Creedence reissues

Okay, prepare yourselves for a non-football post!

Just last week, I read somewhere online that the first six Creedence Clearwater Revival albums will be reissued on September 30 in deluxe packages with bonus tracks. These reissues will include liner notes by such rock critic luminaries as Robert Christgau and Ben Fong-Torres. I was ecstatic upon hearing the news.

I love Creedence. I grew up listening to Creedence. Some of my earliest hazy childhood memories are of me in the living room of my parents little apartment in Holt, Michigan in about 1972, with my dad playing Green River or Cosmo's Factory on the old Motorola console stereo. Of course, at the time I had no idea what the name of the albums were or even the name of the performer. To this day, though, I can remember being really scared by the long instense instrumental in the middle of "Ramble Tamble."

As a junior high and high schooler, other (generally much crappier) music took prominence for me. By the time I got to college, Creedence was definitely not cool. I was getting into "college rock" such as the Smiths, R.E.M., the Replacements, etc. As far as classic rock, everyone in college listened to such bands as Led Zeppelin, the Beatles--nobody I knew listened to Creedence. It wasn't until I was 22, when I absconded with my parent's three Creedence albums (along with several other choice ones that were collecting dust in a closet) that I rediscovered how good those guys were.

Besides the fact that John Fogerty was one of the best songwriters of the sixties, and the band rocked as hard as any band before or since, there's a definite underdog charm to CCR. Even in their own time, they weren't really considered cool. Heck, even in the San Francisco Bay area where they were from, they weren't considered nearly as hip as Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead. They really looked like four regular, blue collar guys from the neighborhood. Fogerty wore the exact same plaid shirt on all their album photos (if you don't believe me, check for yourself), and Stu, Doug, and Tom definitely cared not a hoot about fashion. Also, as has been mentioned many times before, Creedence defiantly played tightly arranged, 3-minute songs at a time when stretching out and jamming was the cool thing to do. However, if you compare Creedence's music to contemporaries like the Airplane or the Dead, CCR's music has aged much better.

Suffice it to say that I'm pretty giddy about these reissues, particularly since CCR has to have about the most neglected and abused back catalog of any sixties band. I definitely intend on snagging "Green River," and will have a hard time resisting "Willy and the Poor Boys" or "Cosmos' Factory."