It's easy to forget but these songs come from life or death times. This song gives a hint of the era's darkness at the same time as giving voice to an individual living through its determination not to lose sight of the light. It's there in the title and there in the song. I searched in vain today for background information on this. The lack of Internet results surprised me as I think it's among their very best despite being dimmed in popular affection on release by its cheerier double A Side Looking Out My Back Door. The single reached #2 at the end of 1970. Creedence, staggeringly, never achieved an American # 1 in the singles charts, instead hitting the # 2 spot a remarkable five occasions. This one's also the closing song on their last great album Cosmo's Factory. Stretching out almost lazily past three and a half minutes but the tale it has to tell requires it.
During their career they band tried their hand successfully at a lot of things. Rock and Roll, Country, Folk, Bluegrass, Blues,R&B, even Weird Psychedelia on their first album but this was the closest they came to an authentic Soul record that would have slotted into place and more than that, jumped out at you from any Stax compilation from the Sixties or early Seventies.The playing is clipped and precise, particularly Doug Clifford's drumming which, as so often, provide the bedrock for the band's sound, but it's John Fogerty's extraordinary vocal performance that really drives this home.
'Fogerty sounded about as black as any Caucasian rock singer has any right to. Let's not mince words: along with Janis, Van and precious few others, Fogerty was a vocal freak, blessed with a larynx that defied genetic determinism. Fusing the influences of Little Richard and Solomon Burke - with a tincture of Tom Jones for good measure - he sang with an inflamed roar that raises the hairs on one's hands.'
Barney Hoskyns
Inflamed roar is right. In terms of the song's sentiments it comes from a dark place but obviously is determinedly set to hang on in there. Fogerty was a man who was almost drafted in the Mid-Sixties but was spared to make his series of great statements and wasn't going to blow the second chance he had been given. Like a lot of his songs it sounds like something that needed to be written. It's among the most 'alone' lyrics Fogerty ever wrote, but even here he's certainly no nihilist. No Ian Curtis although he had an understanding and understandable wariness of the darkness. An essential optimism almost always shows through at least in song though his biography does tell us that he endured a couple of decades of darkness and no little bitterness when Creedence finally split up acrimoniously. This story at least seems sure to have a happy ending. The 'yeah, yeah, yeah, oh yeah' towards the end of the song indicate as clearly as possible that he'll get where he's going.
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