Creedence Clearwater Revival: Creedence Clearwater Revival

Concord Craft Recordings    

180-gram vinyl

Half-speed mastered at Abbey Road Studios

Tip-on jacket replicating the original packaging

With the release of this extraordinary debut album in July 1968, Creedence Clearwater Revival was launched upon a career that little more than a year later would lead to enormous worldwide popularity. The four-man group from San Francisco´s East Bay had worked ten years as a bar band and recorded several singles on the Scorpio label (under the forgettable name Golliwogs), but it was with this Fantasy release that CCR caught fire.

Using high-res transfers from the original analog tapes, the half-speed mastering process involves playing back audio at half its recorded speed while the cutting lathe is turned at half the desired playback speed. The technique allows more time to cut a micro-precise groove, allowing more accuracy with frequency extremes and dynamic contrasts. Abbey Road Studios´ award-winning engineer Miles Showell explains, "I´ve tried to be as authentic as I could, and just make it sound like music. Not over-hyped, not over-processed. Up until now a lot of processing has been done on these recordings, so my approach was to strip them right back and just expose them for what they are — because what they are is great music."

On this album debut, lead singer/ guitarist/ writer John Fogerty emerges as a fine lyric shouter with "Ninety-Nine and a Half," "I Put A Spell On You" and "Suzie Q," a brilliant extended redition of the Dale Hawkins classic that quickly became a Top Ten Hit.

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