. As is fourth album, Willy and the Poor Boys (the third Creedence album of 1969), which continues the basic sound and themes of Green River but with darker and more langourous musical edge, and an even sharper focus on superlative performances. There's less emphasis on the potential smash hit on Willy and the Poor Boys too, and as a result the album feels more cohesive. It also has the least dated and probably best of the zillions of protest songs written in the 1960's, 'Fortunate Son'.

The first of two albums from 1970, Cosmo's Factory is the more accessible but possibly the less accomplished. It does have what are undeniably some of Fogerty's best songs (the sprawling 'Ramble Tamble', 'Up Around the Bend', and to my mind the best thing he ever wrote, 'Who'll Stop the Rain'), but it also has an eleven-minute jamming workout of 'Heard It Through the Grapevine' which is very far from essential and clogs up the second side of the album terribly. In fact three covers are surprising low-points on the album and although this does underscore just how great a songwriter Fogerty was by this point, they do also knock the album down a bit. At the very end of 1970 Creedence released Pendulum, which was apparently an attempt by Fogerty to disprove critics claims that the band were just a knockabout singles act. As a result Pendulum is a pretty serious listen, missing the lively side of their southern roots music, but instead replaces it with an earnestness of intent which isn't misplaced. Pendulum is a great record, it may not be as immediate as its predecessors, but it's got some fantastic work on it (and it's got 'Have You Ever Seen the Rain', one of the greatest songs of the 1970's).

After the creative restrictions that were imposed on him in the Byrds (ie, he couldn't be a stupid hippy writing songs about threesomes), David Crosby found himself free to express himself as he pleased, man, in Crosby, Stills and Nash (and Young). This meant, of course, being a stupid hippy writing soppy songs about threesomes. Anyway, in amongst all the close harmonies and half-baked saving the world by sitting on your fat arse, Crosby released a solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971). It's an album that put a lot of people's backs up, I think simply because it's such a drippy record (Robert Christgau for instance said that Crosby should be ashamed of himself and look to his Byrds days to remind himself what he was like before he went shit. However, Christgau himself is, of course, a total and utter dick ("self-appointed 'Dean of Rock Criticism'" - he's such a clueless tool he gives new Madonna albums good reviews)). However, I think people took it the wrong way and it doesn't surprise me that it's had such a critical renaissance. It's superb. In some ways it's a kind of shattering hangover after the 60's party, full of dread and unspecified paranoia, and the fact that it drifts dreamily along is entirely appropriate. It's a fuzzy, frayed, spaced-out comedown and it's full of fantastic songs. 'Cowboy Movie' and 'Traction in the Rain' are mini-epics of the post-60's collapse and in 'Laughing' Crosby produced one of the best songs of his career, and one of the best songs to come out of the morning after the night before.

Slightly less astonishing is Crosby and Graham Nash's first dual post-CSNY outing, simply entitled Graham Nash David Crosby. Crosby only came up with four of the eleven songs for the album, principally I suspect because he had used his best material for If I Could Only Remember My Name. Therefore it's more Nash's show and I think, contrary to Crosby's experience, he may have been high on the success of his 1971 album Songs for Beginners, and his trademark soppy melodies and vocal style are in full show, but they are, as always, tempered by Crosby's rawer, more spacey delivery. The songs are all pretty good, and the mood of the album veers interestingly between Nash's usual upbeat outlook and a rather more melancholic viewpoint (Crosby's 'Whole Cloth' is an unusual bit of spooked-out misery). It's a successful album partly because of this conflict of outlooks and also because both were still capable of writing songs full of interesting and smart contradictions.

Finally it's the bloated Carry On box set (1991) which is a two and a half hour abridgement of the super-bloated Crosby, Stills & Nash compilation covering pretty much everything between 1969 - 1990. Obviously there's a varied assortment of quality on this bunch of stuff, starting with plenty of early classics that everybody in the whole world knows ('Woodstock', 'Our House', 'Marrakech Express', 'Teach Your Children', etc, etc, etc) but as we slowly work our way through to the second disc we start hearing some interesting (and awful) new things. Now I used to have for instance a copy of the original CSN album which was a curate's egg to say the least, featuring as it does, the great 'Cathedral' and the utterly abysmal 'Shadow Captain'. And that sets the tone for the rest of their career and the contents of Carry On. For every 'In My Dreams' we have a 'Drive My Car', for every 'Find the Cost of Freedom' we have an 'After the Dolphin'. In between Crosby's stupid hippy lyrics, and Nash#s stupid hippy delivery, Stephen Stills was often the grounding between the two. So, it's fair to say that although the soppy, sappy hippy-drippiness of it all can be a bit wearing, in truth Crosby, Stills & Nash really knew what they were doing, at least most of the time...