Creedence Clearwater Revival – "Ramble Tamble" (1970)

There’s garbage on the sidewalk

Highways in the back yard

Police on the corner

Mortgage on the home

You may wonder why I consider Creedence Clearwater Revival to be an underrated band.

After all, the group released five top-10 albums in two years – two of those albums made it to #1 – and had a bunch of hit singles as well.  

Drake agrees!

But while CCR had five #2 singles (plus one #3 and one #4), it never had a #1 single.  That fact cries out UNDERRATED to me.

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CCR’s music was as respected by the critics as it was popular with the public – that’s a rare combination.  

As legendary rock critic Robert Christgau wrote this about CCR in a 1969 review of Willy and the Poor Boys, which was the third of those five consecutive #1 albums: “Creedence’s ecumenical achievement is almost unbelievable: this is the only group since the Beatles and the Stones to turn out hit after hit without losing any but the most perverse hip music snobs.”

I’m guessing that not many people think of CCR as being up there with the Beach Boys when it comes to picking who deserves the “Best American Band Ever” crown.  I give the edge to the Beach Boys, but it’s close.

Given the significance of California in the American psyche, it’s no surprise that the two best American bands ever came from there.  The Beach Boys embodied the babes-beaches-and-hot-rods culture of sunny Southern California, while CCR represented the plaid-shirt-wearing folks from the farm towns and forests of not-so-sunny Northern California.  (NOT including San Francisco and the Bay Area, of course.)

The Beach Boys’ greatest records featured the dazzlingly complicated musical constructions of a true genius, Brian Wilson.  Wilson was the master of the recording studio – he threw everything but the kitchen sink into his recordings.

CCR’s John Fogerty was a musical genius, too, but his genius was his ability to strip rock ’n’ roll down to its essential elements.  He kept only what was necessary, and mercilessly discarded everything else.

Fogerty wrote a lot of great two-and-a-half-minute rock ’n’ roll songs.  But his special talent was turning two-and-a-half-minute rock ’n’ songs into seven-minute, eight-minute, or even eleven-minute album tracks.  

Don’t tell me that CCR’s covers of “Suzie Q” (which was 8:37 long) or “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (which clocked in at 11:05) are too long.  If anything, they’re too short.

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The same is true of the CCR song that I believe ranks behind only the absolutely perfect “Fortunate Son” – one of the top ten singles of the golden decade of rock music (1965-1974) – in their oeuvre.

You may never have heard of “Ramble Tamble,” which was the first track on the Cosmo’s Factory album.  I don’t think I heard it until forty-plus years after its 1970 release.

In 2007, AV Club write Steven Hyden proclaimed “Ramble Tamble” to be “the most rockin’ song of all time”:  

Why?  Because “Ramble Tamble” is like two super rockin’ songs in one.  It starts off as a suped-up, proto-punk take on Sun Records rockabilly.  Then, about a minute and a half in, it slows down to a crawl and then dies for just a split-second, starting back up again as a slowly simmering psychedelic blues number anchored by a cascading guitar riff best-described as Abbey Road-esque.   Just as drummer Doug Clifford seems spent from pounding the relentless jam into submission, the Sun sound comes back even faster and angrier than before for the closing minute and a half.  A perfectly satisfying rock tune that meets all the rockin’ criteria more completely than any song I can think of right now, “Ramble Tamble” essentially is a seven-minute mash-up record encompassing the history of blues, country, punk, and psychedelia.  Until I fall in love with a different rockin’ song, I can't imagine anything out-rockin’ it .

(I won’t bother listing all of the criteria Hyden applied in making his decision.  Suffice it to say that one of his criteria for a rockin’ song is that it makes you drive fast – so he gets it.)

By the way, the middle four minutes of “Ramble Tamble” consists of a four-measure, four-chord riff (Am, C, G, D) that’s repeated (with some variation, but not a lot) exactly 25 times – for a total of 100 measures (if my count is correct).

I like “Hey Jude” as much as the next guy, but I’m ready for it to be over by the time it ends.  “Ramble Tamble” is a different story – it could go on for another 100 measures (or even another 200) and I wouldn’t complain.

The same is true of “Born on the Bayou,” “Suzie Q,” and especially “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”  (How CCR ever thought that “Grapevine” would be a good song for it to cover is beyond me.  But they were right.)

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Click here to hear all seven minutes and nine seconds of “Ramble Tamble.”

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