When Rolling Stone occasionally bothers to write about music, it can actually be…

…readable.

For example, this article, making and supporting the case that Creedence Clearwater Revival is the biggest thing in pop music today:  

I mean, it’s not wrong:

CCR are the most awesomely bizarre case of a classic band that’s bigger than ever right now, without anyone really noticing. But their greatest-hits collection Chronicle is riding high on the Billboard 200 every week, always somewhere in the thirties or forties. It’s currently Number 39, right ahead of the new Ariana Grande album. It’s higher than anything by the Beatles or the Stones or Zeppelin or Queen. It’s crazy because there’s no star power involved, no cult of personality, no Freddie Mercury, no Stevie/Lindsey, no backstory or drama or charisma, no biopic or TV placement, and God knows no sex appeal. Just four anonymous flannel dudes and a bunch of perfect guitar songs about rivers.

Of all the “classic rockers who stay famous forever” stories, this is the one where there’s nothing but the songs. Of all the fans who bought/streamed/whatevered Chronicle this week, I doubt half could give the leader’s name, or tell you a thing about him. But only a hardcore fan could name the other three. Anyone who can tell Stu Cook from Doug Clifford probably is Stu Cook or Doug Clifford. You couldn’t pick any of these dudes out of a police lineup. There’s no hero worship, no narrative, no stars. There’s no love story, no death story. Only the songs.

For the record, I can tell the difference between Clifford and Cook.  Most of the time. 

The “why” is the interesting part:

But ironically, there’s plenty of dramatic lore in the Creedence story, if anyone knew or cared. There’s two brothers hating each other — after big brother Tom Fogerty quit the band, they never reconciled before his death. John was one of the very few rock stars to get drafted in the Vietnam era — he did his time in the Army, waiting out a year of misery, then returned to fight his way back into the Bay Area bar-band scene. None of his peers had a struggle like that to boast about, but it was a cred card he refused to play, even when he was protesting the war in “Fortunate Son.” There’s even the hilarious lawsuit after his 1985 solo hit “The Old Man Down the Road” — it sounded so much like Creedence, his ex-label took him to court, making him the only rock star ever to get sued for plagiarizing himself. He had to take the witness stand with a guitar, to show the jury why his songs sounded like John Fogerty. During cross-examination, he snapped, “What am I supposed to do, get an inoculation?”

Great stories — but only hardcore fans know them, because Fogerty had zero knack for talking about himself. Since the band broke up, he’s never stopped railing at his ex-bandmates, stewing over business injustices he never had much luck convincing anyone else to care about. His 2015 memoir is a barely-readable pity party. Even in their heyday, the group’s interviews were nothing but drab complaints about not getting taken seriously enough. As Cook groused to Rolling Stone, “People know about our music but they don’t know about our heads.”

I haven’t said “worth a read” about something in Rolling Stone in a long, long time.  And it’ll probably be a while before I do it again. 

But here you go.