Creedence Clearwater Revival songs covered by bar bands is my subject this day. IF YOU ARE COVERING CERTAIN selections by this band there is a need to have a guitar tuned a whole-step low, in order to sound “authentic” (*more on this later). I performed CCR covers in rock bands, country bands, and blues bands. In EVERY case fellow musicians made it a point to NOT play the recorded parts like the record, though going to lengths, to be sticklers, about nailing down the part of other cover songs. In country band experiences I saw painstaking effort to mimic a Sawyer Brown or Keith Whitley number, but, sloppily bastardize a CCR song. On rock gigs the players would never think of going astray on ZZ Top or John Mellencamp songs. But, toss Creedence into the set and this really lazy, cheapened attempt at the parts came into play. It was as if the players had never heard the records, though they could not have missed them! I did stints on blues gigs and witnessed the same approach. Thrill Is Gone (BB King) or Pride and Joy (Stevie Ray Vaughan) would be done closely like those covered artists, almost with a religious zeal to do so. However, Suzi Q? The band, at that point, has no recollection OR interest in being true to CCR (though, a cover of Rockabilly’s Dale Hawkins). Here are my direct pointers about this: 1) All the “swampy” songs in key of E7 are DIFFERENT songs. They are not to be adjoined into a Creedence medley. Green River, Born on the Bayou, Suzi Q, and John Fogerty’s Old Man Down the Road are lyrically separate pieces. Each one has a DISTINCT bass guitar line from one to the other. Each GUITAR part is unique and the drums on each song are different song to song. Doug Clifford is one of rock’s great drummers and he played a SPECIFIC part on his kit for EACH SONG. To put all those songs into one big “pot” and play them the SAME WAY is an insult and makes you a cream-puff lounge band. STOP DOING IT. 2) Do the songs in the key Fogerty sings them and you play the authenticity card. It, also, drives the song. Lower the key because you cannot hit the notes, and, you are that ”cream-puff” lounge band. If no one in the band has the high range you might want to do Jimmy Buffett songs or something, instead. 3) Proud Mary, Bad Moon Rising, Fortunate Son, Lodi, Midnight Special, Run Through The Jungle and some others are on that guitar tuned lower*. In fact, the authenticity is really there for a few of these numbers when you combine a standard-tuned guitar WITH one a whole-step lower. Proud Mary is played from an open E chord shape, but, is lower tuned to be an actual D. The voicing CANNOT sound right if it involves only a standard guitar playing open D shape. That is why most bands throw in the towel and do a much-too-fast “race to the fire” rendering of the song, akin to Ike & Tina’s version. CCR’s original is full of soul and has a fantastic groove. Your party-band version takes that all away, and, yes, you just became the “cream-puff” lounge band by doing it in that fashion. Bad Moon Rising has a mesh of the two guitar tunings (standard and low-tuned), with the lower one giving those “Scotty Moore” licks from the E shape (which is D, actually). Those rockabilly licks only come in during the second verse and beyond. YOU CANNOT DO THOSE LICKS on a standard tuned guitar, key of D. You have to be tuned down and have THE E SHAPE for that. Again, don’t, please don’t, lower the key of the song and sound like the cream…….well, you know. In closing, there is such a thing as putting your own stamp on a cover song, something I am in favor of doing. But, if you are guilty of not listening to these great records and hearing WHAT MAKES THEM GREAT, and, bastardizing the parts played out of ignorance, then, go and admit so. Please do not take the lazy way out and insist you are doing it YOUR OWN WAY as an excuse for not knowing your part. How do so many musicians, actual working professionals, treat CCR music as though it is not worthy of solid execution? The band had a few years of being HUGE in rock and pop music, and, are played forever in heavy rotation in many formats. Down On The Corner, Lookin’ Out My Back Door, Who”ll Stop the Rain?, Have You Ever Seen the Rain?, Up Around The Bend and all those previously mentioned-how has a player NOT HEARD THEM ALL a billion times? How did you not notice the bass and drums and guitar and vocal parts? My guess is that the answer is in another question: why do you play Sweet Home Alabama and Mustang Sally too fast?