Cosmo's Factory

The title joins Doug Clifford's nickname, Cosmo, to the Berkeley warehouse called the Factory, where John Fogerty made the band rehearse almost daily. The cover photograph is by Bob Fogerty, and its 3RD GENERATION sign mocks Ralph Gleason's liner note for the debut album. Four songs are covers: Before You Accuse Me, Ooby Dooby, My Baby Left Me and an eleven-minute I Heard It Through the Grapevine.

The 1970 singles were Travelin' Band with Who'll Stop the Rain, Up Around the Bend with Run Through the Jungle, and Lookin' Out My Back Door with Long as I Can See the Light. Each reached the Hot 100's top five. Lookin' Out My Back Door was written for Fogerty's three-year-old son Josh, with a nod to Dr. Seuss and Buck Owens. Cook said the opening and close of Run Through the Jungle used lots of backwards-recorded guitar and piano. The publisher of Good Golly, Miss Molly sued over the resemblance of Travelin' Band to that song, and the case was settled out of court.

Fogerty told Uncut in 2012 that Travelin' Band was his salute to Little Richard, while Who'll Stop the Rain was part of the fabric of the times, since Vietnam was probably the most important thing on young people's minds. Many listeners heard Run Through the Jungle as a war song, but it was actually about the prevalence of guns in the United States. Tom Fogerty named it his favorite Creedence song, calling it a little movie in itself. Lookin' Out My Back Door is a tribute to the Bakersfield Sound, and its parade came from the Dr. Seuss book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. The record draws on R&B, soul, country, rockabilly and psychedelia, the last in the seven-minute opener Ramble Tamble. John Fogerty played a 1968 Gibson Les Paul Custom and a 1969 Rickenbacker 325, and Tom a 1969 Guild Starfire VI. Clifford has said that Fogerty named the album after him so that the pressure would be off Fogerty.

Writing for Pitchfork in 2018, John Lingan called Ramble Tamble a band fighting its way to find new horizons and the eleven-minute Grapevine a droning, claustrophobic blues that turns Motown's dance song inside out. He described the whole record as a hodge-podge, an unpretentious collection of songs, and noted that no album spent longer at No. 1 in the US in 1970. He observed that Creedence never wrote a love song and kept a strict rule against alcohol and drugs while making music.

The album topped the Billboard 200 for nine consecutive weeks and was No. 1 in the UK, Canada and Norway. Rolling Stone said in 1970 that it should be obvious by now that this was one great rock and roll band. AllMusic gave it five stars, Rolling Stone ranked it No. 265 in 2003 and No. 413 in 2020, and it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014.