Creedence Clearwater Revival’s music has soundtracked visions of the Vietnam War in pop culture for years now.
In 1969 Nixon was bombing Cambodia in secret, and over 11,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam. However, at the same time Nixon’s daughter had married Dwight Eisenhower’s grandson. John Fogerty read about it in the newspaper and boiled with righteous fury. This day he wrote “Fortunate Son” in just 20 minutes.
He explained in his 2015 memoir:
You’d hear about the son of this senator or that congressman who was given a deferment from the military. They weren’t being touched by what their parents were doing.
Since then Creedence and Vietnam became a true cinematic cliché. By this point, setting a war scene to a Creedence tune is considered to be a huge failure of imagination.
But how did it reach this point, considering most Creedence songs contain no direct reference to the war?
In her book about consumerism in the Vietnam War, historian Meredith H. Lair argues that music was widely used to improve troop morale. Most troops had access to radios, Lair writes, and “by 1969, one-third of American soldiers listened to the radio more than five hours per day.” Presumably, Creedence were getting some airplay.
In his memoir, Fogerty describes being thanked in the ’90s by a Vietnam veteran who said:
‘Every night, just before we’d go out into the jungle, we would turn on all the lights in our encampment, put on ‘Bad Moon Rising,’ and blast it as loud as we could.’
It all started with a movie Who’ll Stop the Rain (named after a Creedence song). The film’s soundtrack uses three Creedence tracks: “Proud Mary,” “Hey Tonight,” and, of course, “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”
Then, in 1979, Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Apocalypse Now hit the silver screen. It had a cover of “Suzie Q” during its disturbing Playmates sequence.
Oliver Stone’s 1989 classic Born on the Fourth of July featured a cover of “Born on the Bayou.”
Then we get Air America drama with Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. featuring “Run Through the Jungle”.
But it looks like the main reason Creedence went viral was that during the ’80s and early ’90s, legally, their music was readily obtainable, because Fogerty had signed away distribution and publishing rights to Fantasy Records.
The final hit movie that solidified Creedence’s affiliation with Vietnam flicks was the 1994 drama Forrest Gump.
“Fortunate Son” was selected by the film’s executive music producer, Joel Sill. Sill decided on a simple rule for the Gump soundtrack: American artists only. The movie became a success and grossed $677 million worldwide.
Despite the fact that the Creedence track was the crown jewel of the score, Fogerty disapproved because he had signed away control of his songs.
Joel Sill:
John didn’t want his music used if Fantasy Records boss Saul Zaentz was going to profit from it. And he really tried to make a case against us being able to use it.”
According to Sill, Fogerty called the president of Paramount Pictures to ask that his music not be used in Gump.
In spite of his efforts, we were able to validate the licensing process. [John’s] position was based on an emotional battle he was having in the business world, and I didn’t want that to affect the film.
In 2005, Fogerty vented to NPR:
Folks will remember Forrest Gump and that was a great movie, but they don’t remember all the really poor movies that Fantasy Records stuck Creedence music into: car commercials, tire commercials.
That’s it, folks. Hopefully, now this pop culture phenomenon makes more sense to you
