Record Store Day: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s watershed year marked with ‘1969’ box

Even by the crank-it-out standards of the 1960s, 1969 was a remarkably prolific year for Bay Area rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival.

That’s the year the quartet fronted by singer, lead guitarist and chief songwriter John Fogerty released three albums, a year that saw the group transformed from a promising roots-minded outfit that in 1968 had delivered a credible reworking of Dale Hawkins’ 1957 hit “Suzie Q” and became one of the most popular rock bands in the world.

The Concord Music Group is releasing the “1969 Archive Box” set, which lists for $149.98, for Record Store Day on Saturday.

It contains vinyl versions of all three albums -- “Bayou Country” (Japanese pressing on red vinyl), “Green River” (Italian release) and “Willy and the Poor Boys” (U.S. version) -- as well as CDs for each, plus three 7-inch vinyl EPs, one from Japan, one from Brazil and one from Mexico, gathering nearly a dozen of the group’s recordings from the period.

There’s also a reproduction composition notebook with 60 pages of press clippings, a vintage biography, era-appropriate profiles of the band members (also including rhythm guitarist Tom Fogerty, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford), a couple of posters, a facsimile of the concert ticket for the Woodstock Festival that Creedence played, a reproduced Los Angeles Times photo of the group’s concert at the Forum in Inglewood that year along with other memorabilia.

How a group of white teens from El Cerrito in the Bay Area wound up sounding like they’d emerged whole cloth from a Louisiana swamp is explained in the notebook with comments from John Fogerty.

“I really enjoyed the whole southern folk-legend,” he says in the notes. “Mark Twain, Huck Finn, the River and all that went with it. That river and the South just seem to be where all the music that’s kicked everything off started from or sounds like.”

The “Bayou Country” album, released in January 1969, included the breakthrough hit that became the song most widely known, played and associated with Fogerty and Creedence, “Proud Mary.”

He’s often said he knew when he wrote it that he’d reached a new level with his songwriting, and from that new peak, the band just kept climbing.

Fogerty was enamored of Southern-bred rockers such as Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins and so many others, and wound up sounding like he’d grown up as one of their neighbors whenever he opened his mouth to sing.

“Green River” came next, yielding the hit title track as well as “Bad Moon Rising,” “Lodi,” “Commotion” and one of his most personal and deeply felt songs, “Wrote a Song for Everyone.”

“Willy and the Poor Boys” arrived just as the year was ending, and brought yet another of the double-sided hit singles that became Creedence’s signature, “Fortunate Son/Down on the Corner.” In all, Creedence charted seven hits on the Billboard Hot 100 that year.

Besides his ear for melodic and instrumental hooks that defined Creedence’s music, Fogerty also had a keen eye toward social justice in his lyrics, exemplified in “Fortunate Son”:

Some folks inherit star spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord
And when you ask them, “How much should we give?”
Ooh, they only answer More! more! more!

Along with the original songs, Creedence regularly turned in imaginatively reworked versions of blues, R&B and rock oldies that had influenced all four band members, from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” and Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly” to Lead Belly’s “The Midnight Special” and Ray Charles’ “The Night Time Is the Right Time.”

Creedence created a template for authentically rootsy music with a conscience that continues to influence uncounted Americana and roots country acts today.

If all that weren’t enough, Creedence also recorded their next and biggest-selling album, “Cosmo’s Factory,” by the end of 1969, although it wasn’t released until the middle of 1970.

For a list of stores participating in Saturday’s Record Store Day events, go to recordstoreday.com.

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