On the back of a modest 1973 single, John Fogerty’s Ricochet carried the uneasy sound of a famous voice learning how to stand alone.
In 1973, John Fogerty released Ricochet as the B-side to Comin’ Down the Road, a Fantasy single that marked the first time he stepped forward with a solo single under his own name. That detail may seem small beside the thunder of his earlier years with Creedence Clearwater Revival, but it gives the record a special charge. This was not simply another Fogerty song. It was a name on a label, a voice without the old band name around it, and a brief recording that arrived at a moment when identity mattered as much as sound.
By then, Creedence Clearwater Revival had already reached its end. The group that had put a raw American pulse into late-sixties and early-seventies rock was no longer the public vessel for Fogerty’s writing, singing, and guitar-driven urgency. He had spent years inside a band whose records felt communal to listeners, even when his creative imprint was unmistakable. Songs like Proud Mary, Bad Moon Rising, Fortunate Son, and Have You Ever Seen the Rain had made his voice familiar in a way few singers ever experience. But recognition is not the same as freedom. When a familiar voice comes back without the familiar banner, every note is heard against a shadow.
That is why Ricochet deserves more than a passing mention as a flip side. B-sides often lived in the margins: the other half of the single, the track discovered by those who turned the record over, the song that did not carry the main promotional weight. Yet those margins can be revealing. A B-side does not always need to announce itself as a grand statement. Sometimes it becomes interesting precisely because it is smaller, leaner, and less burdened by expectation. In Fogerty’s case, the position of Ricochet makes it feel like a fragment from a complicated crossing: the space between bandleader and solo artist, between radio certainty and a more exposed future.
The single also followed an unusual detour. Around the same period, Fogerty issued music as The Blue Ridge Rangers, a country and roots-minded project credited to a group name even though Fogerty handled the performances himself. That choice said something about his reluctance, or at least his caution, in standing publicly as John Fogerty the solo act. With Comin’ Down the Road and its B-side Ricochet, the disguise was gone. The name was his own. The pressure was his own. The listener could no longer file the sound under Creedence or under an imagined band of Rangers. It was Fogerty, moving forward with all the weight that carried.
Musically, Ricochet belongs to the compact, no-wasted-motion side of Fogerty’s craft. His best work often has a physical directness: the snap of a guitar figure, the forward lean of the rhythm, the vocal bite that seems to come from a place between warning and confession. Even when the song itself is not treated as one of the pillars of his catalog, it carries the recognizable discipline of a writer who understood how to make a record move. Fogerty never needed much ornament to create momentum. His language as a musician was built on pressure, release, and a certain plainspoken force.
The title Ricochet also feels fitting in hindsight. A ricochet is not a clean departure. It is movement after impact, a path changed by collision. That image suits Fogerty’s early solo transition without forcing the song into autobiography. After Creedence, nothing about his career could move in a straight line. Every new record bounced off memory. Every solo release invited comparison. The public heard the old fire and wondered what remained, what had changed, and what could survive outside the band that had made him famous.
There is a particular loneliness in a first solo single from an artist everyone already knows. A new performer has the luxury of mystery. A former band voice has to carry history into the room. Fogerty’s voice had already been in car radios, jukeboxes, living rooms, and open highways. It had already sounded larger than one person. But on Ricochet, tucked behind Comin’ Down the Road, that voice enters a different frame. It is less about conquest than reorientation. The record does not need to solve the whole question of who John Fogerty would become after Creedence. It simply lets us hear the question beginning.
That beginning matters because the later solo career would bring its own defining chapters, from the mid-seventies album John Fogerty to the major return of Centerfield in the 1980s. Those later moments are easier to place in a career timeline. Ricochet is quieter, more easily overlooked, and therefore more intriguing. It belongs to the uncertain doorway, not the victory lap. It shows an artist whose sound was already famous standing at the edge of a new signature, one side of a single at a time.
He had nothing left to hide behind, and perhaps that is the most human part of this small record. Ricochet may not be the song casual listeners name first when they think of Fogerty, but it catches a rare moment: the instant when a voice that had helped define a band began testing the air under its own name. The record spins quickly, but the implication lingers. Sometimes the most revealing turn in a career is not the loud announcement. Sometimes it is the B-side, waiting quietly for someone to flip the single over.
