Midweek Music Break: Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Suzie Q”

Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded this song for their self-titled debut album of 1968. It had originally been written (as with-an-s-not-z “Susie Q”) in 1956 by a rockabilly star named Dale Hawkins, and the Rolling Stones and Johnny Rivers (among others) had covered it already. (You can catch both of their performances on YouTube.) CCR — recently so renamed from (egad) The Golliwogs — were looking about for a song and a sound which would set them apart from the mass of psychedelia-driven bands in the San Francisco area. They didn’t quite succeed right away on that score; the guitar flourishes took a sort of trippy flight every now and then. But John Fogerty’s voice sounded nothing like anyone else’s.

The album version clocked in at eight-and-a-half minutes long, but was broken in half for release as a single (one half of the song on each side of the record). In either short or long form, their “Suzie Q” is a very sly bit of work. It comes sauntering over the horizon of audibility at the start, already (apparently) fully in progress before we hear the first note, and throughout the whole length never surrenders the initial beat. The vocal doesn’t show up until 1:40 in, after a sudden burst of rococo electric guitar, and it doesn’t last long. While it’s present, indeed, it sounds altered somehow. Which it was:

John was also proud of the added vocal effect on the record. “[I] especially [liked] the little effect, the telephone box in the middle. It’s a little funny sounding, but lo and behold, it worked!” Doug [Clifford, drums] adds, “That was kind of a high tech thing for that period. The engineers used this new device. They said, ‘We’ve got this pretty hip deal that makes you sound like Rudy Vallee.’ We said, ‘Hell, we’ll use it.’ John used that just for an effect. At the time, it was ahead of its time.”

[source]

The “telephone box” had nothing to do with the British sort of phone booth; it was — still is, I guess — just an electronic filter to alter the human voice so it sounds like it’s coming through an old-style analogue telephone receiver. It fuzzes the voice and adds a sort of nasal quality to it, evident from the first words out of John Fogerty’s mouth.

Now, about those words…

Here is one Web-offered transcription of Hawkins’s original lyrics. A whole lot of not much at all, hmm? In covering the song, especially for the full eight-minute length, the band had a few options. They could extend the instrumentals; they could repeat the lyrics more than once; they could add new lyrics. They opted to go with all three.

“You know what we’d like to be asked?” Stu [Cook, bass guitar] teased interviewer Harvey Siders. “‘What did we sing in the background of ‘Suzie Q’? Nobody ever asked us about that.”

“Just a whole lot of Moon-June clichés,” Doug volunteered. Nothing more.”

[ibid.]

One story I read (here) was that John Fogerty really disliked simple rhyme schemes, and of course you can’t get much simpler than rhyming the exact same words, over and over. So those moon-June lyrics were intended to intentionally mock easy rhyme schemes. A bit of the old “bite the hand that feeds you” going on, then!

Here’s the album version of the song which would become CCR’s first hit (and the only one which John Fogerty didn’t write):

Speaking for myself, I could probably use an hour-long version of this hypnotic jam-session performance as background, with no sense that it might be overstaying its welcome.