Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits

Creedence Clearwater Revival emerged in the late 1960s as a lean, mean, hit-single scoring machine. While their individual albums feature great diversity and provide wonderful snapshots of moments in time — 1969’s Green River and 1970’s Cosmo’s Factory, in particular — this 20-track collection sums up their career with an almost unimaginable amount of success. “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Lodi,” “Down on the Corner,” “Fortunate Son,” “Travelin’ Band”…the list is long and impressive, and unrelenting in its single-minded quest to deliver the truth in somewhere around three and a half-minutes. The consistency almost doesn’t seem possible. Yet, it exists. The extended 11-minute jam on Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was a slight nod to the San Francisco scene that CCR came from but were never comfortably a part of. Singer John Fogerty felt more at home, imagining the Louisiana Bayou and the “swamp rock” that his ominous guitar tone suggested, which is pitched to perfection among the dark clouds of “Run Through the Jungle” and “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”