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Graded on a Curve: A Song for Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival

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Graded on a Curve: A Song for Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival

The story of Creedence Clearwater Revival in the 1960s and ’70s, of John Fogerty’s drive and determination to become a true artist and performer, songwriter, and lush compositional mythmaker, is a fascinating one. CCR was a band who in part defined the sound of the late 1960s in American rock, who had its share of issues and squabbles, who was ultimately run by John and the vision he had for himself and his music which led to immense commercial success and a fair share of legal battles and artistic frustration in the decades following.

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The Storyteller’s Story: Testimony: A Memoir by Robbie Robertson

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The Storyteller’s Story: Testimony: A Memoir by Robbie Robertson

“He got what he wanted but he lost what he had.” Rock writer Greil Marcus, aficionado-scholar of American music, cultural history, and of The Band, uses this Little Richard quote as a jumping off point to tell the story of American rock ‘n’ roll music in his 1975 work Mystery Train.

Little Richard’s line is the quintessential punishment that often seems to accompany American success stories, like those of Jay Gatsby or Charles Foster Kane. It doesn’t seem to apply to that of Robbie Robertson however, co-founder, main songwriter, and lead guitarist of The Band. (Robertson is Canadian after all.) From a reading of his recently released autobiographical work Testimony: A Memoir, one can conclude that Robertson got a great deal of what he worked for and managed to not lose everything that he began with.

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Derailed, Sooner or Later: Warren Zevon’s Warren Zevon (1976)

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Derailed, Sooner or Later: Warren Zevon’s Warren Zevon (1976)

This is the material world and if one vice doesn’t do you in, another one surely will.  If nothing else, there is the obvious and ongoing erosion of each present self, the sly voice within us that lurks beneath the most laudatory of our triumphs.  Mortality renders the measurability of our accomplishments to be largely at our own discretion.  Sometimes this reaches us during the overwhelming silence of 3AM insomnia, sometimes during the most blissed-out of moments, when we’re trying our hardest to keep this knowledge at bay.

Another Top 10 list? The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs by Greil Marcus

“The story we’re telling is about imprisonment, but the music we’re making is about freedom, the tiny moments of freedom you steal from a life you don’t own, that doesn’t belong to you, that you have to live.”