One of the original “jam bands”, the Grateful Dead are famous for their long, sprawling songs that seem to go on forever, that seem to be going nowhere in particular and getting there slowly. And if they went on for a long time on the albums, then you could bet they’d be twice the length or more in concert.
At 46 minutes, their live album Playing in the Band, Seattle, Washington, 5/21/74, contains just one song. It was their longest continuous recorded track ever, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary for them to drag tracks out for 30 minutes or more at their shows on a regular basis.
Some people call the Grateful Dead the best band America has ever produced, but not everyone agrees with that line of thinking. Speaking about the music of the late 1960s and early ’70s with Uncut in 2006, Creedence Clearwater Revival bandleader John Fogerty remembered, “At the time, there were a lot of songs – by the Dead, the Airplane – where it got very boring for many, many minutes.”
It’s no surprise that frontman John Fogerty wasn’t a fan of the long, meandering jams favoured by bands like the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane. Most of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s biggest hits barely reach the three-minute mark. Tracks like ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain?’ (2:40), ‘Fortunate Son’ (2:20), ‘Bad Moon Rising’ (2:21), ‘Up Around the Bend’ (2:39), and ‘Proud Mary’ (3:07) are lean, concise, and impactful. CCR mastered the art of packing their soulful blend of bluesy roots, rhythms, and rock into songs that made a lasting impression in a short span. By the time CCR could play through their whole album, The Dead might still be on their first track.
But for their first release in 1968, Fogerty did want to try his hand at something a little longer, to see if he could come up with something slightly more interesting and exciting in a long song than other bands of his day were doing.
“Since the guys in Creedence were not world-class musicians, I would arrange the song so that it kept movement going,” Fogerty explained to Uncut. And you can hear that sense of movement in the song. At a mammoth, by their standards, eight minutes and 37 seconds, the track is something of a slow-burn blues groove. The beating heart of the number is the rhythm section, which gives it a quiet propulsion and leaves plenty of space for the lead guitar to occasionally explode into life for a blistering solo.
“Three months before we recorded ‘Suzie Q’, we sounded like your average, low-on-the-totem-pole bar band. Which is what we were,” he added. “I just kind of grabbed the reins, and it shaped up our ragtag little band into something that sounded pretty good very quickly. We weren’t whizz-bang, world-class virtuosos, and our strength was in the groove we could create together.”
By their next album, they had extended that grooving out into more of their music. Only one song in 1969’s Bayou Country was under three minutes, while three were now over five minutes. They never did record one that lasted 46 minutes, though.
