Notes On The Book -- CCR

Updates

August 23, 2024: I posted the original note on September 16, 2022. 

This book on CCR provides an excellent discussion of the "inequality" in the East Bay / Oakland. That was the first time I had heard of the flatlands / hillsides of Oakland. The higher up the hillside one lived, the wealthier one was. The poorest lived at the bottom of the hills, in the "Flatlands." The University of Richmond, Oakland, CA, provides an interactive map: "Mappping Inequality" (link here). This all became a "thing" again when Kamala Harris mentioned that she and her family grew up in the "Flatflands" when they lived in the East Bay / Oakland.

August 23, 2024: from "Mapping Inequality" --

In the city of Oakland, California, real estate interests by the 1920s had carved neighborhoods into long narrow strips marked by income and elevation. They thereby embedded a class and racial regime literally into the physical terrain.

Located directly east of San Francisco, across the waters of San Francisco Bay, Oakland rises from tidal flats into ridgelines of successively higher hills. In the era of HOLC and FHA redlining, native-born white, European immigrant, Black, Latino/a, and Asian American working-class communities characterized the "flatlands," where blue-collar neighborhoods abutted the port, railroads, and factories.

Middle-class and elite white neighborhoods developed further east, in higher and often hilly terrain that ascended dramatically into what locals called the "Oakland hills." One 1930s booster publication indelibly captured this geography.

"High above the turmoil of traffic and hustle of business," it rhapsodized, "are homes tucked away among the tree-covered slopes." This contrast between the multi-racial, industrial flatland neighborhoods and the verdant, garden-like, and largely white hillside districts defined Oakland in the twentieth century. On the 1937 HOLC map—which includes the adjacent, smaller East Bay cities of Berkeley, Albany, Alameda, Piedmont, Emeryville, and San Leandro—one can immediately identify this class and racial geography.

Every flatland neighborhood, running from Berkeley south into Oakland and from Oakland southeast toward San Leandro, was marked with the "hazardous" red.

Adjacent neighborhoods just to the east were identified as "declining."

In all, the 1937 HOLC survey concluded that nearly two-thirds of the residential neighborhoods of the East Bay were in some state of "decline." Notably, this included West Oakland and North Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, as well as South Berkeley, the home of Byron Rumford, one of only two Black State legislators in the immediate postwar decades and sponsor of the "Rumford Act," California's 1963 fair housing law.

East Bay flatland neighborhoods had long served as a "port of entry" for migrating workers, the first place of settlement where rents were reasonable and jobs nearby.

Working-class refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake settled here. So did successive waves of railroad, dock, and factory workers, as Oakland by the 1920s had become a bustling port and warehouse city and an important regional railroad shipping hub. By the 1940s, Oakland was not exactly the "Detroit of the West," as a local booster bragged (although at least six automobile or tractor factories called the East Bay home), but it was nevertheless a thriving industrial city with a multi-racial working class. West Oakland, in particular, was a "marvelous mixture of people," one resident who went on to serve in the California Assembly recalled. "We had every nationality that we knew of in that neighborhood. We had Chinese. We had Mexican, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, Yugoslav. Our immediate neighbor was a Black family."

With a few exceptions, the 1937 HOLC appraisers characterized the East Bay flatlands in derogatory terms. Race was central to those calculations. West Oakland neighborhoods south of San Pablo Avenue were summed up this way: "Old type houses and cottages, tenement tendencies. Heterogeneous mixture of all races." In a flatland neighborhood southeast of Lake Merritt, appraisers insisted that "infiltration of Negroes necessitates hazardous rating." One flatland neighborhood with a significant Black residential population, South Berkeley, was characterized as a "high grade Negro area," where "good loans can be made [...] if care is exercised," but was still "redlined" with the hazardous rating. In all, the language of the HOLC appraisers was a racial grammar, an idiom, that communicated to mortgage lenders, banks, and government agencies which neighborhoods were deemed unfit for investment.

Much further east, in the Oakland and Berkeley hills, FHA financing by 1937 was already leading to new construction for middle- and upper-class white home buyers. These neighborhoods were perched high above the bay with gorgeous views of San Francisco. "Most of the new construction has been financed with FHA loans," the HOLC reported of the hillside district known as Wilshire Heights near Joaquin Miller Park. In a nearby neighborhood, known as Oakmore, new homes were also "largely financed by FHA loans." Even in the Great Depression years of the late 1930s, these "tree-covered slopes" were attractive for developers, who built speculative homes on the assumption that buyers would eventually materialize.

Original Post 

Creedence Clearwater Revival -- specifically, John Fogerty -- Vietnam, music, and the music that connected most with those going to Vietnam. Really, really amazing. 

"Fortunate Son" -- perhaps the most iconic.
"I Put A Spell On You" -- best cover?

1969: the best year ever for music. 

From November 1, 2013:

Regular readers know that I feel strongly that the best music of the modern era was from 1969, from the six months preceding, to the six months following that year.

A Song For Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Lingan, c. 2022. 

About John Lingan. 

I can't say for sure, but I think the author's sources were:

• in the public domain;
• extensive interviews with two of the band's members, Stu Cook and Doug Clifford
  
• no interviews with John Fogerty (based what I read in the book, I don't think John Fogerty would give interviews to an author), nor his brother.

I can't recommend this book for those looking to great literature. By page 196, at the end of Chapter 22, I was ready to not only quit reading this book but actually throwing it away. I "knew" what I wanted to know about Creedence Clearwater Revival. The writing had become boring, repetitive.

But then, page 197, really, really good. Vietnam tied everything together. Just as the "rug really tied the room together" in The Big Lebowski. And, oh, by the way, the author throws in The Big Lebowski into this book.

The book explains so much.

Probably the biggest epiphany, insight: why San Fransisco is the way it is today; why it was the way it was in the 60s.

From the book:

Chapter One: Classmates

• 1958.
• Doug Clifford (drums), Stu Cook (bassist), thirteen years old, seventh grade, Portola Junior High, El Cerrito, northeast region of San Francisco Bay.
• KWBR, AM 1310, R&B, Black music.
• Berkeley Hills: highlanders vs the flatlanders
• Doug lived in between
• Stu: Nut Tree in Vacaville, or the Milk Farm in Davis
• I lived in Vacaville for awhile; ate / shopped at the Nut Tree
  

Chapter Two: The Combo

• John Fogerty, a flatlander all his life
• divorced parents; five brothers; he was the middle one; lived with their mother; dirt poor
• John: Portola Junior High, 1958, also, eighth grade 
• older brother Tom (rhythm guitar), graduating from high school
  

Chapter Three: A Grown Man

• Tom joins the combo of three
• known as the Blue Velvets before Tom joined
  

Chapter Four: Blue and Green

• the band graduated high school, 1963
• Stu and Doug prepared to enroll at San Jose State

Chapter Five: Fantasies

• Blue Velvets graduated high school, 1963
• television: US soldiers seen in Vietnam
• JFK assassination
• Ed Sullivan, Sunday, February 9, 1964: the Beatles
• Blue Velvets changed their stage presence: faced the audience
• renamed themselves th Visions
  
• Bob Rafelson

Chapter Six: Freedom Summer

• April, 1964: Ford Mustang introduced
• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began plotting Mississippi Freedom Summer 
• producer/manager named them the "Golliwogs"

Chapter Seven: Humiliation

• end of 1964, the Golliwogs
  

Chapter Eight: A Man of Nature

•  Stu's mother Dolores died of cancer, 1965
• Rafelson project, The Monkees

Chapter Nine: Niitty-Gritty

• war accelerates in Vietnam
• the San Francisco scene well described
• Velvet Underground

Chapter Ten: The Valley of the Black Pig

• Reagan announces he will run for governor, summer of 1966
• at Santa Cruz: Doug and Stu, enamored of Lord of the Rings
• The Monkees still huge and getting bigger
• US presence in Vietnam hitting a peak
• John and Doug: basic training
  

Chapter Eleven: Full-Time

• Tom, married with two kids; 1966
• Golliwogs and "Porterville"
• new contract for John; lots of songs required
  

Chapter Twelve: Revival

• 1967: Golliwogs missed the Monterey International Pop Music Festival 
• name change, evolving: Creedence Clearwater Revival
  

Chapter Thirteen: Strike Time

• 1968: Redwood National Park established
• "Susie Q" cover

Chapter Fourteen: An Incipient Fad

Chapter Fifteen: Grief

• 1968: Robert Kennedy assassinated
• Jefferson Airplane, the Dead, Moby Grape
• "Born on the Bayou"
• Doug got married

Chapter Sixteen: A Crime To Be Young

• 1968: Stu -- only unmarried member of the band
• Beatles by now had established a pattern of double A-side singles, so that became John's standard 
• preparing for New York debut scheduled for October
  

Chapter Seventeen: Disharmony

• 1969
• "Proud Mary"
• John Fogerty goes it alone on the LPs (p. 145)
  

Chapter Eighteen: Rolling

• 1969 begins
• 1,800 B-52's a month into Vietnam

Chapter Nineteen: Rising

• Lou Reed, Velvet Underground
• "Bad Moon Rising"

Chapter Twenty: Smoldering

• CCR had no respect

Chapter Twenty-one: At The Feet of The Gods

• "Bad Moon Rising"
• Easy Rider
• June 22, 1969: Ohio's Cuyahoga River caught fire

Chapter Twenty-two: Songs For Everyone

• Newport '69

Chapter Twenty-three: The Acceptance of Death

• Vietnam, music, and CCR
• this might be the best chapter in the book
• brings everything together

Chapter Twenty-four: Together and Apart

• "Fortunate Son"

Chapter Twenty-five: An Army Growing in Your Guts

• October, 1969
• Chicago, the Weatherman

Chapter Twenty-six: We Shouldn't Be Taken Lightly

• January, 1970

Chapter Twenty-seven: Forward to the Past

• April, 1970
• "Up Around the Bend"
• European tour
  

Chapter Twenty-eight: Bloodbath

• April, 1970
• Ohio Kent State
• Augusta, Georgia
• 'Lookin' Out My Back Door"
• many songs

Chapter Twenty-nine: Good Business

• "Cosmos's Factory"
• three deaths in just over a month
• Alan Wilson of Canned Heat, September 3
• Jimi Hendrix, September 18
• Janis Joplin, October 4

Chapter Thirty: The Oldest Young Man

• chapter ends, February, 1971

Chapter Thirty-one: Blue Again

• Tom leaves the band

Chapter Thirty-two: The Shit Kicker Three

• May 19, 1970; Creedence TV special aired in syndication
• on tour again
• by the end of 1971, Creedence had sold a total of $100 million
• the year began with John Lennon telling Rolling Stone, he liked CCR
• the year ended with Waylon Jennings praising CCR

Chapter Thirty-three: Savaged

• they toured more as a trio than a quartet
• the band dissolves when John tells Stu he doesn't want to do this any more

Chapter Thirty-four: The Music in Our Heads

• the contract was still in effect
• the four still had to make music
• October, 1972: the press said the band had broken up but was amicable
• inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, their first year of eligibility
• p. 305: The Big Lebowski
• July, 2021: "Have You Ever Seen The Rain" -- took the number one spot on the Billboard Rock Digital Sales chart, fifty years after its release
• "with one member fallen, two retired, and the last still going under his own name, a brotherhood built and broken, it was the band's first number one single"