As someone who never listened to the radio, I’ve got some massive holes in my pop culture knowledge and even in my 40s there are fairly well-known bands I really have no experience with. Classic rock (nowadays considered…oldies? Post-classical?) band Creedence Clearwater Revival is one of those bands that never really drifted through my transom until a song featured on a recent viewing of the excellent The Green Room (2015) finally grabbed my attention. Ninety percent of my non-metal musical discoveries are through film, while “Fortunate Son” is everywhere, and The Big Lebowski was also full of CCR, their stuff always felt a little bluesy and country for my tastes. And because Creedence didn’t let their set be included in the Woodstock movie (and were somehow not on the Dazed and Confused soundtrack), after a few of their hits, I really hadn’t heard much else from them until today’s song:
“Sinister Purpose” is once again just simple blues, and not really the kind of thing that would normally give me pause. But from the opening notes it DID kind of have a dark edge…even a “Sinister Purpose” if you will. And once that chorus hit, I was off googling what album it was from to see if maybe I was a CCR fan after all (The album is Green River, and it is…pretty good, though “Sinister Purpose” was the highlight for me).
So why this song? “Fortunate Son” IS pretty good, but “Sinister Purpose” has a lot going for it that is right in my wheelhouse. To start, that’s just a simple blues scale they are riffing…but that line in the lower end is pretty heavy (for certain definitions of heavy). Second, the lyrics are fantastic:
When the sky is gray and the moon is hate
I’ll be down to get you, roots of Earth will shake
Sinister purpose
Knocking at your door
Come and take my hand
Finally, the two note chorus…by playing one single note (C instead of B) outside that E blues scale they are working, the whole complexion of the song changes. I make a big deal about the diminished fifth in this blog–a note just a half step lower than the perfect fifth power chord everyone loves to play. But this time it’s the augmented fifth–a note a half step higher. In both cases, that half step difference into discordance chaos can elevate a perfectly fine riff into a perfectly SINISTER one.
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