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Willy and the Poor Boys,<br />
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s fourth album, shows a band in the full<br />
flush of success, following two albums that had spent over a year on the<br />
charts (as this one would do), and powered by two hit singles, one of<br />
which would become an anthem for its times.<br />
Willy came out in late 1969, a period when Creedence, surely the<br />
most anomalous band in the “San Francisco” explosion of the late Sixties,<br />
was also proving to be the most commercial and most reliable seller<br />
of them all.<br />
Creedence wasn’t like the other Bay Area bands of the era (I put San<br />
Francisco in quotes above because many of the key players associated<br />
with the city actually hailed from elsewhere: Quicksilver Messenger<br />
Service from Marin County, Country Joe and the Fish from Berkeley,<br />
and the Grateful Dead from Palo Alto) in that the vision John Fogerty<br />
and his bandmates shared didn’t really admit to much of the jam oriented,<br />
solo intensive experimentalism the other bands engaged in. Creedence<br />
had been raised on Top 40, they’d played Top 40, and