Creedence Clearwater Revival in Dick Clark's American Bandstand, September 20, 1969

Amazingly,

VH-1 gave some air time

to Creedence in early 1997 ...

Review by Stephanie Hanus

Adam and I were fortunate enough to see the two instances of Creedence stuff VH-1 so nicely aired. First was an American Bandstand performance. The whole thing was black-and-white. They lip-synched "Commotion" to start off. "Proud Mary" and "Cross-Tie Walker" were just played for people to dance to, and then Creedence came back to lip-synch "Green River." Dick Clark was doing a top-10 songs countdown, and "Green River" was number one. Some of you may have seen footage of Dick Clark revealing the song being number one on his little chart and then Creedence come in and start to sing it for about 5 seconds. But that was in color, so I don't know the story behind that.

At the end of the show, Dick went over to the band and talked to John for a bit, asking if the whole band contributed to the songs and stuff. John said yeah, they all bounce ideas off each other. And then Dick asked John where Creedence would be in '70, '71, and '72, and John said they'd just try to get all the different types of music they had been playing for 10 years onto records. And that was that.

Then there was the 8-track Flashback that aired Wednesday the 8th [1997]. It was the monogram show, they had bands like BTO and ELO and ABBA, and amazingly Creedence, or CCR rather. Suzanne Somers hosted this show, and she explained the origin of the name after they had been forced by their manager to do the Golliwog thing. Then they showed "Travelin' Band" from the Royal Albert Hall show.