Credence Clearwater Revival (CCR), 1969, 2 Record Set, 1978 Fantasy Records, VG+

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Credence Clearwater Revival (CCR), 1969, 2 Record Set, 1978 Fantasy Records, VG+

Willy and the Poor Boys is the fourth studio album by American rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival, released by Fantasy Records in November 1969. It was the last of three studio albums the band released that year, arriving just three months after Green River.[1]

Overview[edit]

The album features the songs "Down on the Corner", from which the album got its name, and "Fortunate Son", which is a well-known protest song.[4] Creedence also released its own version of "Cotton Fields" on this album, which reached the #1 position in Mexico.[5]

The album was planned to be formed around a concept introduced in "Down on the Corner", with Creedence taking on the identity of an old-time jug band called "Willy and The Poor Boys". However, this was dropped rather quickly, except for the cover, where the band remains in character.

Background[edit]

By the fall of 1969, Creedence Clearwater Revival was one of the hottest rock bands in the world, having scored three consecutive #2 singles and the #1 album Green River. In addition, the group had performed at the landmark Woodstock Festival in August and made several high-profile television appearances, including The Ed Sullivan Show. Bandleader and songwriter John Fogerty had assumed control of the band after several years of futility, but, despite their growing success, the other members – bassist Stu Cook, drummer Doug Clifford and guitarist Tom Fogerty, John's older brother – began to chafe under Fogerty's demanding, autocratic leadership. The band's output in 1969 alone – three full-length albums – was staggering considering that they were touring nonstop throughout. "That was a bit of overkill and I never did understand that," Clifford stated to Jeb Wright of Goldmine in 2013, "Fogerty told us that if we were ever off the charts, then we would be forgotten... To make it worse, it might sound funny, but we had double-sided hits, and that was kind of a curse, as we were burning through material twice as fast. If we'd spread it out, we would not have had to put out three albums in one year." The fiercely competitive Fogerty remained unapologetic, insisting to Guitar World's Harold Steinblatt in 1998, "Everyone advised me against putting out great B-sides. They'd tell me I was wasting potential hits. And I looked at them and said, 'Baloney. Look at the Beatles. Look at Elvis. It's the quickest way to show them all that good music."

Songs[edit]

In August, CCR released its third LP, Green River. Shortly after, it began recording songs for its next LP, Willy and the Poor Boys. Two months later the band released its eighth single, "Down on the Corner" b/w "Fortunate Son".[1] The single's A-side reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and its B-side made it to #14.[6] "Down on the Corner" chronicles the tale of the fictional band Willy and the Poor Boys, and how they play on street corners to cheer people up and ask for nickels. The song makes reference to a washboard, a kazoo, a Kalamazoo Guitar, and a gut bass.[7] In a 1969 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show[citation needed], the boys performed the song as Willy and the Poor Boys. Stu Cook played a gut bass, Doug Clifford the washboard, and Tom Fogerty the Kalamazoo, which mimicked the appearance of the band as they appear on the album cover.

"Down on the Corner" b/w "Fortunate Son" peaked at #3 on December 20, 1969, on the Hot 100. "Fortunate Son" is a counterculture era anti-war anthem, criticizing militant patriotic behavior and those who support the use of military force without having to pay the costs themselves (either financially or by serving in a wartime military).[8] The song, released during the Vietnam War, is not explicit in its criticism of that war in particular, but its attacks on the elite classes (the families that give birth to eponymous "fortunate sons") of the United States and their withdrawal from the costs of nationalistic imperialism are easy to contextualize to that conflict. The song was inspired by the wedding of David Eisenhower, the grandson of United States President Dwight David Eisenhower, to Julie Nixon, the daughter of President Richard Nixon, in 1968.[9] Fogerty told Rolling Stone:

Julie Nixon was hanging around with David Eisenhower, and you just had the feeling that none of these people were going to be involved with the war. In 1968, the majority of the country thought morale was great among the troops, and eighty percent of them were in favor of the war. But to some of us who were watching closely, we just knew we were headed for trouble.[10][11]

In 1993, Fogerty confessed to Rolling Stone's Michael Goldberg, "It was written, of course, during the Nixon era, and well, let's say I was very non-supportive of Mr. Nixon." The song has been widely used to protest military actions and elitism in Western society, particularly in the United States; as an added consequence of its popularity, it has even been used in completely unrelated situations, such as to advertise blue jeans.[citation needed] It attracted criticism when Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, and Zac Brown performed the song together at the November 2014 Concert for Valor in Washington, D.C. Fogerty, a military veteran, defended their song choice.[12]

Fogerty's revulsion with President Nixon can also be found on the album's closing track, "Effigy." In 2013 the singer-songwriter told David Cavanagh of Uncut that the tune was his response to Nixon emerging from the White House one afternoon and sneering at the anti-war demonstrators outside, with Fogerty remembering, "He said, 'Nothing you do here today will have any effect on me. I'm going back inside to watch the football game.'"

"Don't Look Now" displays Fogerty's concern for the working poor ("Who will take the coal from the mine? Who will take the salt from the earth?"). As recounted in the VH1 Legends episode on the band, Fogerty once stated to Time magazine, "I see things through lower class eyes."

The Chuck Berry-guitar romp "It Came Out of the Sky" tells the tale of a farmer who finds a UFO in his field and unwittingly becomes the most famous man in America. The album also includes two instrumental tracks in "Poorboy Shuffle" and "Side o' the Road", the former of which segues directly into the song "Feelin' Blue."

The album contains two songs associated with blues and folk legend Lead Belly: "Cotton Fields" and "The Midnight Special". In 2012, Fogerty explained to Uncut, "Lead Belly was a big influence. I learned about him through Pete Seeger. When you listen to those guys, you're getting down to the root of the tree." In 1982, the band's rendition of "Cotton Fields" made #50 on Billboard magazine's Country Singles chart.[6]

When the band members were finalizing the album, they and photographer Basul Parik went over to the intersection of Peralta St. and Hollis St. in Oakland, California and shot the cover photograph at Duck Kee Market, owned by Ruby Lee.

Green River is the third studio album by American rock and roll band Creedence Clearwater Revival, released in August 1969. It was the second of three albums they released in that year, preceded by Bayou Country in January and followed by Willy and the Poor Boys in November.

Background[edit]

In January 1969, Creedence Clearwater Revival released their second studio album Bayou Country featuring their breakout single "Proud Mary" (backed with "Born on the Bayou"), which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.[1][5] Producer and primary songwriter John Fogerty was the driving creative force behind CCR, which would record three albums in 1969 alone. The band's single-mindedness and work ethic drew the ire of some other San Francisco-based bands, with drummer Doug Clifford recalling to Jeb Wright of Goldmine in 2013, "We went to see the local bands and they were so stoned they weren’t even in tune and they were really terrible...We made a pact on the floor of the Fillmore, right then, where we would do no drugs or alcohol. We decided to get high on the music, or get out of the business." Going against the grain at the times, Creedence eschewed the acid-inspired free-form jams favored by many rock bands, for tightly structured roots music with an unmistakable rockabilly edge. "I didn't like the idea of those acid-rock, 45-minute guitar solos," Fogerty explained to Uncut's David Cavanagh in 2012. "I thought music should get to the point a little more quickly than that." Their musical discipline, coupled with Fogerty's prolific songwriting, would catapult the band to super-stardom.

Composition[edit]

CCR's third studio album includes two of their biggest hits, "Bad Moon Rising" and "Green River", both of which peaked on the U.S. chart at No. 2, as well as the highly regarded "Lodi" (No. 52) and "Commotion" (No. 30).[1] "Bad Moon Rising" is notable for its jaunty, happy music juxtaposed with its dark, ominous lyrics. It was inspired by a scene in the 1941 film The Devil and Daniel Webster involving a hurricane, with John Fogerty stating that the words told of "the apocalypse that was going to be visited upon us. It wasn't until the band was learning the song that I realized the dichotomy. Here you got this song with all these hurricanes and blowing and raging ruin and all that, but...It's a happy-sounding tune, right?[6] Regarding the title track, Fogerty recalled in 1993:

Green River is really about this place where I used to go as a kid on Putah Creek, near Winters, California. I went there with my family every year until I was ten. Lot of happy memories there. I learned how to swim there. There was a rope hanging from the tree. Certainly dragonflies, bullfrogs. There was a little cabin we would stay in owned by a descendant of Buffalo Bill Cody. That's the reference in the song to Cody Jr. The actual specific reference, "Green River," I got from a soda pop-syrup label. You used to be able to go into a soda fountain, and they had these bottles of flavored syrup. My flavor was called Green River. It was green, lime flavored, and they would empty some out over some ice and pour some of that soda water on it, and you had yourself a Green River.[6]

In 2012, Fogerty stated:

What really happened is that I used a setting like New Orleans, but I would actually be talking about things from my own life. Certainly a song like "Green River" – which you may think would fit seamlessly into the Bayou vibe, but it's actually about the Green River, as I named it – it was actually called Putah Creek by Winters, California. It wasn't called Green River, but in my mind I always sort of called it Green River. All those little anecdotes are part of my childhood, those are things that happened to me actually, I just wrote about them and the audience shifted at the time and place.[7]

The somber "Lodi" did not make the Top 40 but went on to become a rock radio staple and a fan favorite. It describes the plight of a down-and-out musician whose career has landed him playing a gig in the town of Lodi (pronounced "low-die"), a small agricultural city in California's Central Valley about 70 miles from Fogerty's hometown of Berkeley. After playing in local bars, the narrator finds himself stranded and unable to raise bus or train fare to leave.[8] Fogerty later said he had never actually visited Lodi before writing the song, and simply picked it for the song because it had "the coolest sounding name."[9] However, the song unquestionably references the town's reputation as an uninteresting farm settlement (the song's chorus, "Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again", has been the theme of several city events in Lodi).[9]

"Commotion" has been cited as a metaphor for the social and political unrest that America was experiencing at the time. Fogerty asserted in 2012 to Uncut, "I didn’t think 'Commotion' was social commentary, ’cause all this stuff was just in the air. But I was writing about what was in the air, and that was what came out of me. I was just doing what came naturally."

Other significant tracks on the album include the lament "Wrote a Song for Everyone", which, according to the VH1 Legends episode on the group, deals with Fogerty's failing marriage, and the Ray Charles cover "The Night Time Is the Right Time", continuing the Creedence tradition of including classic R&B and early rock and roll songs on their studio albums, as they had with Dale Hawkins' "Susie Q" (1968's Creedence Clearwater Revival) and Little Richard's "Good Golly Miss Molly" (1969's Bayou Country). In 2012 Uncut called "Cross Tie Walker" "a quintessential Johnny Cash two-step with a nifty bassline and a tale about a hobo hopping a train and starting a new life." The phrase "cross tie walker" appears earlier in the album, as part of the lyrics for "Green River".

Although Fogerty was producing, arranging and writing all the songs at this point, as well as handling lead guitar and singing duties, bassist Stu Cook insisted to Bill Kopp of musoscribe.com, "We didn't always play the parts we were given. John showed us lots of stuff he wanted specifically in songs; songwriters often do that. They come up with a song, they have an arrangement they want to hear. Some things are important, and other things are less important. We had a sufficient amount of latitude in writing and arranging our parts." Although he has always maintained that the band's artistic vision was solely his own, Fogerty himself conceded to Rolling Stone's Michael Goldberg in 1993, "Probably ninety-nine percent of the tracks we did as a quartet are played live with all four guys playing at the same room. I've heard the rumor over the years that 'after they left the studio, John went in and re-recorded all the parts.' No. I think the charm of what you hear on those records is four guys really playing." However, Fogerty has always maintained that the ideas for Creedence were his; in 1998 he asserted to Harold Steinblatt of Guitar World, "Many times — in fact, most of the time — they never heard the melodies until after the record came out...I showed the band how each part went — I showed them the music that fit the song I had written."

In March, prior to recording the album,[2] Creedence conducted a test session at the recently built Wally Heider Studios, where they recorded three instrumental test tracks (two of which, "Broken Spoke Shuffle" and "Glory Be", are included in the 2008 remastered CD).[3] The recording sessions for Green River lasted until June.[2]

Reception