Creedence Clearwater Revival Album: “Hot Stuff”

Hot Stuff is a hard to find CCR compilation album which I've previously only seen in a few gas stations. This is the best CCR album in my opinion; while most fans think Chronicle one and two cover all the great CCR songs, I find this album has much more flow, vitality, and raw energy then the two other compilations. Porterville, 99 and a half, and Keep on Chooglin' are three of CCR's best songs yet most radio listeners and Chronicle owners have never heard of them.

This compilation is okay. I mean, if you're looking for the songs on here and you don't want to play around with the lesser-known songs that fill most of the material on most albums. Slapped together in 1977 to make a little money off of new fans of the group who didn't want to buy musty old 45s, it serves pretty well the purpose for which it was created. It's just that there's nothing really holding it together.

John Fogerty, the brains behind CCR, crafted the group's albums with an eye on the unity of the whole LP. By bringing together songs from several different albums, that unity is compromised. "The Midnight Special" was chosen for its location on Willy and the Poor Boys, and accents the album well. "Born on the Bayou" and "Keep On Chooglin'" shouldn't have been removed from the Bayou Country album. And no matter what you do, "Ooby Dooby" is just a silly song, much below CCR's usual dignity.

The songs themselves are good. This is especially true of the songs we're accustomed to hearing as singles, but only "Bad Moon Rising" fits that bill. "Hey Tonight" and "Born on the Bayou" sometimes get off-album play, but that's mainly a fluke. The songs are okay, and if you're primarily interested in the songs as self-contained nuggets, this disc may be the one for you.

However, getting this album, you will be getting a compromised collection. The artful construction of the albums as Fogerty conceived them is absent, and the songs, rather than being part of a unified whole, are rendered free-floating entities. The songs themselves are fine, but the collection as a whole suffers for this violation.

As budget compilations go, this really isn't too bad. If you're looking for something to put next to _Chronicle_ in your collection, you could do much worse than this. I remember buying this on cassette for about three bucks at K-mart, years ago when I was young and broke. It saved me money, and gave me a copy of "Keep On Chooglin'", one of the band's quintessential recordings, and nowhere to be found on the oft-touted _Chronicle Vol. 2_. "Porterville" is another great song egregiously overlooked by that compilation. And there's plenty else here to enjoy, what with "Wrote a Song For Everyone" and Wilson Pickett's "Ninety-Nine and a Half...".

"Ooby Dooby" was tacked onto the cd version as an extra track, and as somebody else pointed out, it doesn't really add much. But virtually everything else here is top-drawer material, and for the budget-conscious individual, this makes a solid second Creedence purchase.