Creedence Clearwater Revival – Green River (Andy Williams Show – 1969)

The Lime Soda A Boy Saved In His Memory For Twenty Years

What you’re watching is Creedence Clearwater Revival at full velocity — performing “Green River” on the Andy Williams Show on October 18, 1969, just months after the song had stormed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100. John Fogerty delivered his vocals live that day, which was entirely in keeping with a band that prided itself on playing exactly the same way on television as they did in a swamp. The result is one of 1969’s most electrifying small-screen performances — raw, locked-in, and completely unbothered by the glitzy surroundings of a prime-time variety show.

Released as a single in July 1969, “Green River” peaked at number two for one week, held off the top spot by “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies, and was ranked by Billboard as the 31st song of the entire year. The album of the same name fared even better — topping the Billboard 200 on October 4 and spending four weeks at number one before being knocked off the summit by The Beatles’ Abbey Road. Not bad for a band that had already released two other studio albums that same year.

The origin of “Green River” begins not in a Louisiana bayou but at a pharmacy soda fountain in Berkeley, California, sometime around 1955. Fogerty was about eight years old when he ordered a Green River — a green syrup drink that tasted vaguely like lime, served with fizz water in a paper cup in a steel holder. He hadn’t even started playing guitar yet, but he filed the name away. The actual river near the campsite he loved as a boy wasn’t called Green River at all — it was Putah Creek, near Winters, California — but in his head he’d always called it that. Every detail in the song was drawn from real life: the rope hanging from a tree, “Old Cody Junior” — that old man was a direct descendant of Buffalo Bill Cody.

CCR rehearsed relentlessly before ever entering a studio, which kept recording costs extraordinarily low — their first three albums each cost less than $2,000 to make. “Green River” was the debut session at Wally Heider’s Studios in San Francisco, recorded on June 19, 1969, and the first collaboration with engineer Russ Gary. The band walked in knowing exactly what they wanted. They walked out with a record that Fogerty would later call his favourite from the entire Creedence era — because, as he put it, it had the whole Sun Records vibe all over it.

In 1969 alone, CCR released three albums and scored eight hits across four singles — “Proud Mary,” “Born on the Bayou,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Green River,” “Commotion,” “Down on the Corner,” and “Fortunate Son.” It was a creative output so relentless it began to fracture the band from within, as the other three members grew resentful that every song — and every royalty — belonged to Fogerty alone. The seeds of CCR’s eventual collapse were already being quietly sown right in the middle of their greatest year.

The song has never really left. In an internet survey in 1995, fans voted “Green River” the fourth best Creedence Clearwater Revival song; by 2008 it had climbed to third. It remains one of the defining performances of the band’s live canon, and watching this Andy Williams Show footage, it’s easy to understand why. Fogerty sounds like a man who has been singing about that creek his whole life — because in a way, he had been.

Fogerty captured the song’s essence best himself, describing it to Uncut years later as “the barefoot boy with a cane pole down by the river.” A lime soda, a fake river name, and a real descendant of Buffalo Bill — that’s all it took to write one of American rock’s most enduring two-and-a-half minutes. Watch this 1969 performance and you’ll hear exactly why it still sounds like summer.