A Song For Everyone

The definitive biography of Creedence Clearwater Revival, exploring the band's
legendary rise to fame and how their music embodied the cultural landscape of
the late '60s and early '70s

From 1969 to 1971, as the United States convulsed with political upheaval and
transformative social movements, no band was bigger than Creedence Clearwater
Revival. They managed a two-year barrage of top-10 singles and LPs that
doubled as an ubiquitous soundtrack to one of the most volatile periods in
modern American history, and they remain a staple of classic rock radio and
films about the era. Yet despite their enduring popularity, no book has ever
sought to understand Creedence in conversation with their time.

A Song for Everyone finally tells that story: the thirteen-year saga of an
unassuming suburban quartet's journey through the wilds of 1960s pop, and
their slow accrual of a sound and ethos that were almost mystically aligned
with the concerns of decade's end. Starting in middle school, these
Californian friends and brothers cut a working-class path through the most
expansive decade in American music, playing R&B, country, and rock 'n' roll
under a variety of names as each of those genres expanded and evolved. When
they finally synthesized those styles under a new name in 1968, Creedence
Clearwater Revival became instantly epochal, then fell apart under the weight
of personal grievances that dated back to adolescence. As musicians and as
men, they embodied the contradictions and difficulties of their time, and
those dimensions of their career have never been explored until now.

Drawing on wide-ranging research into the social and musical developments of
1959-1972, extensive original interviews with surviving Creedence members and
associates, and unpublished memoirs from people who knew the group closely, A
Song for Everyone is the definitive account of a legendary and still-beloved
American band. At the same time, it is also a cultural history of those same
years--from Elvis to Altamont, Eisenhower to Watergate--seen through the eyes
of four men who encapsulated them in song for all time, told by one of the
rising figures in contemporary music writing.