Monday, August 3, 2020

TEENAGE ME IS ABOUT TO SHIT HIS PANTS.

This is a gift to my younger self. When I was in my early teens, there was one band that mattered to me more than any others, Creedence. For whatever reason, after buying their fifth LP Cosmos Factory as my first album ever, I hitched my wagon to them and no other band came close. I did a term paper on them, collected their back catalog and checked out the sources of their covers, and of those there were some good ones. On their first LP, Screamin' Jay Hawkin's "I Put A Spell On You", Dale Hawkins' "Suzie Q" and Wilson Picketts's "Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won't Do)". On their second Bayou Country, Little Richard's "Good Golly Miss Molly". On their third LP, Green River, they covered Nappy Brown's "The Night Time Is the Right Time" (likely picked up from Ray Charles's version). On their forth LP, Leadbelly's "Cotton Fields", and "Midnight Special" a traditional folk song that no one seems to know who wrote. Cosmo's Factory yielded Bo Diddley's "Before You Accuse Me", Roy Orbison's "Ooby Dooby", Arthur Crudup's "My Baby Left Me" and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", a hit for Marvin Gaye just a couple years earlier. When you're as young as I was, you didn't know shit about any of these songs or the artists that recorded them. But it was a map for future digging.

I never got to see Creedence other than a TV special that was on around that time. If I had known that they played at Woodstock, I would have been hysterical after going to see the movie and not seeing them in it. So, these clips are for my younger self. Although I still think that Creedence was a damn good band, John Fogerty's  solo career has kind of diluted things. Nevertheless, I would have gone ape shit back then to see Creedence on the big screen.



There's some other videos below, a few more Woodstock clips and the odd TV appearances. The kicker for me, oddball lover that I am, is not even a real Creedence video, It;s a thing I ran across on Vimeo, a guy with the handle "Soul Train Bro", Dude lets you watch him listen to side one of Bayou Country. This is not one of those videos where you get someone totally unfamiliar with a band to react either in a quizzical or excited way, and you, familiar with the band, laugh your ass off. No, Soul Train Bro does little more than listen, making about four comments during the whole thing. That's an exaggeration, but there are minutes that tick away while he moves and reacts so little, you'd swear the video is frozen. It's just so out there in its nothingness that it's right up my alley. Like a classic rock version of Eno's Music For Airports.

The oddball icing on the cake is Soul Train Bro's Vimeo channel, which is totally unrelated to Creedence. It's just him sharing his listens on a variety of LP sides. Led Zepp, Betty Davis, Jethro Tull, 13th Floor Elevators, Deep Purple, Rory Gallagher, Sabbath and others. My younger self would want no part of Soul Train Bro's listening parties. My current self values the raising of any freak flag, even if the person holding the flag doesn't even know it. Fuckin' Soul Train Bro is okay in my book.

~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
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