A wordless goodbye to the Sixties’ glow—“Rude Awakening #2” lets Creedence Clearwater Revival close the door with a clang, not a whisper, turning memory into a six-minute shiver of light and shadow.
Key facts, up front. “Rude Awakening #2” is the closing track on Pendulum, released December 1970—the band’s last album with rhythm guitarist Tom Fogerty before his departure in early 1971. It wasn’t issued as a single, so it never had a chart position of its own; instead, the album did the charting, peaking at No. 5 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and No. 8 in the U.K. The piece itself runs a little over six minutes (about 6:20), an instrumental coda that trades verses and choruses for atmosphere and unease.
If you remember unwrapping Pendulum the week it arrived, you’ll recall how different it felt. CCR—America’s most reliable hit machine—suddenly sounded darker, more urban, with organ swells and brass lines cutting through the familiar swamp groove. John Fogerty wrote every song, broadened the palette with keyboards and horns, and then—at the very end—steered into something stranger: an instrumental excursion that many fans hadn’t expected from a band built on economical rock and roll. The track’s mood has often been described as avant-garde psychedelia, a sound collage more than a tune, a crosstown bus of ideas braking and surging through static, sirens, and feedback.
The backstory has its own bite. Over the years Fogerty has recalled the piece as a kind of experiment—part parody of the Beatles’ “Revolution 9,” part in-studio free-form that grafted noise and effects onto a delicate finger-picked idea. He’s been disarmingly blunt about it, suggesting that what was added after the opening figure felt like “free-form nonsense,” a snapshot of where the band was emotionally rather than a polished statement. And he wasn’t the only one to bristle: contemporaneous criticism admired Pendulum overall while calling “Rude Awakening #2” a pretentious detour—proof, perhaps, that Creedence was tugging at the edges of its own uniform.
Because there are no lyrics to hold onto, the meaning of “Rude Awakening #2” lives in its title and textures. The piece begins like a memory you don’t want to disturb—guitar harmonics flickering, the organ breathing slow—before the calm is jolted by metallic scrapes, tape-manipulated turbulence, and alarm-bell clatter. It’s hard not to hear it as a portrait of a band at a crossroads, the glow of late-’60s promise meeting the cold light of a new decade. Knowing that Pendulum was the last CCR album with Tom Fogerty only sharpens the sense of finality. The track sounds like the last glance over a shoulder before you push through the exit door and face the morning.
On the sonic level, that push-and-pull is the whole drama. What starts as a contemplative guitar-and-organ drift becomes a city soundscape: engines idling, radios between stations, a weather front moving in. You can map it to your own memories—midnights in the kitchen with the small radio on, a pot cooling on the stove, headlines soughing through the speaker; or afternoons when the house was finally quiet, and you could play a whole side of a record and let the room breathe with it. AllMusic tags the piece instrumental/psychedelic/experimental, which is exactly how it lands in the ear: a mood rather than a message, a question mark held just long enough to become a period.
What of its place in the band’s story? As a non-single, “Rude Awakening #2” didn’t chase radio spins; the heavy lifting on the charts belonged to “Have You Ever Seen the Rain”/“Hey Tonight”, the lone 45 from the album. But that’s part of what makes the finale so resonant today. The hits kept Creedence on the air; the closer told you where their heads were—restless, curious, maybe a little bruised. In the U.S. the album’s Top-5 showing proved there was still a vast audience listening intently; in Britain, a Top-10 placement said the same across the water. And then, in the months that followed, the band we knew began to change shape for good.
For older listeners, there’s a tender irony in how “Rude Awakening #2” has aged. The “rude” part isn’t anger so much as recognition: life rarely ends a chapter with a tidy cadence. Sometimes it fades into whirr and hum, the inner machinery showing through. Spin the track now and you may hear the sound of 1970 exhaling—the jukebox lights dimming, the calendar turning, America itself blinking in a harsh new day. It is not the Creedence of “Bad Moon Rising” or “Proud Mary.” But it is entirely Creedence, the same band that could turn a two-chord vamp into a river and—just once—turn an album’s last minutes into a dream half-remembered. And when the noise finally slips away, what’s left feels like truth: endings are seldom neat, but they can still be beautiful.
Bottom line: “Rude Awakening #2” never needed a chart number to matter. It mattered because it dared to be a different kind of farewell—Pendulum’s curtain call, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s wordless confession, and for many of us, a sound we didn’t fully understand until years later, when life had handed us our own rude awakenings and we had learned to listen for the hum beneath the song.