Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 9 Born On The Bayou (Part 2)

'I can remember the fourth of July runnin' through the backwood bare. 
And I can still hear my old hound dog barkin' chasin' down a hoodoo there.' 

“I would sit in my little apartment – which was very sparse – and stare at the wall. That’s how I wrote. I would stare at it all night. There was nothing hanging on the wall, because I didn’t have any money for paintings. It was just a beige wall. It was a blank slate, a blank canvas. But it was also exciting. I could go anywhere and do anything, because I was a writer. I was conjuring that place deep in my soul that was me.”
John Fogerty

Born on the Bayou is an evocation of the dream state. The song expresses the freedom Fogerty talks about in the quote above. The members of Creedence were not from the Bayou or the Southern States but that's where they wanted to be, the traditions and mindset, the music, literature, culture and oral tradition far richer and more nuanced than anything they came across growing up in Suburban California. The well that they determined to draw on. This song, along with Proud Mary which was the other side of the band's real commercial breakthrough single in early 1969, was their moment of realisation as well as their moment of differentiation from everything around them.

For me, it takes me back to my own childhood which was spent in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, at the end of the Sixties while unbeknown to me Creedence were climbing to prominence in The States and elsewhere.Walking down my back garden path to the swimming pool, at the age of five, in a world awash with brilliant sunlight, past chameleons on trees and chungalulus, (millipedes), snaking away ahead of me across the paving. Alive, as only a child really is to the mesmirising sensations of living existence. I commit to my own trance of memory whenever I hear this just as Fogerty and his band are committing to theirs.

The hum as the track kicks in is almost avant gard, something the band could not really have been accused of thereafter. But when John Fogerty's voice starts to roar and the drums particularly kick into momentum while bass and rhythm guitar provide the undertow for the melody and drive Fogerty layers on top, it's clear the band are establishing their signature.

What Fogerty's saying here is I think quite profound. In its simplest sense it's music as a channel of indescribable magic. An understanding and deep rooted longing for what's past, the strange unreality of living in an eternal, shifting present, the anticipation of what's to come, the knowledge of what will endure long after we are no longer here to experience it. All life is here. 

Much of Creedence's music is haunted with a sense of otherness but this, for me more than anything else they ever did is immersed within that other world like the moment at night when we shut down reality and surrender to dream. It's myth creation, one of the most powerful acts that Rock and Roll music can achieve. Illusion which becomes solid, shared experience the moment others buy into it. As good as it gets. At least the way I look at it!