A tender pop plea from CCR’s doorway—“Call It Pretending” shows a young band shedding its old skin, asking for love in plain words while the swampier future waits just outside.
Key facts first. “Call It Pretending” began life as the B-side to “Porterville,” issued in November 1967 as the final single by The Golliwogs (label Scorpio 412) and reissued in January 1968 as the first single credited to Creedence Clearwater Revival. The A-side did not chart, so the B-side carried no chart number of its own. The songs were cut in October 1967 at Coast Recorders in San Francisco, just after Saul Zaentz purchased Fantasy Records. On the original 45, John Fogerty hid behind the quirky pen name “T. Spicebush Swallowtail,” but the track is his through and through; later releases restore his name. Decades on, the recording resurfaced on Pre-Creedence (1975), the CCR box set (2001), and as a bonus track on the 2008 40th-anniversary CD of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
If you drop the needle now, what you hear is a pop miniature with its heart on its sleeve—closer to the clean, high-gloss beat group sound of the mid-’60s than to the bayou grit that would soon define CCR. The lyric is guileless and grown at once: a man standing at the edge of goodbye, asking whether the two of them will “make a brand-new start” or keep “pretending.” There’s no swagger here, only the fragile courage of someone who’s finally asking for a straight answer. That tone—plain-spoken, no alibi—is the seed of the band we’d come to know. Fogerty’s voice isn’t yet the flinty shout of “Proud Mary,” but you can hear the grain that will carry those later songs; the melody lifts like a question you’ve rehearsed for weeks and only just found the nerve to ask.
Part of the fascination is where the song sits in the story. In 1967, these four were still The Golliwogs, a hard-working Bay Area outfit with a handful of local singles and not much national traction. Rebranding to Creedence Clearwater Revival in early ’68 wasn’t just a name change; it was a creative reset. “Porterville” and “Call It Pretending” bridge those worlds—one foot in tidy, radio-friendly pop, the other inching toward an Americana voice that sounded like river water and two-lane blacktop. When the reissued single failed to move the needle, the band regrouped, led with “Susie Q” that summer, and the future snapped into focus. Hearing “Call It Pretending” today is like catching CCR in the doorway, coat in hand, deciding who they’re going to be.
Even the paper trail tells the tale of transition. The whimsical Spicebush Swallowtail pseudonym—borrowed from a North American butterfly—reads now like a final wink from the garage-band years; once CCR took off, Fogerty shelved the mask and signed his name. And it’s telling that he left “Call It Pretending” off the 1968 debut LP at first, calling it “pop of the old style of the band” in hindsight—a song he liked, but one that didn’t match the tougher, swamp-lit image he was carving in real time. When Fantasy finally tucked it onto the 40th-anniversary edition of the album, it felt less like a stray outtake and more like a missing preface.
For older listeners—those who lived with 45s and turned them over out of habit—the track also unlocks a sense memory. You can feel the paper sleeve in your hands, the little crackle before the band enters, the modesty of a two-minute single that trusts a good tune and a straight request. The arrangement is lean: bright guitar, tidy drums, a bass line that supports rather than insists. No studio pyrotechnics, no extended jams—just a melody shaped to fit inside an afternoon. In that compact frame, the title becomes a kind of mercy. We all know relationships that keep themselves alive by pretending; sometimes ending the pretense is the kindest thing you can do.
Meaning, then? “Call It Pretending” names the moment when telling the truth becomes more loving than keeping the show going. That’s not the mythic America of riverboats and dirt roads CCR would soon make their own; it’s the America of kitchens and porches, of small talks that decide a life. If the later hits were public declarations, this one is private—two people in a room figuring out whether to turn the page. It’s a reminder that CCR’s gift wasn’t only the stomp and swagger; it was also clarity. They could say the simple thing and make it feel like courage.
And so the record endures, not because it climbed a chart (it didn’t), but because it lets us hear the human scale at the start of a great American band. A shy pseudonym, a clean guitar, a young voice learning to carry weight—that’s the whole story in miniature. When “Susie Q” finally cracked the Top 20 that summer, the world heard the swagger. “Call It Pretending” is the softer proof that the heart was already in place.