A shape‑shifting emergence of unrest hidden beneath swamp‑rock grooves
When Creedence Clearwater Revival released their sixth and final fully collaborative LP, Pendulum, on December 7, 1970, the album swiftly crested at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 in the U.S. and entered the Top 10 in Britain (No. 8)—marking one of the few occasions a CCR record landed in the lower half of the Top 5 despite the band’s previous juggernaut success. Nestled into that record is “Chameleon,” an intimate album cut written by John Fogerty that was never issued as a single, yet stands as one of Pendulum’s most sonically radical statements.
From its first distorted keyboard riff and its clattering backbeat, “Chameleon” announces a CCR unmoored from expectations—its saxophones, electric piano, and horn flourishes marking a departure from their standard guitar‑heavy “chooglin’” template. Working for weeks longer in San Francisco’s Wally Heider Studios, Fogerty layered brass textures and punchy organ lines atop Doug Clifford’s percussion and Stu Cook’s bass—a deliberate sonic expansion that sought to stress test the band’s roots‑rock identity.
Thematically, the song spins a sharply ironic metaphor of emotional duplicity: a lover—or life itself—that flips opinions and moods so capriciously that the narrator must question his own senses. Verse by verse: the singer describes being led “up a wrong‑way street,” then disparaged as inept (“can’t you read?”); he glimpses a “number” that has replaced his own—symbolic of displacement—and in the chorus he accuses his subject of “changing your face like a chameleon”. The second verse piles on the contradictions: “I say what’s up, and then you say it’s down… I see triangles, and you say it’s round.” By the end, the listener feels the frustration of someone tethered to unreliability—in words and emotional tone alike.
Critics were mixed on the result: Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau called “Chameleon” “a bit raunchier … but the words are embarrassing,” capturing the unease the song instilled in listeners used to CCR’s familiar terrain. Meanwhile, New Musical Express journalist Roy Carr praised its soul‑spiced homage to Otis Redding—with a “Respect‑type beat” that complemented Fogerty’s gritty vocal growl against the backdrop of Dwight Yoakam‑style brass and chorus punch.
Beyond its lyricism and arrangement, the cultural and emotional resonance of “Chameleon” derives from Pendulum being Creedence’s only album of all‑Fogerty originals, recorded at a turning point when internal tensions were rising, and before Tom Fogerty’s departure in early 1971. Songs like “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” and “Hey Tonight” garnered radio play, but “Chameleon” became a kind of cult favorite on deeper cuts—told in hushed tones by fans who sensed that CCR’s outward swagger was beginning to crack.
In the years since their dissolution, the song has never again featured in a Creedence live set—or even in John Fogerty’s solo tours—giving it a spectral cachet as a studio experiment frozen in time. Yet its legacy endures, especially for those who listen for the tremor beneath the band’s swamp‑rock swagger: a tremor of insecurity, contradiction, and metamorphosis—what it meant to be heard, but not believed.
In the shell‑shocked folk corridors of the early 1970s, “Chameleon” stands not as a hit single but as a thrusting emotion—a lyric dislocation pitched in blues‑rock diction, scorched with brass and keyboard sting. For vinyl lovers and hardened listeners alike, it is the sound of a band stretching toward something more unpredictable and honest—a pivot where familiar bayou rhythms collide with psych‑soul dissonance, revealing what happens when a tune refuses to stay in place.