If there's one lesson that studying the music groups or artists you love constantly reinforces, it's that sometimes the very people whose art you love can be the biggest dicks in the history of dickdom. For me, with all the Lou Reed tributes cropping up which made mention of Lou's loutish behaviour at times towards journalists (though of course said tributes were pouring in from many of those same journalists), it reminded me of John Fogerty, whom I consider both a talented songwriter (especially with his band Creedence Clearwater Revival) and a huge dick to his former bandmates.
Fogerty led CCR during the late Sixties heyday they enjoyed in the white-hot sulpherous glare of American pop-rock stardom (at a time when Reed and the Velvets couldn't get arrested on the pop charts). Then, first parting with his brother Tom and then with the other two bandmembers (bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford), Fogerty embarked on a solo career that so far has yielded "Centerfield" and..."Centerfield 2013"? "Centerfield 2: Electric Boogaloo"? Safe to say, most people know Fogerty today for CCR, which is a pretty good legacy to have if you can get it. But he's a dick.
I know a lot of people love CCR and will take issue with my assertation about his asshole-ness, but trust me, I looked it up on Wikipedia and read the quote there John gave about how he "did everything" in CCR. He's the last person to ever be accused of modesty, and for the fact that he has continuously snubbed his bandmates (Tom died in 1990, and Clifford and Cook aren't on speaking terms with His High and Mighty John Fogerty), I have personally found it hard to enojoy CCR without thinking to myself "man, the guy singing this song is a dick."
Truth be told, of course, if you're a fan of Lou Reed or even the great Bob Dylan (as I am), you really shouldn't be too upset if an artists turns out to be a pain in the ass on a personal level (or comes across that way because rock journalists *say* he's that way). There's always a story or two every month about the ridiculous riders attached to touring artists who demand white doves in their dressing room, or no green M&Ms in the sparkling bidet that every auditorium must provide, or whatnot. Most of the time, these stories are meant to remind you, the viewer at home, that Celebrities Aren't Like Us, and you can take it either as a compliment (see, you're not batshit crazy, stars are!) or an insult (don't you wish you could get away with this?). So please don't mistake me when I say that John Fogerty is a dick, it doesn't mean that he hasn't written some true-blue American anthems about driving trucks and running through jungles and being a fortunate son who don't have to go get his ass shot off in Vietnam. He has written some great, great songs. He's just a bit of a dick.
John Fogerty can get away with this dickishness because, like I said, he wrote some great songs. But listening to CCR this past week, I can see how hollow and empty some of the band's biggest hits are, at least in terms of being "authentic." At a time when the Band was perfecting the sound of roots rock, CCR made it mainstream by bringing back the sound of the Fifties to the charts. But I'm gonna have to go with the Band over CCR if I want "authentic" roots rock. This has nothing to do with CCR's "Southern by way of NoCal" rock sound (plenty of bands have created an allure that has no basis in geographical fact, and CCR were clearly indebted to Faulkner as much as they were to Sun Records in conceiving of a South that exists in their songs, with maybe some early existential Walker Percy thrown in for good measure). CCR were popular, mighty popular, in their heyday, and the golden rule of music is that the greater your popularity the less relevant you are to future generations unless you're "revived" due to nostalgia or hipster irony. CCR is now used to sell Walgreen's. You can't be "revived" if you're used to hawk medical stores.
But no matter how popular they were in their day, CCR gets a bit of a pass because the good songs they did, the really good ones, are classics that can't be sullied too much by being used in ads. In a perfect world, of course, the Velvet Underground or the Stooges or Big Star would've gotten the sort of acclaim and "all-American appeal" that CCR got instead, but c'est la vie. And I like CCR, at least on some level. I remember as a kid, seeing ads for the band's best-of on TV and thinking how cool and "Sixties" they looked. CCR were fabricated, to be sure, and they were sold to a nation gullible enough to think that CCR were "hip, but okay for backyard pool parties in the suburbs," not "child-raping revolutionaries with bombs aimed at the heart of America" (though few songs can match "Fortunate Son" in terms of "go fuck yourself" and anger). I like CCR when I don't have to think about how much of a dick Fogerty was to his former bandmates. But as I get older, it's harder to seperate the two. For the time being, however, crank it up when this song or any of their songs come on the radio. It may have as much to do with the South as Larry the Cable Guy does, but the music of CCR is blessedly, flawed America at its best. Even when it's written by a huge dick.
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