Sailor's Lament

Background

"Salor's Lament" is an album track of Pendulum, the sixth long-player of Creedence Clearwater Revival. 

The band enriched it's sound by Pendulum. Besides normal guitar-bass-drums treatment, "Sailor's Lament" featured Hammond organ (1), sax and multi-layered backing vocals by the band. Recording of the album took more weeks than any of the previous Creedence Clearwater LPs. Doug Clifford recalled the band spent plenty of time particularly on "Sailor's Lament". 

Journalist Roy Carr described the song in the New Musical Express in December 1970: "The first of many tracks of which the organ predominates in a Booker T. bag. Against an underlying rhythmic foundation of bongoes, bass and drums, John sings the strong melody line with which has a positive West-Indian feel in it, being joined by the rest of the group on the reoccuring "hook" line. Towards the end John blows a rauchy tenor solo which leads into a multi-dubbed riffing sax section prior to returning to the theme." 

Recording session

"Sailor's Lament" is one of the three Creedence Clearwater songs where backing vocals are done by the whole group. In all other songs, harmonies were sung by John Fogerty.   (John Fogerty, Fortunate Son)  

Collector's notes

The "Molina" b/w "Sailor's Lament" single was released with a similar cover sleeve in Germany in July 1972. It was different from the one launched in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. The single was not released in the USA (Peter Koers, Green River: An Illustrated Discography, 1999).  

Live versions

Creedence Clearwater never performed the song live in concert. Neither has John Fogerty done it during his solo years.   

Critical reception

"Potential single material." -Roy Carr, New Musical Express, December 1970.

""Sailor Man," [sic] the second cut, retains something of the "Proud Mary" beat but offers us both piano and sax and a Beatle-like backing chorus. --- On "Sailor Man" [sic] some of the stylistic nuances of the album emerge. The recording is perfectly clean, with each track separate and distinct. The vocals move but in a studied way: Fogerty's voice has none of the sway of his masterpiece. "Proud Mary." It sounds like a great deal of overdubbing was used and that technical perfection was sought at the expense of everything else. There is a mechanical quality to the sound of "Sailor Man" [sic] and much of the rest of the album that is almost inhuman in its cleanliness." -Jon Landau, The Rolling Stone, February 4th, 1971. 

"--- I deeply love 'Sailor's Lament'. My musical knowledge is not very deep, but I suppose it doesn't take a genius to guess that the song is based on about two chords in total, and its repetitiveness could almost be called proverbial, and yet deep down my subconscious..." -George Starostin. 

“---features a huge backing vocal chorus supporting John set to a wonderful rolling keyboard and familiar CCR rhythm guitar work. The saxophone part on this track provides wonderful depth to a CCR ditty." -R. David Smola, Bullz-eye, 2008.

Fans' views

"Has a repetitive baseline but somehow the CCR magic makes it set the tone for the song instead of making it all sound redundant ... but don't ask me how."

(1) According to Doug Clifford, Stu Cook played a solo vox on Pendulum (Wayne Bryman, Discoveries, November 1988). 

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