Not every career-defining concert is going to be smooth sailing for the band, which is something John Fogerty and the rest of CCR learned the hard way while narrowly avoiding disaster multiple times during a midnight (or 2 a.m., depending on who you ask) set on a wet, poorly grounded stage set up in the middle of Max Yasgur’s farmland in upstate New York on Sunday, August 17, 1969. This was, of course, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.
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Considering the sheer size and enduring legacy of this festival, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume the experience was great for the artists, too. But that assumption would conveniently ignore rainstorms, shoddy electrical wiring, and a surplus of psychedelic drugs that led to CCR excluding the concert footage from the documentary that came out the following year. “We had this thing about big shows,” CCR drummer Bill Kreutzmann said in 2015. “[The set] was so bad that we didn’t allow it to be in the movie. It was terrible.”
According to Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, who went on just before CCR, the band(s) were honestly lucky to walk away from the festival unscathed. “The stage was wet,” Weir told Guitar Player. “The electricity was coming through me. I was conducting. Touching my guitar and the microphone was nearly fatal. There was a great big blue spark about the size of a baseball. And I got lifted off my feet and sent back eight or ten feet to my amplifier.”
If that had happened during the CCR set, the people up front likely wouldn’t have even noticed.
John Fogerty on Near-Disastrous CCR Set at Woodstock
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair organizers promised Creedence Clearwater Revival a primetime slot on Saturday night of the gargantuan festival. But they made the same promise to the Grateful Dead, who, unsurprisingly, ate up so much stage time that CCR didn’t take the floor until closer to midnight. (John Fogerty says it was even later, around 2 in the morning.) “I come running out ‘cause this was a big chance,” Fogerty recalled to Guitar Player. “There was a half a million people there. And I look down there. I see a bunch of people who look a lot like me, except they’re naked. And they’re asleep.”
“They were all kind of piled together,” the frontman continued. “It looked like one of those pictures of the souls coming up out of Hell, like Dante’s Inferno or something. But they were all asleep. So, we started rocking out in the middle of the night, and in the middle of nowhere, trying to get things going here. And waaay out there, about a quarter mile, some guy is flicking his lighter. He says, ‘Don’t worry about it, John! We’re with ya!’ So, in front of a half a million people, for the rest of my big Woodstock concert, I played for that guy.”
For bands like CCR, the opportunity to perform a set at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was a career-defining opportunity. Although the band opted not to have their set in the Woodstock documentary from 1970, Fogerty said, “After a couple of days, I realized, ‘What the heck, that’s just one disappointment. Credence is still moving forward. So, I didn’t worry about it too much.”
Photo by Tucker Ranson/Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
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