When one thinks about Creedence Clearwater Revival the terms “psychedelic” or “avant-garde” usually don’t come to mind. The Bay Area unit was first and foremost a rock-n-roll group, their unpretentious, southern-flavored style standing in contrast to psychedelic rock, and San Francisco jam bands like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. So, it might come as a surprise—as it’s rarely talked about—but CCR did actually dabble in psych and the avant-garde.

While Creedence’s self-titled debut album, released in the summer of 1968, did include a handful of songs with psychedelic elements, and the group would stretch out on some of their subsequent album tracks, few would categorize any of it as experimental. One notable exception is the final number on their sixth LP.

Released in December 1970, Pendulum did expand on the CCR formula, bringing horns and keyboards into the mix, but even still, this wouldn’t have prepared Creedence fans for the album’s closing number, “Rude Awakening #2.” This instrumental starts off sounding very much like a standard CCR tune, before morphing into something else altogether. It’s definitely psychedelic, but also has dramatic qualities. To my ears, it sounds inspired by the Sgt. Pepper’s track, “A Day in the Life.” It’s definitely weird, but, ultimately, the song doesn’t really go anywhere, and after six-plus minutes, “Rude Awakening #2” simply fades out.
 

 
In his autobiography, Fortunate Son, band leader John Fogerty wrote about the track.

The only thing we ever really collaborated on as a band was the six-minute-plus instrumental with sound effects called “Rude Awakening #2.” (Which begs the question, what was “Rude Awakening #1”?). The Beatles had done this “sound collage” called “Revolution 9”; that type of thing was in the air. I’d recorded a beautiful fingerpicking song that I did with a split pickup guitar. I liked the song, but the stuff added on after it is just free-form nonsense. Doug [Clifford, drummer] farts on the track—that was his contribution. So that’s the one and only Creedence collaboration. A masterpiece? No.

 
I would definitely agree that “Rude Awakening #2” isn’t CCR’s pièce de résistance, but I think the comparison to “Revolution 9” is more apt in regard to an even more bizarre Creedence work.
 

 
A couple of months prior to the release of Pendulum, a promotional-only CCR 45 was sent to radio stations. The two-part “45 Revolutions Per Minute” was described by Fogerty in Fortunate Son as a “little two-sided narrative for the fans.”
 

 
While the text on the cover of indicates the 7-inch is “meant to thank radio disc jockeys,” the record is, in part, a parody of the sort of interviews in which band members are asked the usual, banal questions by dopey DJ’s. It’s also the strangest thing Creedence ever issued, an avant-garde exercise with lots of tape manipulations and sound effects. Think “Revolution 9” and the Beatles’s wild comedy number, “You Know My Name (Look up the Number).”
 
More after the jump…

 
I won’t hear any badmouthing of John Fogerty on my internet. John Fogerty is tops. If he’d drunk a bottle of poison after recording “Proud Mary,” we’d still remember him as a peer of Bob Dylan and the Beatles. But Fogerty left the cyanide on the shelf and led Creedence Clearwater Revival for an astonishing run of hit singles and albums, every last one of which (okay, maybe not Mardi Gras, but that leaves six LPs of quality) belongs in the collection of even the most half-assed, fair-weather, penny-pinching, Sunday-driving, miserable, mean, craven self-abnegating rock fan. I guarantee it!

So it is not to mock Fogerty that I draw your attention to a low point in his career, but to praise him. Behold: this lowly nth-generation bootleg of this ridiculous album, Hoodoo, which was to have been his second solo LP before he destroyed the tapes—even this sorry thing, with its stiff beats, gratuitous synths and friendly gestures toward the disco audience, is like unto one of Paul Bunyan’s labors compared with the bleats of today’s puny “Americana” people. It’s pretty good!

Hoodoo sure is weird, though. Since none of the surviving images of the cover are up to DM’s standards, let me tell you about it. Picture Fogerty’s name (in yellow) and the album title (in blood red) printed in the kind of Gothic script you’d expect to find on a Hellhammer LP. Below stands Fogerty, his sunburst-finish Fender slung over a black jacket embroidered with a crescent and a pentagram, his right hand raised in warning to point at some haint or zombie lurking just over your shoulder. And if you were there with him at the photo shoot, you’d be pointing at the exact same spot, because there’s a fucking knight in a full suit of armor over Fogerty’s right shoulder. The overall effect: you’re gazing into a magic mirror that reveals you to yourself as John Fogerty, trapped between worlds in the Pit of Souls.
 

 
In 1976, “You Got The Magic” b/w “Evil Thing,” the lone single from Hoodoo, “managed to escape,” in Fogerty’s words, before he and the label agreed to flush the album down history’s toilet. Here’s how it happened, according to last year’s Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music:

Joe Smith was now the head of Asylum, and just before my new album Hoodoo was to be released, he requested to meet with me in Los Angeles. Very gingerly, he said, “This isn’t very good, John. We’ll put it out if you want us to. We just kind of feel like it’s not up to your level.” You can’t be any more generous or diplomatic than the way Joe Smith handled it. That was hard for him to do. You have to be able to be brutally honest if you’re ever going to be worth a crap.

It was hard for me to hear it, too. Nobody likes to hear, “You stink!” But they didn’t really have to twist my arm too much. I kind of knew it in my heart. “On the Run” was one of the songs on Hoodoo. I could never quite get the words to make sense. Funny: about a week before I wrote this chapter I was still trying to write that song. People under duress will do stuff because of a deadline, let it go, call it finished when they really don’t think it’s finished. My head just wasn’t right. I was in a bad way. The one-man-band thing was really hard. And the stuff with [Fantasy Records owner] Saul [Zaentz] was eating me up. Those were the hardest times I ever went through up to that point.

Joe Smith was right, of course, and I knew it, so I went back home and instructed my engineer, Russ Gary, to destroy all the Hoodoo tapes. Some things in life it’s better not to get snagged by. It’s better to move on. I didn’t want to have this come out after I’d died in some plane crash. One of the things Joe said to me was, “Why don’t you go home and fix whatever it is that’s bothering you?”

More after the jump…