Among rock and roll’s lost albums, Magic Window by Doug “Cosmo” Clifford, who gained fame as drummer for Creedence Clearwater Revival, might be the only one whose reemergence came thanks to a bit of tidying. Clifford was cleaning his garage when he happened upon tapes from 1985 containing over 100 songs on them. He chose the best for Magic Window, which gets its release this week.
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Clifford spoke to American Songwriter about the serendipitous turn of events. We asked him if he was surprised by anything he found on the tapes once he unearthed them after they sat around for 35 years. “What surprised me is that they played,” he laughs. “I had to take all the reels and do the baking process and they all came out flawless. Sounded like I just recorded it a week ago. There’s some pretty cool stuff on there. When I listen to it, it’s like it’s a new band. It’s not like I’m listening to my own stuff.”
The saga of Magic Window began in the mid-80s when Clifford found himself inspired by the scenery around his Lake Tahoe home. “I had a studio in my house,” he remembers. “We were 1,000 feet above the lake and you could see 60 miles in every direction, a beautiful lake view. That was the magic window actually, looking out there when I was writing. We recorded the stuff and didn’t get an offer (from a record company) right away.”
While waiting for a record deal, Clifford became involved with environmental issues surrounding the Lake Tahoe area. When they subsided, he moved on to other musical projects and the songs that would eventually comprise this album were left behind. Until now, that is.
Once he found the tapes, the process of creating the songs started to come back to him. “I’d just get behind the piano and look out the magic window and hope for a tune to come by,” Clifford remembers. “I was writing what was happening on the radio or MTV. I wanted to have songs that had nice grooves. That’s my expertise. I spent a lot of time on it and had good guys working with me on it. The vibe was always good. But I skipped over things. Lo and behold, I’m glad I didn’t throw that stuff out.”
The songs on Magic Window, which include Clifford on drums and vocals, Russell DaShiell on lead guitar, Chris Solberg on bass, and Rob Polomsky, who co-wrote many of the tracks with Clifford, on rhythm guitar, definitely sound very much of that era, albeit with a lean, tough rhythmic punch that keeps them from seeming too dated. And Clifford proves a soulful vocalist, something that many might not have expected. He capably handles harder-rocking songs like the title track and “Don’t Let Go,’ as well as gentle ballads like “Just Another Girl” and “Don’t Leave Me Alone Tonight.”
“I worked really hard on the vocals, knowing that if I’m gonna make this work, that had to be fixed for lack of a better term,” Clifford explains. “I spent a lot of time on my vocals. You can do that when you have your own studio. You can take as much time as you want. It’s the best that I’ve ever been able to sing.”
Creedence fans will also love the throwback sound of “Born On The South Side,” which finds Clifford looking back nostalgically at his musical roots. “That drum groove is definitely something that I probably played on a record or two of Creedence,” he says.
Diehard CCR fans might know that Clifford has one other solo album in his catalog: 1972’s Cosmo. But he says that wasn’t meant to be an artistic statement of any kind. “The first one I did was really an experiment. The band had broken up. We still had the lease on Cosmo’s Factory. And it had a big rehearsal area with 16-foot long drapes. It had a decent sound, but we had never recorded in there. Remote trucks were becoming popular in LA and there were none in the Bay Area. So our plan, with Russ Gary (CCR’s engineer), Stu Cook (CCR’s bassist) and myself, was that we would have a production company. We would lease the truck out.”
“Well, we had terrific-sounding recordings. But I didn’t spend a lot of time on it as an artist. In fact, that was not the idea. But I always wanted to play with a horn section, so I got the Tower of Power horns. I always wanted to do an album with my buddy Duck Dunn, so we had Duck Dunn in there. Stu always wanted to play rhythm guitar, so he did. The record was not really meant as a work of art.”
Clifford has a different feeling about this album. “The thing that’s great about Magic Window is that I’m the artist here,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of hats that I’m wearing. I’m not just the drummer in the band. Not that that’s a bad thing if the band is Creedence Clearwater Revival.”
Even though he recently retired from touring with Cook as Creedence Clearwater Revisited, Clifford still has a lot of music in the hopper. There is at least another album’s worth of material from the found tapes, and he’s been writing songs with other artists in the hopes that they could do the singing. In the meantime, he’s proud to finally give Magic Window its long-awaited release.
“I hear songs in there and I listen to them from afar really like it’s somebody else’s music,” Clifford says. “And I say, ‘I like that one.’ It’s such a great surprise to just fall out of the sky.”
