VOLUME 1 / NUMBER 4 / AUGUST 1 - SEPTEMBER 1 1970
40 CENTS
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TV REVOLUTION Editor Phillip Frazer, currently in San Francisco, met Creedence at their practice studio-cum-recreation centre-cum-office. Known as the Factory, it is a warehouse in a dingy street in Berkeley, it is where everything Creedence has done has been formulated. And everything Creedence has done has been their own thing — despite the fact that they are the world’s biggest performing group (in terms of sales and receipts for performances), they have no office staff, manager, prom oter or whatever. Just the four band members and four “helpers” . Despite their multi-million dollar status they are, as Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone put it, “ Still a San Francisco Bay Area school band that made it big by doing brilliant tunes.”
JOHN: We don’t draw lines like that.
There have been rumors that you’re coming to Australia —w hat’s going on? TOM: They are just rumors. I t’s not that we aren’t going to, but it’s not in the immediate future.
JOHN: We specifically aim away from a certain area and th a t’s easy listening. We don’t W'ant to become I guess what they call ‘legit’. You know like Tom Jones — you know' Show Biz. And open at the Cococabana or the Kazmo or Combo or whatever. I don’t know, it seems that most artists, as soon as they become successful they immediately jump into that.
DOUG: Say this, we’ll be there inside sixteen months. We heard the rumors too, in fact it came back to us that we were supposed to be playing there, but had no knowledge of it at all. TOM: I doubt that if w'e go there we’ll be working for anyone else. We’ve eliminated the bad-payer promoters from our thing here in the States. We’d want to do it right so there wasn’t any of that aftermath where everyone gets screwed and that crap. Do you agree that you’ve breached the gap between top 40 music and its 13-19 year-old fans and heavier music?
TOM: I d o n ’t think, at least in the United States, that there is an age-limit on people who listen to AM radio. Have you tried to appeal to any particular group of people? DOUG: We don’t set out to say OK here’s age-this or these guys are going to be buying x amount of records. We just play the kind of music that we like to play, the kind of music that we play best.
But you don’t need that any more, right?
JOHN: Because we have the money you mean? TOM: But a lot of people who didn’t need it still did it, because I think they always had a certain feeling about their rock ‘n ’ roll music as being a stepping stone to what they really wanted to do. Whereas with us the love of the music was a lot more basic and a lot heavier than that, it’s not a step ping stone so we can all become actors or something. CONTINUED ON PAGE 10 | T