To an eleven-year-old in a Long Island suburb, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1969 hit sounded like it came from somewhere distant, deep, and haunted.
Any time is a good time to grow up if you find what you love, but there was something special about coming to self-consciousness in the mid-sixties, amid the British Invasion and the rise of Motown. I got hooked on rock early, when I was six—in 1964, in Queens, at the onset of Beatlemania—thanks to a friend in my building who, like his cool older sister, had a pocket-sized radio, so my father took me to Radio Row (the electronics district in lower Manhattan that was wiped out to make way for the World Trade Center) to get me one, too. Top Forty music (though nobody I knew called it that then) was the soundtrack of my life for the rest of the decade, as it seemingly was for the world at large, because that was the meaning of the rock revolution—the making of a new mainstream. That’s why my millennial children listen to that sixty-year-old music now, whereas, in 1964, only a precocious Mahler buff would have listened to the music of 1904.
I soon started buying records (45s, which had an A-side and a B-side—the intended hit and the throwaway that was sometimes just as good): lots of Beatles to start, but also other artists’ work, including “The Name Game,” “Downtown,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “Satisfaction,” “Love Potion Number Nine,” “Look of Love,” “The Game of Love” (looks like I was getting a whole lotta love). Thanks to radio—New York’s 77 WABC—I heard and loved many more songs than I could buy, and what I got from this wide and wild spectrum of collective liberation was an aesthetic education, a sense of style that took far deeper root than did anything I was finding in books or movies. These songs evoked worlds of experience then beyond my ken, and did so in ways that, in retrospect, seem distinctly cinematic, from film noir (“I Fought the Law,” “Summer in the City”) to neo-Westerns (“King of the Road”), from spiky low-budget independent films (“You Really Got Me”) to European art films (“A Whiter Shade of Pale”), from comedy (“Wooly Bully”) to surrealism (“Red Rubber Ball”) to a real-time freakout hallucination (“Pictures of Matchstick Men”). Meanwhile, a prodigious weekly outpouring of masterworks from Motown laid the groundwork for my teen-age love of jazz.
Then summer vacation ended, I went to school and met some kids, and the following summer, actual death stole into the family circle and the songs didn’t matter so much; but Creedence wasn’t done with me. At the end of the year, their new album “Pendulum” came out; it was the first album I’d ever bought, so I depended less on radio hits. In one track, Fogerty’s desperately aggressive query “Molina, where you goin’ to?,” which he wailed with a hefty backbeat, captured this twelve-year-old’s bewilderment with existential randomness and concision. I can’t say I’ve listened to Creedence much since then; the association with bad times is hard to shake. Also, I soon found other paths through the darkness—I read Willa Cather’s story “Paul’s Case,” I found out that philosophy exists, and I started listening to music with far more revolutions per minute, namely, jazz—but in substance and sound, their summer song had opened the way. ♦
