In the 1980s, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Doug “Cosmo” Clifford undertook a number of substantial musical experiments, both solo and in collaboration. One of them was recording with various musicians as songwriters, vocalist, and drummer at his home studio near Lake Tahoe, which was unearthed and released in 2020 as Magic Window. Now, still exploring “Cosmo’s Vault”, and it does seem to have quite a treasure hoard, Clifford has brought forth his songwriting collaboration with longtime friend Steve Wright of the Greg Kihn Band, and the two performed on the recorded versions of their songs while also enlisting an all-star troupe of Bay Area musicians to round out the record, For All The Money In the World. This included Greg Douglass (Steve Miller Band), Jimmy Lyon (Eddie Money) and Joe Satriani, as well as keyboard players Tim Gorman (The Who) and Pat Mosca (The Greg Kihn Band).
There were hopes at the time of using the carefully crafted record to entice a record label to pick them up as a band, but they couldn’t quite commit to the level of live playing that would help seal the deal. This album suggests that the collaboration was certainly a winning one, and now, with the passing of Steve Wright in 2017, finally bringing this music to the world takes on added poignancy. This is also the first album that Doug Clifford has released purely on his own label, Cliffsong Records, which he has spent part of the downtown of the pandemic setting up.
Doug Clifford promises more from the vault to come, but for now, we have a particularly timeless series of tracks that bring in a wide range of genre accents and mainly focus on the ups and downs of relationships from Hard Rock to ballad approaches. The musicality behind the album is immediately obvious, with plenty of layers behind guitars, keyboards, and more, and there’s a wealth of lyrical and vocal energy (provided by Keith England) behind the songs to match. I spoke with Doug Clifford about the context behind For All The Money in the World and what the songs continue to mean to him from a current perspective.
Did this project happen before or after the work that went into Magic Window?
Actually, they came out in reverse. This one was first, before my solo album Magic Window.
That’s interesting since that suggests that you were interested in producing and assembling musicians to work together at an even earlier stage than people might realize.
That’s true. In my “vault” which I lovingly call “Cosmo’s Vault”, I have more work co-writing with somebody and that was done in 1978 to 1979. So I have some things that go back a long time.
That’s really exciting to hear. What made it the right time to release For All The Money in the World versus other projects from the vault that you might have chosen?
Well, I had the solo album [Magic Window] out since I put it out right when the pandemic hit. I was the singer/songwriter on that project, but the Clifford/Wright project had a different band. I had three great guitarists, Joe Satriani, Greg Douglass, and Jimmy Lyon, all on the same record as well as the vocalist Keith England. I was sitting listening to it and thought, “I’d rather listen to that than my solo album.” I think the listening public will probably agree with me choosing that one to be released.
There’s a lot of energy to this album, and plenty of that is down to the guitars, but a lot of that is also due to the songwriting. I didn’t realize until I heard about this album how far back in time you and Steve Wright’s relationship went.
That’s exactly right. His older brother went to high school with John [Fogerty], Stu [Cook], and I. We had an instrumental trio and we were looking to maybe round that off a little by moving Stu to bass and adding Dave Wright as a guitarist. The problem with that was that Dave had an attitude and was in fights all the time, and back then we were playing some pretty rough joints with phony IDs. We thought about it and realized that if we had him in the band, we were going to get our asses kicked and our instruments broken.
So we passed on him but sometime much later, after Creedence had broken up, Steve came to my house. I had never met him, but he was a fan and living in our hometown. We chatted and hung out and got to talking about songwriting. We decided, “Let’s do some writing.” That’s where it started, and once we had songs written that we liked, we thought, “Let’s record this stuff and see if we can do something with it.” Once we started that process, we wanted to have a band that we could work with and give us a vehicle for writing. That’s what happened. But we needed to go out and play gigs. That’s how you did it—you would send a tape out to a label, and if they responded, they would come to one of your gigs and you could meet. But Steve didn’t want to do that, so that took a big part of the process out of of getting a contract. Then things changed, and I had little kids starting school, and doing that sort of thing.
Later, Steve had a heart attack and then a stroke, and that pretty much finished that project. Into Cosmo’s Vault it went. After that I did my solo project [Magic Window] and then I became involved in a civic project dealing with drought and fire safety. That became the number one program in the nation under the Department of Agriculture, so I got out of the music thing for a while, a couple of years, because I was having success with that and felt it was very important. Right now, all the same things are in play. We’re in a red flag fire zone right now.
You must be really attuned to all the environmental stuff that’s going on right now because of that past work.
Absolutely, and it’s very scary. We’ve mauled the planet over the years with our carbon and output. It’s real and these fires are cataclysmic. They aren’t normal fires because of conditions like overgrowth and mismanagement. Back then, I worked with the university’s biology department to create a manual for managing fuels in a way that would be the least invasive to the environment. Right now, I’m looking out and I’m seeing smoke in the sky and my eyes are burning. We’re surrounded by major fires.
One of the differences between Magic Window and For All The Money in the World is where they were recorded. Magic Window was done at your home studio, but For All The Money in the World was recorded at various studios in the Bay Area. What led to that decision?
I moved to the Lake [Tahoe area] in 1980, but I was working with Steve, so I would commute down. We were working on that project into the 80s and there were several sessions at 9 or 10 different places. That’s why there are all those guitarists. We didn’t do a session with all three of those guys there! That would be kind of silly. I’m sure they wouldn’t have appreciated it much.
In Joe [Satriani’s] case, he hadn’t had his big break yet, so it was an audition and a recording session. When he said that he wanted to do an instrumental Heavy Metal record, we all rolled our eyes and said, “Good luck with that!” Oops! Last laughs are truly the best. He’s just a great player on a huge level and it’s great having him there on four songs. It was like a supersession, really, which is a great reason to release this, but it also gives Steve [Wright] a chance to shine posthumously. He played really great and it was really fun writing and playing with him.
Was it an emotional thing to go through the masters for this album and decide to release it in the context of Steve’s passing?
DC: Yes it was. We also had to “bake” everything that was in there because of the age of the tape. It had to be heated. When I found the tapes, I asked a recording engineer friend of mine if I should put them on a reel and he said, “No! That’s the last thing you want to do! You want to bake them.” I said, “We’re not dealing with brownies here. What are you talking about?” [Laughs] A little baking humor. I got a chuckle out of that with him. But anyway, we baked them all, at least ten of those reels with different people on them and different writers.
I’m a co-writer with one other person in most cases. When I co-write, I prefer to work with just one other person. With more than one, you often don’t get a solid direction, and there’s the other side of things where people argue about percentages. I don’t want anything to do with that. With co-writing we just split things down the middle and don’t worry about it. Then we can just focus on the art of it and what each person brings to the table. What they have I don’t have and what I have, they don’t have. That’s the beauty of it.
That’s a great way of putting it and definitely still relevant to our times.
Yes, don’t let the money get in the way. “For All The Money In The World” is not a song about money, it’s a song about love. The speaker wouldn’t give up the love of this person for all the money in the world. I’m about 95% lyricist when I write with someone else, and I can bring my drums in to lay grooves down. That’s my wheelhouse. Then the other person can jump in. But occasionally if I’m writing by myself, I use the piano. I’m not a piano player, but I use the piano as a way to make melodies.
You use it as the basis for finding a composition?
Exactly. It’s fun working with somebody else, though. You can get a lot more done with two people and you have a larger bag of tricks to choose from.
Does it create more energy because you have a back and forth? Rather than starting a song and maybe shelving it for a few years, you have someone else thinking about it, too, so it pushes the wheeling to keep turning?
Yes, that’s exactly right. What I usually do is I have a little cassette recorder and as we’re putting ideas down, I use it as a footnote to record the idea. Then you’ve articulated what you’re thinking about. Then you have a bunch of these things with you when you go home and it’s like homework. A lot of times I’ll write the songs when I go home, but when we’re together with our instruments, it’s about collecting ideas to start something with. That’s a really good thing. If you get an idea and stick with it, and it’s not happening, so you start banging your head against the wall, that’s counterproductive.
But if you put something down that has potential, when you’ve collected a bunch of things that you’ve decided to work on, you can work on them by yourself and there’s not a pressure to move on to the next song. A lot of times I’ll write the melody for the verses after the chorus because the chorus is the “gold” and what the song is all about. You’re setting everything up until you get to the chorus. Then you repeat that chorus through the song. That’s what songwriting technique is about. If I’m working on the idea and we have the chorus but we don’t have the verses yet, well the verses are the easy part. The good news is that once you’ve got the lyric part for one chorus, you’ve got it for the rest.
I have noticed that in a lot of classic Rock songs that really stay with us through the years, the verses each individually build in a different way towards the chorus that immediately follows them. Of course, it’s also about emotion and what that build up and chorus does for audience.
Well, exactly. You hear something and you know that you’ve got the chorus, and that means that you’ve got 90% of the song. If it’s not that high a number, that means you’ve got to have some pretty strong things happening in the verses, too and/or you have a guitar hook that runs through the song as the “glue”. It’s nice to have a guitar hook. John [Fogerty] had a lot of nice guitar hooks in Creedence as a building block to the songs. Sometimes you’d find yourself humming the hook, not the lyrics sometimes. It’s a strong thing. [Laughs] If you’re writing a song, don’t beat yourself up if the lyrics aren’t coming the way that they should, instead maybe focus on that hook and approach things a little differently.
On “For All The Money In the World”, Steve told me, “I’ve got a killer chorus.” He came in and played the chorus, and I said, “Man, you’ve given me a home run. I’m going to really have to have strong verses to hold up against that powerhouse.” So I wrote all the verses and the melodies to set up for the payday. When I heard it, I said, “That’s already a hit. We could just play that over and over again.” It did inspire me to write things that made sense and it’s a love song with a shuffle. I love shuffles and they are things that people can’t help but tap their foot to.
Did you and Steve plan to do an album initially, or was that further along in the collaboration?
It was further along. We weren’t thinking so much about doing an album as we were trying to show a record company that we were capable of writing different genres. It would be Rock ‘n Roll, no question of that. We wouldn’t leave the barn. But we wanted to show that we were capable of writing a multiplicity of styles. We weren’t thinking of making an album because we didn’t have a deal, but we thought that if we sent over songs that were different in a good way that might attract a label. In the end, labels were interested in the songs, but would say, “Where are you playing?” And we weren’t playing. They’d say, “When you’re ready, call us back.” That’s just how things were done then.
I notice that, like on Magic Window, love songs play a big part. We get a varied impression of relationships here, though, for instance: What happens if you want something and can’t get it, or have something and lose it? It’s more of an exploration.
Creedence never did any love songs so I made up for lost time between my solo album and Clifford/Wright. [Laughs]
Were there other songs from those sessions?
There are other songs, but the recording of the other songs was was not as good or not as finished as these songs. But then again, I know guys who are putting out old cassettes from rehearsals and doing box sets. I do have some cassettes that have different material. Then there were sessions where there was limited time, so I didn’t put as much effort forward towards making a professional recording. But there is a song called “World of Hope” which I feel would be a timely song. Another one is “Those Were The Best of Times”. There are at least five or six, maybe more. Maybe I should reassess my vault inventory and see what I’ve got!
Photo by Brent Clifford
