It's New to Me: Willy and the Poor Boys by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969)

Illustration from The Advance: Yearbook of Indiana State Normal School, 1916

Sometimes it seems like I don't write anything for this blog except reviews of albums everyone else already knows by heart, but I realized today that it's been a couple weeks since I did one of those. So guess what? Willy and the Poor Boys is a pretty good record, as I'm sure everyone else already knows.

It wasn't a conscious thing at all, but my avoidance of Creedence Clearwater Revival was probably mostly about my entirely unfounded fears of "Southern Rock" (a scene that CCR had little if anything to do with), and my hatred of the Eagles. Two things changed my mind about CCR: the use of the song "Lookin' Out My Back Door" in the movie The Big Lebowski, and a message board poll I saw in which a very large and diverse crowd agreed that CCR was the most universally likable rock band. So I went out and bought CCR's 1970 album Cosmo's Factory, and I had to admit straight away that it was a great record. Starting with the band's fourth album put me in a weird position, though - CCR's albums after Cosmo's Factory are considered to be less-than-great, but I was concerned that, if I went back and bought their albums in chronological order, I'd find that their early stuff didn't have the characteristics I loved about Cosmo's Factory.

So I decided to work backward from Cosmo's Factory, which put 1969's Willy and the Poor Boys next on the list. There are a few songs on Willy and the Poor Boys that everyone knows well enough that I would just embarrass myself trying to write something non-redundant about them - "Down on the Corner" is an easy-going pop song in the style of "Lookin' Out My Back Door" (probably my preferred mode of Fogerty compositions), "Fortunate Son" is a fiery political statement about David Eisenhower's ability to avoid getting sent to Vietnam, and "Effigy" is a heartfelt epic with some great guitar work in it.

The album's two covers ("Cotton Fields" and "The Midnight Special") are actually real album highlights with great harmony vocals, and the rest of the Fogerty originals are pretty good - I find myself particularly enjoying the chooglin' sound of "Feelin' Blue" and the alien-abduction-themed "It Came Out of the Sky" more than I thought I would. But, while Willy and the Poor Boys isn't weighed down by the just-kinda-there covers and overlong "groove" tracks that weighed down Cosmo's Factory a little (eleven minutes of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine"?), it does have some filler in the form of two "meh" instrumentals. These instrumentals are really more than interludes, though, and I can excuse them when the rest of the album's tracks are so consistently excellent.

So, CCR is two for two so far for me - the natural next step would be to pick up Willy and the Poor Boys' 1969 predecessor Green River, but I've been reading some good things about the underrated Pendulum from 1970, the last of the classic-era CCR records. I'm going to have to do some more research before proceeding further.

"It Came Out of the Sky" by Creedence Clearwater Revival