BEFORE: I've got at least another week of rockumentaries to go - this one's the fourth in the series of good old Summer Concerts - just one more to go, and it's a doozy, but I won't get there until Friday. Almost at the halfway point of this year's Doc Block, and there seems to be a competition for which rock doc has the longest title. This one's vying for second place, because yesterday's film had an additional tagline in the name which I didn't even use.
John Fogerty was one of those musical guests shown in the montage in yesterday's film, so he carries over tonight from the Billy Joel doc with the very long name. There's been an appalling lack of birthday SHOUT-outs lately, which is only shocking considering how large some of the casts have been in these docs with so much archive footage used. So can I send out a non-synching belated Birthday SHOUT-out to John Fogerty, who turned 80 on May 28? Man, all the boomers who were born in 1945 are really getting up there...
THE PLOT: Follow the legendary Creedence Clearwater Revival concert as well as unreleased material from the band.
AFTER: I think you can see now how much crossover there is in documentaries - every doc filmmakers is out there scrambling, trying to land the biggest names possible to appear in or narrate their film. So this film links back to "Valerie" by using Jeff Bridges as a narrator, he also was available to talk about Ms. Perrine's life. There are a THOUSAND or so other connections like this, and the hard part for me is realizing that I don't have to follow 99% of those connections, I only need one per day and I can ignore the rest. But when I start putting a doc chain together, I still need to know about them all, so I can figure out which are the rare ones that I want to use as links. I think it might be easier in the long run to just put the films in the order I want and then make sure there's a through-line. Which is kind of what I did this year, lumping all the actors together and then all the rock bands, I just got there the hard way. Really once I get to rock music, almost every film uses footage of the Beatles and/or the Stones so in the end I shouldn't even have to worry about it.
There's maybe a scandal brewing, bigger than the fact that the Beach Boys didn't play their own instruments on their records, because CCR was not in fact "born on the bayou", as their song implies. They were just four guys from outside San Francisco who liked blues music and made it seem like they grew up near a swamp. They saw this as their meal ticket, performing songs in a style similar to the records they used to listen to, which happened to all have the sound of Mississippi river music.
Back in those days there was no internet, so fans couldn't check out the band's background (or perhaps they just didn't care) or they would have found out that John Fogerty had not grown up in a swamp, he just went to summer camp a few times in the Bay area. Also he had never owned a hound dog and gone chasing a hoodoo there, nor had he rolled with a Cajun queen. And then after "Proud Mary" became a hit, people might have found out that the band had not actually cleaned any plates at all in Memphis, and never took that ride on the Riverboat Queen. It goes without saying therefore that none of them had pumped any 'pane down in New Orleans. (I always thought it was "pumped a lot of pain" which always seemed like a weird metaphor but thanks to subtitles today I found out it was really 'pane as in propane. Maybe it works both ways?)
It turns out that CCR started as a cover band, there's really no shame in that, because The Stones started out as a Chuck Berry cover band (some would say they still are...) and even The Beatles formed as a skiffle band, and they would have stayed that way if someone hadn't told them they could make more money by writing their own songs and getting those sweet, sweet publishing royalties. But we've had to re-visit Led Zeppelin, because they were essentially covering Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters and Leadbelly songs all those years, without giving proper credit to those artists, which is a form of stealing. CCR wasn't that bad, like when they recorded "Susie Q" or "I Put a Spell on You", they gave credits to Dale Hawkins or Screamin' Jay Hawkins (no relation) but they were essentially doing what every 60's band was doing, taking old blues songs and playing them for a much larger white audience. As penance I'm relegating the Led Zeppelin documentary on Netflix to next year's chain - really I'm too lazy to try and work it in to what I already have planned.
But it's just music, right? We've all played it and listened to it for years and I guess we'd rather not think about reality while we're doing that, or it's just on in the background while we shop or party or hang out at the beach and yeah, I get that I'm harshing everyone's mellow while they're trying to have a good time. The same probably holds true for country music and rap music, maybe once you do a little digging you find out that it's all just fantasy and the personal lives of the artists could be very different from the experiences they're singing about, just like how movie stars are playing characters most of the time and they're just people who do other things when they're not in front of a camera.
But let's say that this trend of making movies about the lives of rock musicians continues - like Chalamet playing Bob Dylan was a big deal, and now they're working on a similar movie about Bruce Springsteen starring Jeremy Allen White, and it might be a huge deal. Also there are FOUR movies coming out about the Beatles, each telling the backstory of a different band members. If the trend continues, and somebody ends up making a film about CCR, they really should call Steve Zahn first to play John Fogerty, if Zahn's not already too old.
Remember that after the Beatles hit, there were a thousand bands hoping to do what they'd done, and CCR was one of them, perhaps the most successful to ride along in the Beatles' wake, since the "Abbey Road" album displaced CCR at the top of the charts. They were always in the Beatles' shadow, weren't they? Like just as they were preparing to do this concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the news broke that the Beatles were done, that the band couldn't reconcile with each other and there would be no more albums released. Creedence figured this was their opportunity, they'd benefit from the bad news, and they were poised to take over as the number one band in the world without the Beatles in their way. And it seems a lot like the British people spoke as one and said, "Nah, that's all right, we're good, we'll just keep listening to these Beatles records over and over."
Well, after all that, how was the concert? Well, I'm really just whelmed, partially because except for "Fortunate Son", which they played at a too-fast tempo at the Albert Hall, these songs sound EXACTLY like the recordings - so I could have just played "CCR's Greatest Hits" on my iTunes and achieved the same effect. OK, so they were consistent, but nobody is THAT consistent, right? I think the band maybe just had their sound locked in, and this is what you get when the same four guys play the same songs together a few thousand times. Still, if you told me that some of the sound recordings from the concert were not that good, and the film crew ended up using Creedence's records to edit to, and then they accidentally left that sound in the film, I'd be inclined to agree. Or maybe it's just that we've all heard these songs a thousand times, I had only a few cassette tapes in college, and one of them was CCR, so yeah it was in constant rotation - but I wasn't as woke back then about how much of white person rock was stolen from black people.
Still, this band played at Woodstock, though maybe they were scheduled for 2 am, they still PLAYED there, so respect should be paid. The band broke up three years after that for the typical reasons - disagreements about business matters and artistic control, plus you go on tour with each other for a decade or so and any little petty annoyances grow into really big ones. Lawsuits and court cases over the band's songs and other matters continued until the mid-1990's, I remember the one over who got to use the NAME of the band in promotional material for concerts, did it belong to John Fogerty or the band that had two other members of CCR in it. Really, this is how every rock band ever has ended, except for the Rolling Stones, those guys will still be touring together when they're 200 years old.
Another scandal - CCR's record label released an album of the Royal Albert Hall concert, only the music on the record was NOT from that concert, it was recorded in Oakland - but it was probably the same set-list, so really, who cares? It's just another part of the fantasy world that the recording industry was selling. It's not like the Woodstock festival album was recorded in Woodstock, NY, as we all know the festival took place in Bethel, about 60 miles away. What's in a name, as long as the kids keep buying the records?
Directed by Bob Smeaton (director of "Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child")
Narrated by Jeff Bridges (last seen in "Valerie"
with archive footage of Doug Clifford, Stu Cook, Tom Fogerty, Ray Charles (last seen in "Remastered: Tricky Dick and the Man in Black"), Dick Clark (last seen in "Stevie Van Vandt: Disciple"), George Harrison (ditto), Mick Jagger (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), Ringo Starr (ditto), Vince Guaraldi, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Jimi Hendrix (last seen in "Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes"), Howlin' Wolf (last seen in "The Stones and Brian Jones"), Muddy Waters (ditto), B.B. King (last seen in "Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away"), Leadbelly, Jerry Lee Lewis (last seen in "Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind"), Robert Plant (last seen in "Count Me In"), Max Weiss,
RATING: 5 out of 10 prior horrible band names. (The Golliwogs? Really?)
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