"They say when you get lost in the woods, you should walk downhill until you find the river and then Revival, America was never that simple. They showed you why on their third album, the August 1969 masterpiece Green River. John Fogerty sings about a river, pure and unpolluted, with the power to "let me remember things I don't know." But his green river is alive with the noise of all the drowned souls it carries -- the ghost cries of flatcar riders and crosstie walkers, Pharaohs and Israelites, husbands and gamblers. Creedence bang out nine great songs in under thirty minutes as the pastoral beauty of "Green River" flows into the sexy nightmare of "Sinister Purpose."
CCR got looser and jammier on Green River, soaking in the Northern California air, but they stood apart from the San Francisco psychedelic bands - partly because of their blue-collar earthiness and partly because their drummer didn't suck. Fogerty's spit-and-growl voice was the purple-mountain majesty above the fruited plain of phenomenal rhythm section Doug Clifford and Stu Cook, California's answer to Wyman and Watts. The guys rambled their tamble while Fogerty ran down the road, chased by a tombstone shadow under a bad moon rising. Absurdly underrated as a lead guitarist - just listen to his terrifying one-note solo in "Tombstone Shadow" - Fogerty sang his hairy ass off in soulful ballads of struggles personal ("Lodi") and political ("Wrote a Song for Everyone"). Still, CCR were staunchly committed to the public pleasures of rock & roll, making music anyone could love at first listen, which is why their songs have been sung by everyone from Richard Hell to Def Leppard, from Tina Turner to the Minutemen, from the halls of Bonnie Tyler to the shores of Bon Jovi. In short, for a year or two there, Creedence were as great as any rock & roll band could ever be."

(Rolling Stone US)

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If anything, CCR's third album Green River represents the full flower of their classic sound initially essayed on its predecessor, Bayou Country. One of the differences between the two albums is that Green River is tighter, with none of the five-minute-plus jams that filled out both their debut and Bayou Country, but the true key to its success is a peak in John Fogerty's creativity. Although CCR had at least one cover on each album, they relied on Fogerty to crank out new material every month. He was writing so frequently that the craft became second-nature and he laid his emotions and fears bare, perhaps unintentionally. Perhaps that's why Green River has fear, anger, dread, and weariness creeping on the edges of gleeful music. This was a band that played rock & roll so joyously that they masked the, well, "sinister" undercurrents in Fogerty's songs. "Bad Moon Rising" has the famous line "Hope you've got your things together/Hope you're quite prepared to die," but that was only the most obvious indication of Fogerty's gloom. Consider all the other dark touches: the "Sinister purpose knocking at your door"; the chaos of "Commotion"; the threat of death in "Tombstone Shadow" you only return to the idyllic "Green River" once you get lost and realize the "world is smolderin'." Even the ballads have a strong melancholy undercurrent, highlighted by "Lodi," where Fogerty imagines himself stuck playing in dead-end towns for the rest of his life. Not the typical thoughts of a newly famous rock & roller, but certainly an indication of Fogerty's inner tumult. For all its darkness, Green River is ultimately welcoming music, since the band rocks hard and bright and the melancholy feels comforting, not alienating.

(by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide)

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RELEASED IN AUGUST 1969, a month before Woodstock, Green River is a crystalline expression of its time, a throwback to early rock'n'roll, and a visionary work that Imagines the world yet to come.

The album is bound to its time because it includes some important links in the string of remarkable hiss with which Creedence Clearwater Revival helped shape its era. "Green River," "Bad Moon Rising," "Lodi," and "Commotion" dehne the everyday quality of the band's music, the melodies and rhythms you seem to have known forever before you've heard them all the way through once.

That's what makes these songs throwbacks to pre-psychedelic rock'n'roll. Their kinship with the music of the '50s and the pre-Beatles '60s comes across in John Fogerty's New Orleans drawl and Doug Clifford's "Susie Q" backbeat, in the homage to Ray Charles in "The Night Time Is the Right Time" and the hints of rockabilly raveup in "Green River" and "Commotion". Even when he's taking guitar liberties that are absolutely late '60s, John Fogerty's songs distill an essence of rock'n'roll.

But this is not the late '60s in Haight-Ashbury; it's the late '60s of poor boys from an unhip town in the East Bay. The Green River album portrays the Future in darker terms than any other '60s rock band would have dared. Fogerty's fatalistic, desperate insights—a kind of realistic paranoia—crop up in the very first lines of the very first songs "Let me remember things I don't know," he sings and suddenly, you Sense that there's grimness lurking even in the bucolic bliss that is "Green River," a place that defines sweetness and joy. This guy is lost in a world grown cold—he's a modern Robert Johnson by that measure—and the only place he can think to turn is very likely a myth. ("Let me remember things I don't knovv Gould have been the motto of the greatest mythmaker of all, Ronald Reagan.)

The turmoil of the era is as real as 4/4 time and if what comes out of it isn't going to be a love revolution, disaster impends. That's the way Fogerty Sees it. He takes it personally in "Tombstone Shadow," vvith its very conscious echo of Johnson's "Crossroads", and "Lodi", which is the life he'd have lived if "Proud Mary" hadn't scored. But that's small potatoes. "Bad Moon Rising" offers a complete, social cataclysm. Fogerty sings in an Old Testament prophet's voice, warning the righteous and unrighteous alike. He sings like these Images and ideas—the earthquakes, the lightning, rivers overflowing, the voice of rage and ruin, the dread in the bass live—are pulled out against his will. He sings, in short, like the truth of the matter is just coming clear and leaves him with about half a prayer: `Hope you have got your things together / Hope you are quite prepared to die," Now the nature that offered solace in `Green River` has itself revealed a sinister purpose.

Within Green River, there is also another vision. It is halting, unsure of itself, but in the end it's just as powerful. "Wrote a song for Everyone" is perhaps John Fogerty's lost classic, a Statement of profound fatedness, related somehow to that scathing Strother Martin live from Cool Hand Luke — "What we have he-ah is a fail-yuh to comMUNikate" in a Southern voice exactly as affected, precisely as credible as Fogerty's. "Wrote a Song for everyone / And I couldn't even talk to you." If you knew soldiers stumbling home from 'Nam, civil rights workers crawling back from the South, revolutionaries who wound up face down in the mud of some farmer's field, then what Fogerty had to say fiere was past, present, and Future all wrapped up in one: "Saw the people standin' / Thousand years in chains / Someone Said it's different now / Look, it's just the Same."

It's not just that Fogerty can't communicate, that he's cast into some existential isolation. That would be a righteous boxe, as hordes of singer-songwriters sonn proved No, the thing that really makes him desperate is that John Fogerty is a true rock'n'roller and what he wants, more than anything, is to drill his point home, to make you believe that all he says is true, that if we don't stop turning our backs an love and one another, we really are going to wind up nothing but the shadow of our own headstones. Even more, he needs to know that he's drilled it down in the depth of his bones, and if he can't feel it, he's lost.

This is as far from `Green River" as you can get. It's not just a world where face overrules hope; it's a world where almost all that exists is despair. In a way, it's amazing that anyone this bitter, scarred, and scared Gould rise out of bed, let alone make music so heartbreaking.

Fogerty gets himself out of it in the usual fashion. He goes to church. That's all "The Night Time Is the Right Time" is, really. Sheer gospel, the letting loose of all the rage, yearning, and depression that these excursions into damnation have bottled up. Fogerty cuts most of it loose wich his mouth shut, through a blistering guitar solo. You can't say it's great gospel—it's not gospel any gospel Binger would recognize—but it purges Fogerty's soul, and that counts.

All that reflects a memory of things we don't know; it's not how Green River feels when you think back on it. I remember "Green River and "Bad Moon Rising" sluicing out of the radio, their beat an antidote to pretension, offering the joy inherent in hearing a great rhythm section speak its mind—a mind that may, indeed, have been at Cross purposes to the lyrics but then that's the whole purpose of having a band, right? Doug Clifford, Tom Fogerty, and Stu Cook were maybe the most underrated rhythm section in rock'n'roll in those days and just listening to them roll on these tight, dramatic Songs is sheer pleasure.

But when you listen, rather than just recall, there's an undertow that pulls you toward the nightmares and won't let go. Maybe it comes from the singularity of Fogerty's vision, or maybe it's just the residue of playing all those nights in "Lodi"-style bars. Maybe it's the commotion that 1969 left in everyone's head, maybe it's what happens when you have enough Stardom to look down and See where you came from, how far you now have to fall. (This was, after all, only Creedence's third album, only its second big hit.)

In the tumultuous world that its greatest album foresaw, Creedence Clearwater Revival is no longer mistaken for a teenybopper hit Singles band. Long after the hippies have been filed and forgotten, these East Bay working boys reign. And they should. They gave us everything they had—past, present, and future, vision and reality, love and fear—and it is not at all their fault that we have lived down to 1969's worst expectations. In a funny way, the fact that so mang of the permanent strangers who inhabit the black world of the 21 st century can still relate to the heart in this music is one of the few things that makes me want to live in it.

(DAVE MARSH, April 2000)