Green River is the third studio album by American rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival, released on August 7, 1969 by Fantasy Records. It was the second of three albums they released in that year, preceded by Bayou Country in January and followed by Willy and the Poor Boys in November.
Background
In January 1969, Creedence Clearwater Revival released their second studio album Bayou Country featuring their breakout single "Proud Mary" (backed with "Born on the Bayou"), which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Producer and primary songwriter John Fogerty was the driving creative force behind CCR, which would record three albums in 1969 alone. The band saw themselves as more disciplined than other San Francisco-based bands, with drummer Doug Clifford recalling to Jeb Wright of Goldmine in 2013, "We went to see the local bands and they were so stoned they weren’t even in tune and they were really terrible...We made a pact on the floor of the Fillmore, right then, where we would do no drugs or alcohol. We decided to get high on the music, or get out of the business." Going against the grain at the times, Creedence eschewed the acid-inspired free-form jams favored by many rock bands, for tightly structured roots music with an unmistakable rockabilly edge. "I didn't like the idea of those acid-rock, 45-minute guitar solos," Fogerty explained to Uncut'''s David Cavanagh in 2012. "I thought music should get to the point a little more quickly than that."
Composition
CCR's third studio album includes two of their biggest hits, "Bad Moon Rising" and "Green River", both of which peaked on the U.S. chart at No. 2, as well as the highly regarded "Lodi" (No. 52) and "Commotion" (No. 30). "Bad Moon Rising" is notable for its jaunty, happy music juxtaposed with its dark, ominous lyrics. It was inspired by a scene in the 1941 film The Devil and Daniel Webster involving a hurricane, with John Fogerty stating that the words told of "the apocalypse that was going to be visited upon us. It wasn't until the band was learning the song that I realized the dichotomy. Here you got this song with all these hurricanes and blowing and raging ruin and all that, but...It's a happy-sounding tune, right? Regarding the title track, Fogerty recalled in 1993:Green River is really about this place where I used to go as a kid on Putah Creek, near Winters, California. I went there with my family every year until I was ten. Lot of happy memories there. I learned how to swim there. There was a rope hanging from the tree. Certainly dragonflies, bullfrogs. There was a little cabin we would stay in owned by a descendant of Buffalo Bill Cody. That's the reference in the song to Cody Jr. The actual specific reference, "Green River," I got from a soda pop-syrup label. You used to be able to go into a soda fountain, and they had these bottles of flavored syrup. My flavor was called Green River. It was green, lime flavored, and they would empty some out over some ice and pour some of that soda water on it, and you had yourself a Green River.In 2012, Fogerty stated:
The somber "Lodi" did not make the Top 40 but went on to become a rock radio staple and a fan favorite. It describes the plight of a down-and-out musician whose career has landed him playing a gig in the town of Lodi (pronounced "low-die"), a small agricultural city in California's Central Valley about 70 miles from Fogerty's hometown of Berkeley. After playing in local bars, the narrator finds himself stranded and unable to raise bus or train fare to leave. Fogerty later said he had never actually visited Lodi before writing the song, and simply picked it for the song because it had "the coolest sounding name." However, the song unquestionably references the town's reputation as an uninteresting farm settlement (the song's chorus, "Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again", has been the theme of several city events in Lodi).
"Commotion" has been cited as a metaphor for the social and political unrest that America was experiencing at the time. Fogerty asserted in 2012 to Uncut, "I didn’t think 'Commotion' was social commentary, ’cause all this stuff was just in the air. But I was writing about what was in the air, and that was what came out of me. I was just doing what came naturally."