Seventies classic, American blues-rock department. Which I’m not embarrassed to enjoy even though it’s all over oldies radio like the plague. You know that weird guilt feeling for liking something that other people also enjoy? Like you shouldn’t be liking it because it’s not ‘yours’? I struggled with that for years. I feel great liking things nobody else likes, but popular things make me feel like a trespasser. Is that weird or is that just the thing that motivates people to become hipsters? That and feeling uncool for liking a band – Creedence in this case – whose only audience at this point is nostalgia-head baby boomers. Which is a misguided attitude but hard to shake. There’s plenty of old bands who’ve come full circle and are enjoying the warm embrace of pop culture once again, because they were ahead of their time in the first place and so sound totally current. You know, like Kraftwerk or Talking Heads. But nobody’s taken up CCR and said ‘oh wow, they were so important and they changed the world’. Because they didn’t. They weren’t particularly earth-changing, in a very crowded field of earth-changing late sixties bands. They just played Southern-style blues rock really, really well. And if you say they were a big influence on Kings of Leon, I’ll say let’s pretend that never happened.
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