Welcome to MusicDayz

The world's largest online archive of date-sorted music facts, bringing day-by-day facts instantly to your fingertips.
Find out what happened on your or your friends' Birthday, Wedding Day, Anniversary or just discover fun facts in musical areas that particularly interest you.
Please take a look around.

Fact #134980

When:

Short story:

Creedence Clearwater Revival begin a nine-week run at No.1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart in the USA with their fifth album, Cosmo's Factory, on Fantasy Records.

Full article:

CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL - COSMO’S FACTORY

This feature by Johnny Black first appeared in Hi Fi News.

In 1970, Creedence Clearwater Revival, led by songwriter John Fogerty, was, without question, the most successful band in America, and that year’s album, Cosmo’s Factory, was their most successful ever, spending eight weeks at No1 in Billboard, and eventually achieving quadruple platinum status.

And yet, to call Cosmo’s Factory an album flies in the face of almost everything that has long been accepted about how classic albums get made. The classics LPs of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys and others tended to be made in a well-defined single period of time in a studio, and emerged as a coherent body of work, whose running order was carefully chosen to enhance the listening experience.

Cosmo’s Factory broke all of those rules and not only harked back to the 1950s when albums were routinely cobbled together from a string of existing hit singles but looked forward to the present day when many artists release individual tracks online and think of albums almost as an afterthought.

"Cosmo’s Factory was really a collection of singles," points out Creedence bassist Stu Cook. "That album was recorded over ten months. We’d just go in and record A and B sides, release them, and we had over half the album done before we went in to record Grapevine and the cover tunes … Ooby Dooby and whatever else."

A modicum of research proves Cook to be right. The bulk of the album was recorded in June 1970 but its best-known cuts, Who’ll Stop The Rain and Travelin’ Band were done late in 1969, while Up Around The Bend and Run Through The Jungle were recorded in March 1970. In other words, the June sessions were mostly cover versions - the aforementioned Ooby Dooby, plus My Baby Left Me, Before You Accuse Me and I Heard It Through The Grapevine. The opener, Ramble Tamble, is a seven-minute long guitar work-out, so the only genuinely new song from that period is the evocative closer, Long As I Can See The Light, which is, admittedly, a John Fogerty classic of the highest standard.

With all of this in mind, why does Cosmo’s Factory merit our coveted Vinyl Icon status? Simple. However haphazardly it was assembled, the end result remains one of the most enjoyably listenable experiences ever committed to disc.

"It may actually be our best record," the quartet’s presiding genius, John Fogerty, told Craig Werner of Goldmine in 1997. "I always thought it was the culmination. By that time, Creedence had all these records, and we looked back and put everything on it. It was almost redemptive, you might say. We’d done all these things and it was like, "'Boom! There, I said it again.'"

Russ Gary, who engineered Cosmo’s and several other Creedence albums, recalls how, "At a time when rock’n’rollers were developing increasingly flamboyant looks, Fogerty, in his simple jeans and flannel shirt, came across as more of a shaggy-haired working man than a rock star. But even just standing around, he gave off an intensity that drew your eye to him.”

Although based in the psychedelic stronghold of Berkeley on the San Francisco Bay, Creedence were never part of the same hippy movement that birthed The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe And The Fish. You’ll look in vain for rambling, esoteric guitar solos, freaky time signatures and primitive electronic experimentation on Creedence hits, because Fogerty’s genius was for tightly-structured three minute rock gems with eminently singable choruses. Unfashionable maybe, but they sound as fresh and uplifting now as they did then.

Even the covers on Cosmo’s Factory are beautifully executed, and perfectly integrated with the new material. Their 11 minute take on Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine, for example, has become as well-loved as many of Fogerty’s originals. Cook has acknowledged that Grapevine, "had a little jammy character to it, but they were all pretty structured. Live, there was a little bit of noodling, but in the studio we always tried to nail the arrangement."

Many of the early Creedence hits, Proud Mary, Green River, Down On The Corner, had dealt with simple Ordinary Joe topics, but by 1970, the socio-political scene in America was riling Fogerty. One obvious example of such concerns on Cosmo’s factory is Run Through The Jungle, which is still frequently mistaken to be an anti-Vietnam war rant. "I was talking about America and the proliferation of guns, registered and otherwise," he has explained. "I’m a hunter and I'm not anti-gun, but I just thought that people were so gun-happy - and there were so many guns uncontrolled that it really was dangerous, and it's even worse now."

Who’ll Stop The Rain, despite its hauntingly evocative sound, is every bit as politically-charged. And this time, it actually was about Vietnam, and how the American government didn’t seem to represent the way Fogerty and millions of other young people felt. "Protest songs were always kind of done with a real loud approach vocally and a harmonica a la Bob Dylan," he told Craig Rosen of Billboard. "I really wanted to do a song about the times, but I didn’t want to be obvious. I wanted to say what I wanted to say and come to people in layers, so they were absorbing the beauty of it and enjoying the song, before it ever occurred to them what it was actually about."

Misinterpreting Fogerty’s lyrics seems to be almost a national pastime in America, where the country-rockin’ Lookin’ Out My Back Door is frequently described as a drug song. Not according to Fogerty it isn’t. "I wanted to write a kid's song for my son Josh who was three years old at the time," he explains. "There was a Dr. Seuss book I loved when I was a child called, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. This story filled me with wonderment and I wanted to write a song that felt the same way." He succeeded.

The clutch of cover versions on the album was intended to reveal the musical inspirations that first motivated Fogerty, and so too did one of his own compositions, the solidly rock’n’rollin’ Travelin’ Band, which he described as, "my salute to Little Richard." Unfortunately, Little Richard’s publishers considered it to be so similar to Good Golly Miss Molly that they slapped a lawsuit on Fogerty which he eventually settled out of court.

The album closes with a frequently overlooked Fogerty classic, Long As I Can See The Light, a blissfully simple song about trying to make a way home through the dark which finds him singing at his most soulful. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect ending for Cosmo’s Factory, because it exemplifies all of the things - clarity, melody and lyricism - that make John Fogerty a timelessly imaginative songweaver.

Released on July 16, 1970, Cosmo’s Factory spent eight weeks at No1 in Billboard, reached No1 in the UK on September 12 and was certified gold in the USA on December 16. It took another two decades, but the album was finally certified for quadruple platinum - four million - sales on December 13, 1990.

PRODUCTION NOTES

Cosmo’s Factory was the nickname given to a 22,000-square-foot building in Berkeley which Creedence used for rehearsals while getting tracks together. As drummer Doug 'Cosmo' Clifford (after whom it was named) has recalled, "We had our offices there. It was very funky. It was a manufacturing place that had stairs, and the upper level wasn’t enclosed, it just had a railing that went all around it, it was all open. We had an area in the back that was curtained off. We had a rug and put in wall-to-wall carpet for our rehearsal area. Underneath was the coffee machine and the main office was upstairs with the pool table and that sort of thing."

Cosmo’s also boasted a basketball court and a ping-pong table, and provided the location for the cover photo on the album.

Despite the album’s title, it was actually recorded in Studio C of the recently-opened Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco. Engineer Russ Gary oversaw the sessions, on a Frank DeMedio custom-built recording console, using a 3-M 8-track recorder with Ampex 401 and Scotch 201 tape. Gary’s preference was for the Scotch tape, because it, “seemed to have a sweeter, brighter top end.”

“That was a good room,” Gary recalls. “You could put a lot of instruments in there and you didn't have to worry about baffling.”

Shure SM56 mics were employed, which Gary favoured because, "they had a natural peak at around 2k or 4k. I don't know why, but that mic made instruments sparkle a little bit without funny EQ.”

Russ Gary says that Fogerty also rehearsed at home, with a small recording system Gary had helped assemble. “I'm sure he even rehearsed the tape delays because he had machines that had the same head gap as the Ampex recorders at Heider."

Studio trickery was kept to a minimum, but there was one effect that became an integral element on nearly every Creedence recording. “When we first worked together, John asked, ‘Can you give me some slap-back?’" Fogerty’s fondness for slap-back came from having grown up (as Gary also did listening to Elvis and Sun Records recordings. Gary achieved the Creedence slap using a two Ampex 440 2-track machines and the studio's echo chambers. “During most mixing sessions, both 2-track machines would be running and I would delay the signal going to the chamber to get it slapping and bouncing around, and then there would be one to mix on.”

In the studio, Fogerty was a hard taskmaster, virtually a dictator. He was famed for editing Doug Clifford’s drum tracks to get the beats exactly where he wanted them and, rather than let the band sing harmonies, he’d multi-track them himself. Effectively, he treated the others like session musicians, writing all of their parts and teaching them how to play them. He also supplied all overdubs - everything from background vocals to piano, tambourines, keyboards and percussion.

Fogerty’s control-freakery eventually broke the band apart, but he was always unrepentant. "There’s a lot of time being consumed in bands where everybody’s having their say,. Then you have a meeting, you take a vote — you see what I’m getting at. But basically, Cosmo’s Factory was really the very end of me being very strong and very pure and very clear in my direction. And after that . . . the fine running machine was starting to get a little wobbly."

And Cosmo’s Factory? In later years, the building became home to a studio, DSR Productions, which Russ Gary created along with Clifford and CCR bassist Stu Cook.