The definitive biography of Creedence Clearwater Revival, exploring the band's rise to fame and how their music embodied the cultural landscape of the late '60s and early '70s.
Diagnosing the push-and-pull of John Fogerty’s unnavigable conflicts—between populism and artistic sophistication, control and collaboration—is where 'A Song for Everyone' is at its best...In Mr. Lingan’s telling, he was an impossibly driven and talented young man, and utterly impossible to deal with...When the group first splintered and then finally imploded—his brother Tom was first to leave—it was with the sort of exhausted finality that ensured a reunion would never be in the cards...Tom Fogerty died in 1990...The brothers never truly reconciled...And yet, 63 years after four kids from El Cerrito first played together, CCR’s music remains a fixture and a crown jewel of American culture...Decades after so many of their peers have been relegated to the 'where are they now?' file, the resonances of their Herculean labors are everywhere, from Bruce Springsteen to Sonic Youth to 'The Big Lebowski'...Their reputation has never been greater...That’s one hell of an encore.
As we learn in John Lingan’s compelling A Song for Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival, the members were not, by any stretch, born on the bayou...They all hailed from working-class Northern California, not Berkeley, not San Francisco...They were fake southerners, and John Fogerty’s fake dialect sometimes became a bizarre hybrid...'I hoid it through the grapevine,' he sang, which must have been weird for Marvin Gaye to hear, though there was nothing weird about the royalties...It sounded like a Cajun acid trip, though they didn’t do drugs...Way later, in a world that had gone wrong many times over, Fogerty went on social media demanding that Donald Trump stop playing 'Fortunate Son' at his rallies...'Fortunate Son' is from the point of view of working-class young men who didn’t have the connections to avoid Vietnam, not a rich kid with bone spurs...Fogerty tried to explain, but Trump just kept paying the fines and blaring the song...Music that lasts can stray far away from its maker...'I want to know, have you ever seen the rain?' asks Fogerty on the Creedence track that can always break my heart...This song is a beatitude, with a soaring melody and a haunting image...The rain can be healing; it can be romantic; it can be the pathetic fallacy...It could have been about Vietnam then, and it could be about the sorrows of today and beyond...There’s always another bad moon rising...That’s why we need music.
Lingan brings more to his tale than just mastery of prose...Though he caps A Song For Everyone with a meticulous set of endnotes to corroborate every statement, for most of the text he opts for a straight narration, without citations...Freed from the formatting restrictions that see a biographer’s words acting as mere connecting tissue between long quoted passages, Lingan displays his flair for storytelling unencumbered...This stylistic choice adds an almost novelistic flavor to A Song For Everyone, as Lingan’s imagination enters the minds of his subjects, becoming less a biographer than an omniscient narrator...Vivid retellings of intra-band drama make a worthy addition to the Creedence Clearwater Revival canon...However, as he demonstrated in his previous book Homeplace (2018), Lingan’s natural talent lies in his wide-angle view of his subjects...In the same way, A Song For Everyone pulls out from the Creedence Clearwater Revival story, bringing in points of view sourced directly from Vietnam vets, student activists, fellow artists, and blue-collar workers, many of whom can point directly to Creedence Clearwater Revival as a source of comfort or inspiration...Where other biographies pay lip service to these groups in sentence-long bites to establish context, Lingan has no compunction about setting Creedence Clearwater Revival aside for entire pages, painting peripheral characters in detail before circling back to connect them to the band’s story he came to tell...Thus, we see the specter of the draft hanging over young American men, the often violent pushback threatening student activists, and a dark cloud of racial and class discord, all serving as a massive human backdrop to the proceedings.
