Someone told me long ago there's a calm before the storm

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

07/03/71 : Pendulum - Creedence Clearwater Revival

Our third trip with CCR and I've apparently enjoyed the previous two, but have to admit I don't really remember anything about them - in my defence, the last one was 5.5 years ago. I'm looking forward to becoming reacquainted with them though - hopefully it will jog my memory.

Yeah, I recognised the general "swamp rock" sound and was surprised to know "Have You Ever Seen The Rain" which I don't think I knew was by them - we've actually previously met a somewhat different version on this. The rest of it is very much in a similar vibe and all well played and perfectly listenable, except when things go a bit off-kilter towards the end of the album on "Rude Awakening #2" (and even worse on "45 Revolutions Per Minute" if you listen to the bonus tracks). It's not really a sound we've heard this year so that was nice - some bits approach Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin, but it's both more restrained and more American (which is an unusual combination). I'm not convinced by the album cover though.

We're at #9 in the charts this week on their eighth week of an eleven week run, with it having peaked at #8 in its eighth and ninth weeks - what a lot of eights and nines there are there! The top five this week were George Harrison,, Elton John, Simon & Garfunkel, Led Zeppelin and Andy Williams with the highest new entry being Neil Diamond (#23) - which was surprisingly also true last week as well.

Wikipedia tells us it's their sixth album (and the second one they released in '70) - apparently it took them a month to complete, which was a long time for them. Part of this is that they had a band meeting before they started it and the people who weren't John Fogerty demanded greater input into the creative process than they had previously been allowed. He agreed and so they all went into the studio with no songs prepared in order to jam and hope something came out of it - and it didn't, so John snuck off home and wrote a load of songs which they used (probably slightly sheepishly). Critically, it was well received, if maybe viewed as not as ground-breaking as their earlier work and commercially, it did well getting to #3 in Germany and Italy, #2 in Canada, The Netherlands and Japan, #1 in Australia, Finland and Sweden and #5 in the US - which is more of a global reach than most albums have shown this year.

discogs.com tells us you're going to have to spend six quid to get hold of a copy of this (I was super pleased to see an 8 track version available) but if you want the limited edition, 180gm vinyl reissue then it's going to set you back £125. I enjoyed this both as a standalone album and also as something a bit different from the rest of the year - it's both of its time and nicely timeless. 

14/03/71 - Another decent enough album