Creedence Clearwater Revival

This Bay Area quartet dropped seven hit albums during a remarkable five-year run starting in 1968, pushing aside the Summer of Love psychedelia that surrounded them to lay the foundations for what eventually became roots rock. The members of the band had played together for nearly a decade as The Blue Velvets and The Golliwogs prior to renaming themselves Creedence Clearwater Revival. The flannel shirts worn by frontman John Fogerty, who wrote and sang all of CCR’s original material, came to symbolise a blue-collar aesthetic embedded in the group’s unfussy arrangements and songs celebrating working-class struggles (“Proud Mary”) and lodging anti-war plaints (“Fortunate Son”). The men had never experienced the American South, yet they nonetheless built their sound upon the musical traditions of Mississippi and Louisiana, with an unadorned collision of blues, R&B and swamp rock. Fogerty’s soulful, raspy howl presided over stripped-down grooves leavened by amped-up guitar solos, and he complemented his indelible writing with inventive covers of early rock ’n’ roll and blues gems like “Suzie Q” and “I Put a Spell on You”. The group acrimoniously disbanded in 1972, but over the decades, CCR emerged as spiritual forefathers for post-punk groups like The Minutemen and Hüsker Dü, unencumbered by trappings of the late ’60s.