Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 8 Fortunate Son

'And when the band plays 'Hail to the chief. Ooh they'll point the cannon at you.'

Back on track. This one fairly zips along. Less than two and a half minutes and the stand out track from Creedence's third album of 1969, Willie & the Poor Boys. Inspired, partially at least, by the wedding the year before of David Eisenhower, Ike's Grandson to Julie Nixon, Richard's daughter.

'When I wrote "Fortunate Son," Julie Nixon was hanging around with David Eisenhower. And you just had the feeling that none of those people were going to be involved with the war. In 1969, the majority of the country thought morale was great among the troops, and like eighty percent of them were in favor of the war. But to some of us who were watching closely, we just knew we were headed for trouble ... It was written, of course, during the Nixon era, and, well, let's say I was very nonsupportive of Mr. Nixon There just seemed to be this trickle down to the offspring of people like him. You got the impression that these people got preferential treatment, and the whole idea of being born wealthy or being born powerful seemed to really be coming to the fore in the late-sixties' confrontation of cultures. I was twenty-three years old, I think. I was mad at the specter of the ordinary kid who had to serve in an army in a war that he was very much against. Yet the sons of the well-to-do and powerful didn't have to worry about those things. They were fortunate. I thought, all these guys were running around saying, "It's good for America" — Nixon or whoever was saying this. Yet their kids ain't going.'John Fogerty

                             

Like much of Fogerty's writing a specific emotion leaps out of the song, on other occasions, joy, fatalism, dread. But in this case pure fury. Not by any means unpatriotic, in a way the track it most closely aligns with is Springsteen's Born in the USA, which came fifteen years later. It's probably the most specific song ever written about the Vietnam draft and what it actually meant to those most vulnerable to it. The song itself matches the lyric's sentiment in terms of lack of compromise.'John Fogerty... rasps out the lyrics... in a voice filled with bile and uses his guitar as a weapon to run machine-gun stitches right through everybody who's ever abused a privilege.'
Dave Marsh, The Heart of Rock and Soul

Worth comparing with The Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers, which sounds next to this as if its skipping along at an anti-war demonstration. Fortunate Son doesn't whole back for a second and in two and a half minutes it's gone.Its message is abundantly clear and like all of Fogerty's greatest statements holds equally true today.