Before Creedence had its name, a small B-side carried the sound of a band learning how to become itself.
In 1967, before Creedence Clearwater Revival had become the name the world would remember, John Fogerty, Tom Fogerty, Stu Cook, and Doug Clifford were still releasing records as The Golliwogs. One of the final singles from that period paired Porterville on the A-side with Call It Pretending on the flip. The A-side would soon be absorbed into the first Creedence Clearwater Revival album in 1968, but the B-side remained more tucked away, a small pre-fame document from the edge of transformation.
That placement matters. A B-side is often where a band’s history feels less polished by later memory. It is not always the song chosen to announce ambition; sometimes it is the song that reveals the workbench. Call It Pretending belongs to that kind of space. It is not the fully formed Creedence of Born on the Bayou, Green River, or Fortunate Son. It arrives before the group’s image had hardened into flannel, friction, river mud, and hard rhythmic certainty. Yet the record already contains something essential: a preference for directness over decoration.
The title itself now feels almost too fitting. Call It Pretending was released under a name the band would soon leave behind, at a moment when identity was not yet settled. The Golliwogs had been part of the group’s early Fantasy Records story, but the musicians inside that name were moving toward something sharper and more durable. Listening from the far side of Creedence history, the song becomes less a curiosity than a threshold. It lets us hear a band not as an institution, but as four players narrowing their instincts.
Musically, the recording stands between the pop and garage-band language of the mid-1960s and the leaner attack that would define Creedence Clearwater Revival. The performance is compact, with little interest in excess. The rhythm section does not sprawl; it keeps the song moving with plain purpose. The vocal does not yet carry the mythic force that John Fogerty would later bring to his river-country narratives, but the outline of his authority is there in the phrasing: clipped, earnest, and aimed forward. Even when the style still reflects its era, the band’s discipline is beginning to separate itself from fashion.
That discipline is one of the quiet pleasures of the record. Call It Pretending does not need to be overpraised to be valuable. Its importance lies in its scale. It shows how a great band’s roots are often practical before they are poetic. The musicians were learning what to leave out, how to make a short record stand on feel, how to let a hook and a groove do their work without crowding them. The later Creedence sound would become famous for its economy, but economy is not a switch that gets thrown overnight. It is a habit, and this B-side catches that habit forming.
The contrast with Porterville is also revealing. Porterville points more clearly toward the Creedence to come, with its sharper storytelling and its sense of place. Call It Pretending, by comparison, feels less like a declaration and more like a clue. That difference may be why it has remained a collector’s corner of the band’s story rather than a central monument. But the quieter song has its own kind of historical force. It reminds us that transformation is rarely visible only in the obvious breakthrough. Sometimes it is preserved on the reverse side of the record.
There is also a certain dignity in hearing Creedence Clearwater Revival before the fame made their sound seem inevitable. Later success can flatten the past, making every early choice look like a step in a grand design. Call It Pretending resists that illusion. It belongs to uncertainty: a band with a soon-to-vanish name, a single with one foot in the old identity and one foot in the new, a song that did not become a standard but still carries the temperature of becoming. Its rarity is not just about availability; it is about perspective.
For listeners who know Creedence through the big songs, the 1967 B-side offers a humbler kind of reward. It does not ask to replace the familiar catalog. It asks us to listen for beginnings: the tightening of a band, the emergence of a voice, the moment before a name becomes fixed in public memory. In that sense, Call It Pretending is less an outtake from greatness than an early root pushing toward it. The sound is smaller than what came next, but the direction is already there.
What remains moving about the record is its ordinariness. It was made as part of the everyday labor of a young band still trying to define itself, not as a relic for future interpretation. Time has given it another role. The flip side to Porterville now feels like a narrow doorway into the pre-Creedence room, where the musicians had not yet become symbols and the songs still carried the uncertainty of first shape. Call It Pretending matters because it lets the beginning stay human.
