In May 1968 they made their Avalon Ballroom debut on a bill with Taj Mahal two months later they played the Fillmore West with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Both cover versions were on the band’s first album, which reached No.52 on the Billboard chart. A cover of Dale Hawkins’s ‘Suzie Q’ was their first single in 1968 a cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s ‘I Put a Spell On You’ followed it. There are competing stories as to how it happened it may have been the name of one of Tom Fogerty’s friends or it could have come from a beer commercial. In 1967 John finished his stint in the army and the band picked up where they had left off, beginning by renaming themselves as Creedence Clearwater Revival. It looked likely that they would stay that way because both John Fogerty and Doug Clifford were drafted into the Army. They were just another Bay area bar band until ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ sold 10,000 copies in California and adjoining states. Fantasy released ‘Don’t Tell Me No Lies’, sung by Tom, in late 1964, but neither it nor the 1965 follow-up singles, ‘Where You Been and You Can’t Be True’, were played on the radio outside of their local area. They first recorded in 1964 as the Golliwogs Tom Fogerty worked as a packing clerk in San Francisco at Fantasy Records, a jazz label. Back in 1960, while in junior high school, the boys formed a band called Tommy Fogerty & the Blue Velvets and spent much of their time practising in the Fogertys’ garage. Although their music evoked the raw, gospel-tinged sound of the rural South, Doug Clifford, Stu Cook, and Tom and John Fogerty actually hailed from El Cerrito, California, a small town near Berkeley.