The first Fogerty song to really go someplace was Proud Mary. We learned from the singles market not to put a bunch of padding on your album. A single means you’ve got to get it across in a very few minutes.
As he said in 1970, “As a songwriter, I think in terms of the Top 40. Much of his youth was spent in the family basement, hunched over his record player, dissecting singles by everyone from Carl Perkins to Ray Charles. John was a huge fan of the three-minute-or-less story.”įogerty was not only a huge fan but a dedicated student. For years, wherever we played – state fairs, frat parties – it was singles. While we had a psychedelic moment with Suzie Q, which gave us a little bit of cred as a band you could trip out to, most of our stuff was focused on singles. We’d been working hard at it since the late 50s. We were out of sync, the guys from the East Bay who had a completely different take on the kind of music we wanted to play.
“All these people in San Francisco, like the Dead and the Airplane, who’d been in folk bands and were now hanging out at Golden Gate Park and the Haight-Ashbury, they had their own thing going. “We were like Rodney Dangerfield – we didn’t get any respect,” Stu Cook tells Classic Rock with a laugh. John Fogerty and Creedence, 'Give me a year, pal' (Image credit: Getty Images)īut the Avalon stage manager wasn’t alone in his low estimation.
