Fantasy Records — Creedence Clearwater Revival, Berkeley

Fantasy Records at 2600 10th Street in Berkeley was the label that released every Creedence Clearwater Revival record and the scene of one of the most complicated artist-label relationships in rock history. CCR — John Fogerty, Tom Fogerty, Stu Cook, and Doug Clifford, all from El Cerrito in the East Bay — signed to Fantasy in the mid-1960s as the Golliwogs and recorded their first CCR albums there beginning in 1968. The run of records they made between 1968 and 1970 — 'Bayou Country,' 'Green River,' 'Willy and the Poor Boys,' 'Cosmo's Factory' — was one of the most commercially successful in American rock history, and the music bore no relationship to the Bay Area psychedelic scene around them: swamp rock, Delta blues, country, rockabilly, played with directness and economy.

The relationship with Fantasy's owner Saul Zaentz became one of the most litigious in music: John Fogerty signed away rights to his CCR compositions in a deal he later described as exploitative, and the resulting legal battles prevented him from performing his own songs for years and drove him to the extraordinary position of being sued for plagiarising himself when his 1985 solo song 'The Old Man Down the Road' was alleged to sound like CCR's 'Run Through the Jungle' — which Zaentz owned. The case went to trial and Fogerty won, but the bitterness of the Fantasy years coloured his relationship to CCR's music for decades.

Fantasy Records relocated from Berkeley over the years and the original building has been repurposed. The label continues to exist as part of the Concord Music Group. El Cerrito, where the band members grew up, is an East Bay community north of Berkeley accessible via BART. The CCR story — four working-class East Bay kids making music that sounded nothing like San Francisco and selling more records than anyone around them — is one of the stranger and more compelling narratives in late-1960s rock.