But the brevity of the band’s career seems to have contributed to its longevity as a cultural avatar of one hyperspecific era-a particularly tumultuous period that’s constantly depicted onscreen. The band recorded at an absurd pace, releasing three LPs in 1969 alone, and disbanded less than five years after adopting the Creedence name. “Creedence was part of the soundtrack of the time.”Ĭreedence’s career was a model of speedy efficiency: seven albums in four years. “That was when the band was popular,” says bassist Stu Cook. Most Creedence songs contain no direct reference to the war (though “Run Through the Jungle” is frequently misinterpreted as such), but they do evoke a period when the war dominated American life. (Plenty of non-Vietnam-related films set in that era use Creedence songs for this purpose too, including Rudy, My Girl, and Remember the Titans, to name a few.) And culturally, the band’s roots-rock hooks functioned as a nostalgic shorthand, immediately situating scenes in the late ’60s or early ’70s. In his memoir, Fogerty describes being thanked in the ’90s by a Vietnam veteran who told him that his squad routinely played Creedence to prepare for combat: “‘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.’”īut during the ’80s and early ’90s, music supervisors increasingly latched onto Creedence for two underlying reasons: Legally, the music was readily obtainable, because Fogerty had signed away distribution and publishing rights to Fantasy Records (a decision he’d later regret).
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 was getting some airplay. Lair argues that music was widely used to improve troop morale. In her book about consumerism in the Vietnam War, historian Meredith H. Was Creedence actually popular among the troops? Maybe. as Vietnam-era pilots caught in a drug-smuggling ring. A decade later, the trend started to really catch on: 1969, a meditation on the war’s impact on a small town released in 1988, used “Green River,” while Oliver Stone’s 1989 classic Born on the Fourth of July featured a cover of “Born on the Bayou.” The following year, “Run Through the Jungle” was used in the widely panned Air America, starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. Then, in 1979, Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam-set war epic, used Flash Cadillac’s cover of “Suzie Q” (a song popularized, though not written, by Creedence) during its disturbing Playmates sequence.
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