Pendulum

Recorded at Wally Heider in San Francisco over about a month, it was the last Creedence album produced solely by John Fogerty and the last with his brother Tom in the band. A band meeting before the sessions had seen Tom, Cook and Clifford demand a bigger creative say. With John's backlog of songs already used on Cosmo's Factory, the band went in planning to jam and experiment, but no songs came of it. Fogerty later said the others wanted to come up with songs by osmosis, and he began going home after each session to write. He said he worked as hard on Pendulum but that it had fewer great songs.

The sound widened. Fogerty played keyboards and saxophones, Cook added piano and kalimba, and the members also played harmonica, vibraphone, recorder and percussion. John played Hammond B-3 organ on many tracks, in homage to Booker T. & the M.G.'s. When Clifford played the record for Duck Dunn and Steve Cropper of that group, they said it sounded remarkably like their bandmate Booker T. Jones. The closing Rude Awakening #2, an avant-garde instrumental inspired by the Beatles' Revolution 9, was later dismissed by band members as embarrassing and free-form nonsense.

The album reached the top 10 in ten countries and No. 5 on the Billboard 200. The single Have You Ever Seen the Rain? with Hey Tonight came out in January 1971 and reached No. 8 on the Hot 100. Robert Christgau gave the album an A-, calling Molina and Pagan Baby slightly subpar, and AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine found it not transcendent but a grower.