A Song For Everyone by John Lingan

Author:John Lingan [Lingan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-One

AT THE FEET OF THE GODS

May brought new milestones. Sales of the self-titled album and Bayou Country eclipsed a million dollars each, and Creedence was breaking their own attendance and ticket sales records with seemingly every show. Early in the month they played the Anaheim Convention Center in front of 9,000 people, grossing more than $43,000. Only three weeks later they sold out the 13,000-seat Long Beach Arena and grossed $62,000. They demanded a minimum of $15,000 per concert and 60 percent against the gross, and still had gigs lined up through the summer. Saul Zaentz was fielding regular offers to buy the band’s contract. Some offered to buy the entire label. In interviews, he claimed he wouldn’t take $6 million for the group. “We have turned down much higher offers than that,” he bragged.

These numbers testified to the band’s explosive live act and their power as a band. They didn’t simply re-create their songs note-perfect onstage—they increased the energy, the volume, and the tempos. Especially after John’s tightened grip on the arrangements and recordings, the live show was where Stu, Doug, and Tom got to exhibit their contributions to the Creedence sound. John still sang at an angle to the crowd and still stepped away from the front of the stage to solo. Even though their songs were mostly his, the full effect of their stage show relied on Tom’s unwavering rhythm, Stu’s smiling enthusiasm, and Doug’s thunderous, athletic bashing. They approached live performance like the singles chart: awe the audience, overwhelm them, leave no doubt about the band’s dominance.

And yet those perfect songs were beginning to pay off in their own right. The same month that Creedence continuously crushed their own attendance records, Solomon Burke, the big baritone journeyman soul singer, released a new LP for Bell Records, Proud Mary, named for the Creedence cover that opened side one. Musically, Burke didn’t change too much from the original except to add a blaring horn section, but he added a brief spoken intro explaining that his “forefathers” could only work on a boat like the Proud Mary. They were “stokers, cooks, and waiters,” not liberated voyagers. “I made a vow that when I grew up I’d take a ride on the ol’ Proud Mary,” Burke intoned before kicking off the first verse. He turned his own singing into an act of historical reclamation; John’s song, released only four months earlier, was now a gesture to Burke’s ancestors. Burke performed the song on American Bandstand and released it as a single, marking the first time John made money from someone else’s performance of his song.

Burke was not the only legend who embraced the group. In the spring they went to Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium to tape an episode of The Johnny Cash Show, which had yet to begin airing. Cash’s At Folsom Prison album, released the previous year, had made him a revered figure even among rock fans, and the band was indeed starstruck. When they met, John could only get out a single stuttering sentence: “I love you, Johnny Cash.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.