Woodstock was the defining concert of 1960s rock and roll. The three-day event held in August 1969 boasted some of the day’s top acts, including Jimi Hendrix, the Who (whose set was famously interrupted by Abbie Hoffman), and CSN&Y.
But two of the biggest groups to play the festival refused to let their performances be included in the 1970 concert movie or its companion album: the Grateful Dead and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
As it happened, the two groups performed one after the other as Saturday, August 16, turned to Sunday, August 17. And the problems that went down during the Grateful Dead’s set affected CCR’s, causing the group’s set to suffer.
Dead guitarist Bob Weir explained that a downpour made the stage a danger zone.
“The stage was wet, and the electricity was coming through me. I was conducting!” he recalled. “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 10 feet to my amplifier.”
Matters weren’t helped by the fact that the band were incredibly high, resulting in a haphazard performance even before the rain began.
"We had this thing about the big shows — 'blowing the big ones' — and I'm not sure why that was," drummer Bill Kreutzmann told Conan O’Brien in 2015. "It was so bad that we didn't allow it to be in the movie. It was terrible."
CCR guitarist John Fogerty watched it all go down from the side of the stage. He says his group — then one of the biggest acts in rock thanks to 1969 hits like “Proud Mary,” “Born on the Bayou,” “Bad Moon Rising” and “Green River” — were originally scheduled to go on much earlier in the day.
“We were promised a prime time on a Saturday night, like nine o’clock,” Fogerty told O'Brien. “What they didn’t tell me is, ‘You’re gonna follow the Grateful Dead.’
"Things went sorely wrong after they hit the stage. Everybody was running late, of course.
“But what they didn’t tell us until the ’90s was they had all taken LSD just as they went onstage.”
The group’s drug intake, combined with the hazardous stage conditions, caused delays in their set. Fogerty — who at the time was rocking his iconic "ACME" Fireglo Rickenbacker 325 electric guitar — claims that at “about the middle of their set, it went dead silent. It was quiet for about an hour and then they started playing again."
He says Creedence finally went on at “literally 2:30 in the morning” — although many sources say it was actually 12:30 — only to find the audience dead asleep.
"I come running out — ‘cause this was a big chance; there was a half a million people there — and I look down there and 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.
“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.”
After about five songs, he addressed the crowd, hoping to rouse a response from the sleeping masses.
“I said, ‘Well, I hope you’re enjoying some of this. We’re having a great time up here; we just want you to like us,’ you know.”
“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."
In the end, Fogerty decided the muted reception didn’t look or sound good for the group’s image. He refused to let the footage or audio from their set go into the Woodstock film and album.
But ultimately, one bad show wasn’t enough to ruin what ended up being a banner year for Creedence Clearwater Revival.
“We came home, and after a couple of days I realized, ‘What the heck, that’s just one disappointment; Creedence is still moving forward,’” Fogerty recounted to GP. “So, I didn’t worry about it too much.”
Fogerty, who won a 50-year battle for the ownership of CCR’s music in 2023, recently celebrated by releasing Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years, which features his new takes on classic CCR tracks.
