Happy 55th Anniversary to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s fourth studio album Willy and the Poor Boys, originally released November 2, 1969.
Put on any rock album from 1969 and chances are you'll hear in its grooves the times in which it was made. Even the otherworldly sound of The Band's "Brown Album" represents that era's shift toward the get-back-to-basics hipness that their former and future boss, Bob Dylan, along with The Byrds, had been moving toward in the couple of years prior. There were groundbreaking albums that year that stretched the boundaries of music but now seem trapped in time. Time in a bottle, to quote that Croce fella.
The songs of John Cameron Fogerty do not belong to that era—or any particular era. Actually, they belong to all of them. Creedence Clearwater Revival sounded like nothing else at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair that sweltering August weekend fifty-five years ago. Following the meandering jams of The Grateful Dead—who extended "Turn On Your Lovelight" so long the stage lost power as the song passed the half-hour mark—CCR barreled through nine songs in the same amount of time. The setlist was taken from their first three albums: two of which (Bayou Country and Green River) had been released just that year, and they had already started recording what would become their best work.
What ended up as their third release in 1969 alone—and fourth overall—Willy and the Poor Boys stands as a crowning achievement in an all-too brief career filled with them. It doesn't seem so on paper: ten songs, two of them instrumentals, two others covers of songs associated with Leadbelly, one a slow, apocalyptic dirge. But somehow, when you drop the needle, it all makes perfect sense, and the parts add up to CCR's most powerful statement.
The first thing you hear is the four-count of a high-hat, then joined by a cowbell, to "Down On the Corner," which is driven by a guitar riff that is as close to the sound of pure joy as rock music ever achieved. The song is about Willy and the Poor Boys, a fictional jug band that may have to sing for their supper by busking on the street corner (that corner being in front of Duck Kee Market in West Oakland, California, according to the album cover), but they bring happiness to everyone within earshot, including us.
"Down On the Corner" sets the tone for the album that follows; its sense of optimism in the face of adversity informs the outlook of the farmer who witnesses the crashing of a UFO on his property—and his ultimate profiteering from it—in the fierce, driving "It Came Out of the Sky." Here, humorous lyrics are underscored by Fogerty's rhythmic Scotty Moore-inspired lead lines. Doug Clifford's having such a blast behind the kit that he just starts crashing the cymbals on the two and four with abandon for the entire last third of the song.
Listen to the Album:
Willy and the Poor Boys return on "Poorboy Shuffle," where Stu Cook's washtub bass, Doug Clifford's washboard, and Tom Fogerty's guitar back John Fogerty's harmonica, giving an audio background to the scene depicted on the album cover. In fact, the jam was improvised while the cover was being shot, resulting in a proper version being recorded once they returned to the studio.
"Poorboy Shuffle" fades into "Feelin' Blue," which finds CCR at its funkiest. With the band channeling Booker T. & the MGs, John Fogerty offers ambiguous dread in the lyrics, while tearing off one of the best, funkiest solos of his career.
"Feelin' Blue" is rivaled by "Side o' the Road," a late night bluesy jam that harkens back to the deceptively simple rhythmic backing of "Graveyard Train" off Bayou Country earlier in the year, allowing Fogerty to show off his ridiculously underrated lead guitar skills.
The two Leadbelly covers brilliantly add context to the rest of Willy and the Poor Boys. There's the innocent laid-back country bounce of "Cotton Fields" juxtaposed with the doomed subject in "Midnight Special," longingly hoping for a way out of his cell, if only in vain. Both songs—and much of the album—are punctuated by Fogerty's overdubbed backing vocals. Though they illustrate just one example of his growing control over the band, they add a muscular sound that is inarguable in its effectiveness.
Fogerty's penchant for doom is illustrated on Willy and the Poor Boys in the form of "Effigy," a six-minute-plus dirge that never mentions the subject by name ("Who is burnin'?"), but the overall sense of dread hovers overhead like a coming storm. A perfect analogy for the end of a tumultuous decade overcome with uncertainty at a time of war and civil unrest. That uncertainty gives the song its power.
So much has been written about "Fortunate Son" that writing about it now feels superfluous, but its message has not diminished in 55 years. With each new generation, its idea of the poor fighting at the whim of the rich and powerful remains just as relevant, whether skewering the offspring of US Presidents marrying each other (part of its original inspiration) or medical deferments for bone spurs.
Along those same lines is the rockabilly rave-up of "Don't Look Now (It Ain't You or Me)." Fogerty asks who'll do the backbreaking work, the blue collar (or no collar) jobs and tasks. ("Who'll take the promise you don't have to keep?"). As he told Rolling Stone upon the album's release, "who’s going to be the garbage collector? None of us will. Most of us will say, ‘That’s beneath me, I ain’t gonna do that job.'"
Not much has changed fifty-five years, which brings us back to the timelessness of Creedence Clearwater Revival. When all the psychedelics wore off, most of the bands from that era lost their impact; they couldn't sustain the good vibes in the midst of coming back down to reality.
CCR couldn't survive as a unit, either. Which is probably as it should be (especially after the mess that was 1972’s Mardi Gras, their final studio album). They gave us more than enough to sustain us for decades in just a few short, but important, years. It's not just the lyrics, either. It's the unpretentious, no-nonsense, critics-be-damned, driving rock & roll. From Chuck Berry to Kurt Cobain, it's the sound of guitar, bass, drums—three chords and the howl of truth.
LISTEN:
Editor's note: this anniversary tribute was originally published in 2019 and has since been edited for accuracy and timeliness.