Stu Cook has played “Fortunate Son” enough times to make any man want to call it quits—or at least call it a day. After more than half a century of swampy riffs and Vietnam War soundtracking, the Creedence Clearwater Revival bassist has finally decided it’s time to hang it up, but not before one last lap with Creedence Clearwater Revisited, the band he and drummer Doug Clifford spun off for the last 25 years. “We’re still hitting on all eight cylinders,” Cook insists, “but the road’s just not a place you want to be anymore.”
It’s not like the guy’s planning to fade into obscurity. “I don’t have a plan,” he shrugs. “Scuba dive more, play golf, ride my bike… maybe produce some tracks, lay down some bass.” In other words, the exact kind of retirement we’d all like to have. But don’t expect any more endless tours. “There’s more sand in the bottom of the glass than the top right now,” he says, proving once again that musicians have a thing for poetic ways to say “I’m tired.”
Revisited’s farewell tour is part victory lap, part charity mission. One stop in Solana Beach partners with the Museum of Making Music and Friends of San Pasquale Academy. “Music brings energy together in one spot,” Cook says, though he’s under no illusions about it changing the world. “It’s disposable now,” he adds, clearly not thrilled with today’s Spotify generation. “Music may not fix the problems of the world, but it makes your day nicer.”
Cook’s musical day-making started a long time ago—about 60 years, to be exact. “I’ve done Doug for 61 years this September,” he deadpans. That’s Clifford, not the dog. Together they formed The Blue Velvets with John Fogerty in the early ‘60s, but things didn’t exactly explode until CCR’s ridiculous 1969 hat trick: Bayou Country, Green River, and Willy and the Poor Boys all dropped within the same calendar year. “It seemed like one long record to us,” Cook admits. Singles, LPs, whatever—it was all just a rush of music recorded as fast as they could churn it out.
Then there’s Woodstock, a show Cook swears was “just another festival” at the time. “There were bigger festivals, for sure,” he says. “We were just the background music for some other kind of event.” And yet, decades later, Creedence is as tightly woven into the mythos of the ‘60s as the mud at Max Yasgur’s farm. “Once all the stories were woven together and we had a film, that’s when it became something different.”
As for the idea that music could once “change the world,” Cook doesn’t buy it. “It brings people together, but then you have to do the hard work,” he says. And don’t get him started on Woodstock 50. “Michael Lang’s done all the Woodstock festivals—including the one that turned into riots,” he notes. “I don’t know that it makes any sense to try and recreate the first one.”
For someone ready to leave the road behind, Cook still has plenty of stories to tell—like producing Roky Erickson’s The Evil One back in the day. “That’s when I really realized what a record producer was supposed to do,” he says. “We recorded 15 songs, and it was a very productive period for Roky. I think it was some of the best he ever did.”
And of course, there’s The Big Lebowski, the ultimate pop culture nod. “It’s always nice to be written into a script,” Cook says, proud to be immortalized as the band whose tape The Dude never got back. “Stephen King does that too—he uses Creedence to describe a time and a feeling.”
Which, really, says it all. Creedence may not save the world, but they’ll always be the soundtrack to somebody’s ride through the jungle—or to a stolen car in Los Angeles. Either way, Stu Cook’s good with it. “We could still scratch our heads and wonder how we could’ve had not only one but two great careers,” he says. “We even had one career, actually, given the music business.”
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