Were CSNY really considered the "American Beatles" in the early to mid 1970s?

If you mean the Hamburg Beatles, then yes!

 

Absolutely.

I also think this thread is being wrongly looked at as a CSNY vs Beatles thread. Being called the "American Beatles" isn't mean they're being put up against the Beatles.


Oh I wouldn't put CCR near any of that. CSNY is infinitely above CCR.

 

I've never seem a map or a globe that labeled anything "the Americas". Saying that is about like believing there are 52 states in the US.

 

I think you really nailed the question right here. I remember reading that all 4 solo albums were big hits, I have them all and really enjoy them. I think Stills' album is the best, with Nash coming in a close second. Croby and Young's are good too, but IMO Stills and Nash's albums are very equal in terms of quality. As you point out, if CSNY had been able to stay together, those four debut albums alone would have provided enough material for four or five CSN(Y) albums, plus if they could have used some of Stills' Manassas songs and some of Young's songs from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After The Gold Rush CSNY would have had a heck of a discography, but the egos and drugs make that impossible. It's a shame in a way because it would be interesting to hear some of those songs given the group treatment, although the 1974 set does do that, and I really enjoyed hearing the group doing sole songs like Love The One You're With, On The Beach, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Chicago and others.

But just some random thought from reading through everything, I think Stills and Crosby would've at the time had the opinion that they were the Beatles "sucsessors", Stills seems to have a high opinion of himself, as does Crosby. Not trying to bash them, I love their work, but they have pretty big egos. I could never see Young thinking or saying they were the "new Beatles" or something similar, I think he'd just say the he is is own person, if that makes sense. Nash seems pretty humble and I don't see him thinking that either.

As many of you have stated, I think it more of a PR thing, but I wouldn't be surpised if Stills or Crosby helped get that line in the book. And as stated they really do pound you with shots of stadiums full of people, almost too much, I get that the concert were sold out, I would've like to have seen more pic like the ones where they are rehearsing privately at Neil's place or the pic of Neil banging away on that little typewriter. I did like the pic of the topless girl on the guy's shoulders, that's a perfect pic of a time that no longer exists.

I remember reading that Paul McCartney said CCR was his favorite band, I think this was in 1969. And in the unauthorized bio of CCR it talks about CCR holding a big party for the release of Pendulum, I thought this chapter from the book was interesting, it shows that bands as big as CCR strived to be the "new Beatles".

In an uncharacteristic move, the band hired the Hollywood PR firm of Rogers and Cowan to help launch Pendulum. Almost immediately, some band members were unhappy with the arrangement. “Rogers and Cowan’s idea of promotion was to get you the key to the city, and have a day named after you,” mused Stu. “We had no idea how to control the hype that grew out of the Rogers and Cowan PR machine.” Part of Rogers and Cowan’s plan involved a huge press and VIP party to preview the album. They invited 200 journalists, deejays, and key retailers to listen to the record, watch the National General In Concert television show, have a couple of meals with the band, do interviews, and watch the band play on their home turf, in the Factory. “The night of the generals,” is how both Jake Rohrer and John Fogerty refer to the event. “After Pendulum was recorded,” John recalls bitterly, about six weeks after the BAND MEETING, we planned a big coming-out press party, just two and a half years into our career. I call it the Night of the Generals, everybody was now a general, no soldiers to do the work. We hired Rogers and Cowan to proclaim that the tyranny was over, Creedence was now a democracy. I went along with it, there wasn’t much else I could do. Yet that’s what they wanted, so I took a big swallow, and thought, “Ooookay.” The guys all talked to Rolling Stone and the rest of the press about how they were going to be singing and writing, making up their own music parts instead of following John. As a surprise to me, I even had to get up and say something nice about Saul Zaentz. I swallowed hard and told the story about how Saul had loaned the band $1,200 so we could buy a new Kustom Amp. “We had retained this high-powered, Hollywood PR firm, Rogers and Cowan,” Rohrer adds. They had heavy-duty Hollywood credentials and many big stars in their roster. Bobbi Cowan was in charge of our account. I liked Bobbi, an energetic and personable gal, but the boys from Berkeley didn’t really fit into the Hollywood scene. I found it all very foreign to our root beliefs. For the release of Pendulum, she wanted this big party for the press at the Factory. We’d fly in all the prestigious rock journalists from all over the country, have a big dinner party, the band would perform, and we’d show them a good time and play the new album for them. This would continue to rocket Creedence into the stratosphere where each member would have a star of equal brilliance. Of course it was ********. Tom really thought it would help establish Creedence at the top of the heap, ignoring the fact that they had already arrived there just being themselves. We were all feeling the reverberations from the band’s internal struggle. I worked hard to represent the band in a positive light.

“For all Creedence’s immense popularity,” wrote cultural critic Ellen Willis, “John Fogerty never made it as a media hero, and the group never crossed the line from best-selling rock band to cultural phenomenon … but then no recent pop performers have attracted anything like the Creedence audience, which during that peak year included hard-core rock-and-roll fans and hard-core freaks, high school kids and college students, AM and FM—in short, closely resembled that catholic rock audience whose loss we mourn.” As might be expected, many rock writers—fiercely independent and antiestablishment themselves—were put off by this obvious PR overkill. “John Fogerty”, wrote rock journalist Al Aronowitz, “has been telling members of the Rock Press that he wants his group to have the same cultural import as the Beatles.” Aronowitz quoted the itinerary for the event: “Hi! Welcome to the CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL GALA. We’ve planned a wild wicked weekend (with the help of our record company—Fantasy-Galaxy Records), a once-in-a-lifetime spin through the center of American political activism.” Many members of the press questioned both why they were there and whether the trip really was necessary. After all, CCR was the most successful group in the world. Pendulum shipped a million copies off the bat. The group obviously didn’t have anything to prove to the public—which left the press. “This would appear a somewhat redundant exercise,” wrote the influential Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, “albeit tax deductible, but in fact it wasn’t. Creedence finds itself in a quandary as perplexing as it is enviable.

The band has turned off the kind of fan who exults every time he identifies a chord change, who assumes a single is a bad record and who talks about rock rather than rock and roll. Worse still, Creedence has not infused its public with the kind of ardor public idols are expected to expect …. Creedence is tired of being just friends. “It was apparently John’s subalterns (you remember Tom? Doug? Stu?), double bridesmaids, who felt the need for this most and pushed for the December bash in which journalists from everywhere were flown to Berkeley and housed and fed for a weekend,” he added. “But it was strictly a flannel-shirt affair. Although the party was timed to coincide with the release of Creedence’s sixth LP, Pendulum, there was none of the superliminal exposure that is the normal price of such gatherings. The sound system played classical music, unobtrusively. In return for several good meals and unlimited booze in the famous Factory, the journalists had to sit through a one-hour television film on the group, screened specially at a downtown movie house, and a twenty-five-minute set comprising two new songs and ‘Grapevine’ which left everyone shouting for an encore that did not materialize.” “The idea of Creedence as a new ‘supergroup’ or set of culture heroes is a curious one,” Rolling Stone’s John Lombardi commented. Still, the members of the group felt that they weren’t getting the respect they deserved from the rock writers. “I think that the press just doesn’t believe our success,” John complained. “I mean, if groups like Led Zeppelin or Grand Funk Railroad or Chicago or ourselves can sell out huge stadiums, obviously some of the critics don’t know what’s happening.” “Everyone has the most ****ing respect for the Beatles,” Doug lamented to Lombardi. “Well, we’re the biggest American group. We put out quality records. We go over and over our songs. We rehearse hours every day. Nothing bad gets out under our name. We have artistic control. We even carry our own sound system. We shouldn’t be taken lightly. You can’t sell that many records and be taken lightly.” “Sometimes, reading the reviews,” John concured, “it seems like ‘ho-hum, another hit for Creedence.’ ” In all, the band spent about $30,000 on the junket. There were signs of internal dissension at the junket party. Stu Cook beefed to Lombardi about lack of respect he felt the band received. “We’re tired of that riff about [being] John Fogerty’s backup band.” “Creedence,” Jake Rohrer reflected, “was more of an entity than an individual. They always wanted to push the individual, get individual photos and names and that sort of thing out there, but it never succeeded. Creedence was Creedence.” Tom Fogerty, although one of the instigators of the party, ironically became reticent during the event. He’s the only band member not directly quoted in the coverage. He was fighting his own personal demons. “Tom and the other band members wanted to write songs,” Gail Fogerty says. “John’s songs were so good, and I think Tom was just frustrated by it all.”

Everyone left the party with a copy of Pendulum. If the party succeeded in anything, it made the critics more thoughtful. Still, they were divided over the group’s more ambitious undertaking “Grander still was the music itself,” wrote Robert Christgau, “including a saxophone solo and girlie choruses and lots of John Fogerty organ and even some audible overdubbing here and there. Unfortunately, richer does not mean better. Fogerty felt he had to go somewhere from all that economical guitar-playing and hard-rocking backup, which is understandable, and that he should choose for his inspiration Booker T. Jones and a dollop of Terry Riley is typical of the fine taste in influences which his song selection has always demonstrated. In fact, the album’s ambitions were so intelligent that kindness was almost mandatory …. Ho-hum, another brilliant Creedence album.” “There appears to be something about John Fogerty’s approach that is ideally suited to the demands of a three-minute single,” Jon Landau wrote in Rolling Stone, “and out of place in the context of a 40-minute album. His taste is too predictable, his mind too tight and his hand too heavy. Over a three minute span, tightness and orderliness can be virtues; over 40-minutes, they can be deadening. “Pendulum is Creedence’s attempt to prove that the album can be their medium, too,” he adds. “On it, they introduce John Fogerty’s piano and sax playing as regular features…. On ‘Sailor Man’ [sic—the song is actually called “Sailor’s Lament”] some of the stylistic nuances of the album emerge. The recording is perfectly clean, with each track separate and distinct …. All the elements of great rock and roll are present on some of this album and yet none of it ever becomes great rock and roll.” “I confess to being awed by their professional acumen (or is it the expertise of JC Fogerty alone, who has written, arranged and produced all the tracks here that deserves such respect?),” wrote Peter Reilly in his “Super Pro”-rated performance, “Excellent”-rated recording review in Stereo Review. “This group is so smoothly integrated, so slick in performance, and so professionally assured that it would be like trying to take apart a wafer thin Swiss watch to analyze it.” Many commercial copies of Pendulum were packaged with a copy of John Hallowell’s Inside Creedence. The book took about six weeks from the time it was conceived until it was actually published. “About a month after he was with the band,” notes Bob Fogerty, “there was a book. It was so quick.” The reviews for the book were terrible. “Inside Creedence, written in a spastic, pseudo-Tom Wolfe style, goes from just plain silly to downright offensive”, wrote Richard Cromelin. Dripping with dropped names of Hollywood stars Hallowell has interviewed, the book is marked by a complete lack of perception into the youth culture and its music … One problem is the mere presence of these rock gods seemingly reduces him to a state of giddy, reeling incoherence in which he raves like a fawning and devoted press agent about every inspired blink of a Creedence eye. The potent combination of too much coffee and some loud rock sends him on mind-blown flights during which he makes such intriguing discoveries as: (1) there is a lot of sex (“S-E-X!” he sniggers more than once) in rock ‘n’ roll; (2) rock musicians emit much energy at a recording session, and (3) the police club kids at rock concerts.

The ever-hip Village Voice critic Robert Cristgau ripped the biography calling it “positively bad”: John Hallowell’s Inside Creedence, is an authorized biography by a former Life staffer with a penchant for amazement and inappropriate analogies. Bantam peddled it for a dollar with merchandising keyed to Pendulum—both were graced with the very same dumb cover photo. It wasn’t just that it looked like a fan-book, thus supporting the teen image the group is uneasily trying to shake, but that it really is a fan-book. The music, after all, simultaneously transcends and elevates its image, as rock and roll always has. John Hallowell, however, lacks John Fogerty’s genius for generous deception. If John (and Tom and Doug and Stu) is less than a demigod, you won’t find out from Inside Creedence. He is a humble leader and they his admiring but self-sufficient henchmen. Hallowell refuses to discuss drugs, and although he babbles about the group’s sex appeal with all the jittery wistfulness of a man who wishes he were twenty-three again, he never explores concretely or analytically Fogerty’s assertion that the group tries to “avoid the cliche uses of sex” …. Although a silly book won’t ruin Creedence, it does demonstrate how difficult the task of achieving a new level of seriousness without abandoning the old is going to be. Despite the critics’ carping, with a million copies of Pendulum sold out of the box, both Fantasy and the group knew that they didn’t have to worry about the fans. The people who had become devoted to the group over the past two years remained devoted. The party topped off another banner year for CCR. They received an Outstanding Contribution award from Soul magazine. The Music Operators of America, the organization of Juke Box Owners, named them Artists of the Year. Billboard named them Top Album Artist, as well as the top pop group in the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Switzerland, Norway, and Israel. The readers of England’s New Musical Express voted them top international pop group, and the readers of England’s Record Mirror named them Top Male Pop Group. The Italian critics named them the best foreign group. They received Germany’s Musikmart and Golden Otto awards and Mexico’s Golden Clover. The Recording Industry Association of America named them the Top Gold Record artists of the year. The National Association of Recording Merchandisers honored them as the year’s top-selling artists. They would never see the likes of such a year again.
Bordowitz, Hank (2007-07-01). Bad Moon Rising: The Unauthorized History of Creedence Clearwater Revival (p. 115). Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition.

Thanks for all the responses, it's cool to hear from everyone who was around back then (no offense ). Sorry the post got a little long,









.

 

I have a vague recollection reading of CSNY's annointment as the American Beatles in some early back issue of Rolling Stone. However, that would be at odds with their review of DEJA VU in May 1970:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/deja-vu-19740501

By Langdon Winner

Along with many other people, I had hoped that the addition of Neil Young to Crosby, Stills, and Nash would give their music the guts and substance which the first album lacked. Live performances of the group suggested that this had happened. Young's voice, guitar, compositions and stage presence added elements of darkness and mystery to songs which had previously dripped a kind of saccharine sweetness. Unfortunately, little of this influence carried over into the recording sessions for Déjà Vu. Despite Young's formidable job on many of the cuts, the basic sound hasn't changed a whit. It's still too sweet, too soothing, too perfect, and too good to be true.


Take for example all of side two. Here we have a splendid showcase of all the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young strong points — precision playing, glittering harmonies, a relaxed but forceful rhythm, and impeccable twelve-string guitars. But are there any truly first rate songs here? If there are, I don't hear them. David Crosby's "Deja Vu" has little or no tune and fails totally to capture the eerie feeling that accompanies a real deja vu experience. "Our House" by Graham Nash is a flyweight ditty with nothing to say and makes this clear through its simpering melody. Steve Stills' "4+20" conjures up some quiet enigmas, but with such tepid questions at stake, who really cares? Neil Young's "Country Girl" continues his tradition of massive production numbers which includes the masterful "Broken Arrow" and "Down By The River." But compared to his earlier work, the piece is sadly undistinguished. In both this song and the next one, "Everybody I Love You," Young's voice is absorbed in the major key barbershop harmonizing of the other singers. C, S, N and Y could probably do the best version of "Sweet Adeline" in recorded history.


One's disappointment with the album is heightened by the absurdity of its pretensions. The heralded leather cover turns out to be nothing more than crimpled cardboard. What a milestone — fake leatherette! The grainy portrait of the "Old West" characters on the cover looks less like Billy the Kid, the James Gang and Buffalo Bill than the waiting room for unemployed extras for Frontier Atmosphere Inc. "Now then, which of you desperados is next?" And, of course, the pretty gold leaf lettering turns out to be yellow Reynolds Wrap. Deja Vu would like to convince you that it has roots deep in the American soil. But a closer inspection reveals that its tap root is firmly implanted in the urban commercial asphalt.


There is much on this album of real merit. "Helpless," "Carry On" and "Teach Your Children" are excellent songs, well performed. But for me Crosby, Stills and Nash — plus or minus Neil Young — will probably remain the band that asks the question, "What can we do that would be really heavy?" And then answers, "How about something by Joni Mitchell?"

 

No, he just states as his opinion. He makes a case through the essay, but it is just his opinion. I have a feeling one of members of CSNY wanted that line, IMO.

 

offED topic:

You don't know that North America & South America are known as "The Americas"?
https://www.google.com/search?q=The Americas&rls=com.microsoft:en-US:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&gws_rd=ssl
Saying that is like believing Washington D.C. & Puerto Rico are states... well actually posting that North America & South America aren't known as "The Americas" is 'nuff said!!!

 

I've heard the odd American (a person from the U.S.) say it, usually for ethnocentric reasons.

Nobody I know says that. This includes people from South America. Might as well call it The New World. I think we're over those monikers.

 

Well if he's just presenting his opinion, that's one thing. I think it's a silly statement but okay....if he's talking about how the group was generally regarded by rock fans, I don't think I ever heard such an appellation and certainly it wasn't generally or widely thought.

 

Well I was around and I certainly heard it in the mid 70`s, can`t say where from exactly but it would have come from the British music press I was reading at the time, the NME or Melody Maker. I`m not saying the comparison would have originated in the British music press but I certainly heard/read it at the time.

 

“I don't want to embarrass any other catcher by comparing him to Johnny Bench.”
―Sparky Anderson

 

Do we really want to go by a RS review? Especially one from back then?

 

no, they are a joke...

 

Every time the merit of CSN&Y comes up for discussion, then or now, the answer seems the same: They should've been great, but they weren't.

 

In fairness, Rolling Stone had some pretty harsh words for the British Beatles in November 1969:

 

They were by me, then. Yes.

 

That review is priceless!

 

there will never be an american beatles nor will there ever be a british bob dylan that my friend is the way the cookie crumbles.

 

Rubber Soul certainly took some cues from the Byrds, and not just in George's borrowing of McGuinn's "Bells of Rhymney" riff to create "If I Needed Someone." But the various members in CSNY all had histories that had run more or less in parallel with the Beatles from 1964-67: when they "formed" CSN, they were all roughly at the White Album stage of their careers, and then Déjà Vu was like Abbey Road, where they were fighting over who got how many songs on the album.

 

Never heard that said before, nor can I fathom how anyone could arrive at that idea.

 

I've never heard CSNY referred to as the American Beatles. Not once.
In the early days they would talk up the Byrds that way but that didn't last long.

 

No. Never.

 

If you asked Stills this question, his answer would be a resounding "yes".

 

Nope

 

The Beatles and/or their music appealed to a broader spectrum of Americans. Its impossible to compare them directly to CSN&Y, even at the time, popular as CSNY were .