Doug Clifford of Creedence Clearwater Revival, courtesy Brent Clifford.

Doug “Cosmo” Clifford spent the first 13 years of his career as the drummer for a band he cofounded with some friends in El Cerrito, in the East Bay. They spent most of that time as a local bar band before striking it big, then breaking up after a few years and going their separate ways.

That’s not an uncommon story in music. Most musicians start off in a bar band with friends. But when that first band is the legendary Creedence Clearwater Revival, it tends to define one’s legacy.

“We started the band as an instrumental trio: Stu [Cook], John [Fogerty] and me. Our goal was to hear one of our songs on the radio,” Clifford says. “Well now they’ve been playing our songs for 53 years. The dream has eclipsed itself monumentally. We were number one in the world in record sales and concert draw two years in a row.”

That said, CCR broke up in 1972, and Clifford has kept playing music in the 49 years since. For example, he formed Creedence Clearwater Revisited, the touring band he founded in 1996 with Stu Cook after they became neighbors near Lake Tahoe and started playing together again.

“When we started it, we had a four-year plan for Revisited, and we just retired it at 25 years,” Clifford says, laughing. “So who knows, right? You go with what works.”

In addition, he did session work on solo albums by Steve Miller, Greg Kihn and Fogerty. And he also wrote and recorded countless songs. Some of those songs got released, but some he put aside in what he calls “Cosmo’s Vault.” The reasons songs were committed to the vault vary. Sometimes, he couldn’t convince a label to release them. Sometimes, he thought they weren’t ready. Sometimes, they were never intended to be released—but he kept them all, just in case.

A while ago, when Doug Clifford was reorganizing his studio, he found a box of master reels of some of that vault material. He sent the tapes he found off to get baked—”I told the engineer, you didn’t mention anything about brownies,” Clifford says. “Little tape-baking humor there.”

It turned out the the tapes were in perfect condition. First, he released a solo album he had recorded about 35 years ago.

“I released it right when the pandemic hit,” he says. “It got rave reviews, but nobody noticed.”

Then he turned his attention to another set of tapes from the same set: a collection of songs he wrote and recorded with the late Steve Wright, the fellow El Cerrito native and Greg Kihn Band bassist who cowrote their hit “Jeopardy” over nine or ten recording sessions back in 1986.

“The idea was to record the songs we had been writing to show a label that we could write together, and that we had a broad base of music we were writing,” Clifford says. “That we were wide open to subject matter. That’s why there’s a wide variety of songs, tempos, ideas, things of that nature.”

But, unfortunately, it was not to be at the time.

“What we really wanted from the labels was a deal, but back then you had to play someplace where they could come see you. Steve didn’t want to do it; he said he was done playing those small venues,” Clifford says.

Some of the tracks also featured an impressive array of backing musicians including Tim Gorman, former touring keyboardist for The Who; Greg Douglass, formerly of the Steve Miller Band; Jimmy Lyon, guitarist for Eddie Money; and, notably, guitar legend Joe Satriani.

“There’s a tremendous amount of talent on that record. We had an amazing bunch of guitar players that we had at different sessions,” Clifford says. “Steve knew Satriani and the other guitarists from the Greg Kihn Band. It was a very East Bay collection of musicians.”

But why release it now after all these years?

“It’s something I really want to share with the world because it’ll let people hear Steve Wright playing bass,” he explains. “And, I mean, it rocks. If there was ever a time we needed some rock and roll, it’s right now, I’ll tell ya. The world is in a shambles, and there’s nothing like something that makes you feel good and makes you tap your feet.”

Follow editor Daniel J. Willis at Twitter.com/BayAreaData.