If you had to explain to someone what rock ’n’ roll music is by playing that person any one – and only one – album, which would you choose? What is the record that typifies rock ’n’ roll better than any other? In my view, there can be no doubt as to the answer: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Cosmo’s Factory, which was released 40 years ago this month.

Named after Creedence’s rehearsal place, which was in turn named after the group’s drummer, Doug “Cosmo” Clifford, Cosmo’s Factory was the fourth of five albums to be released by the group in the astonishingly short time span of two years. What is more, all five of those albums – Bayou Country (January 1969), Green River (August 1969), Willy and the Poor Boys (November 1969), Cosmo’s Factory (July 1970) and Pendulum (December 1970) – were either masterpieces (the middle three) or at the least very good records, and were accompanied by a torrent of wonderful hit singles, including “Proud Mary”, “Bad Moon Rising”, “Green River”, “Down on the Corner”, “Travelin’ Band”, “Up Around the Bend”, “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” and “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”. Today, it would take the average group the best part of a decade and a half to release this quantity of new material.

Despite the fact that Cosmo’s Factory was (indirectly) named after Clifford, he was not the pivotal member of Creedence Clearwater Revival: that role fell to John Fogerty, who (prior to Mardi Gras, the group’s final studio album) wrote all of Creedence’s original material, produced the group’s albums, sang lead vocals on all tracks, and played all of the instruments other than drums, rhythm guitar (handled by older brother Tom) and bass (Stu Cook). Fogerty, mainly as a result of his work with Creedence, is a figure of gigantic stature – so much so that if I were to choose four individuals whose likenesses would be carved out on a Mount Rushmore of American rock, Fogerty would be among them. (The other three would be Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.) The sustained excellence of Fogerty’s work with Creedence Clearwater Revival led to the group being labelled “probably the greatest American singles band” in The New Rolling Stone Record Guide (1983) and “America’s best basic rock band” in the next edition of that work, The Rolling Stone Album Guide (1992). Only the Ramones rival Creedence for the title of best American rock group of all time.

Of the 11 tracks on Cosmo’s Factory, no fewer than six were released before the album appeared. They were the A- and B-sides of three transcendent singles released during the first half of 1970: “Travelin’ Band”/“Who’ll Stop the Rain”, “Up Around the Bend”/“Run Through the Jungle” and “Lookin’ Out My Back Door”/“Long As I Can See the Light”. Traditionally, B-sides of singles are a dumping ground for inferior material by artistes who wish to release their good work as A-sides or as album tracks, but Fogerty (like Oasis, 25 years later) was not prepared to put second-rate compositions on the flip sides of his group’s hit songs. In the result, “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and “Run Through the Jungle” are arguably even better than the A-sides that partnered them, while “Long As I Can See the Light” falls not far short of doing the same. All three singles attained the American top five, with “Up Around the Bend” peaking at number 4 and the other two each reaching number 2. (Famously, Creedence never enjoyed a Number One single in the United States. And the only one of its singles to reach Number One in Britain was “Bad Moon Rising”, the lead single from the Green River album.)

When the time came to record Cosmo’s Factory, John Fogerty had only one self-penned song left over: “Ramble Tamble”, a driving seven-minute guitar jam with which the album opens. The long instrumental section that forms the middle part of this track builds and builds, bookended by a litany of urban and moral decay (“roach in the cellar”, “bugs in the sugar”, “garbage on the sidewalk”, “highways in the back yard”, “police on the corner”, mortgages on home and car, “actors in the White House”, “acid indigestion”, and so on) bothering Fogerty at the time. The four remaining tracks on the album were cover versions of well-known songs, with a strong leaning towards the classic ’50s rock ’n’ roll that Fogerty so obviously loves: Bo Diddley’s “Before You Accuse Me”, Roy Orbison’s “Ooby Dooby”, Elvis Presley’s “My Baby Left Me” and Marvin Gaye’s much more recent hit, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”, which was here expanded to an intense and largely instrumental track running to a length of over 11 minutes. The cover versions, however, are no mere filler: all are played (like every one of Fogerty’s own songs on the album) with incredible gusto, enthusiasm and self-confidence. The songs burst out of the radio at the time of their release, overwhelming the listener with joy at being alive, and they do the same from stereo systems to this day. The version of “My Baby Left Me”, although recorded as a tribute to the King, is so good that it renders Elvis’s own recording redundant; never before or since has this song rocked so hard.

Everything that is good about rock ’n’ roll is be found on Cosmo’s Factory: the biting political protest (against the war in Vietnam that was then raging) on “Run Through the Jungle” and in the opening couplet of “Who’ll Stop the Rain” (“Long as I remember the rain been comin’ down/Clouds of myst’ry pourin’! confusion on the ground”), the exuberance of playing rock ’n’ roll (“Travelin’ Band”), the youthful idealism of hope for a better world, combined (crucially) with action to bring it about, on “Up Around the Bend” (“There’s a place up ahead and I’m goin’/Just as fast as my feet can fly/Come away, come away if you’re goin’/Leave the sinkin’ ship behind/Come on the risin’ wind/We’re goin’ up around the bend”), a celebration of the delights of domesticity in the form of a song about imaginary creatures cavorting in happiness on Fogerty’s front lawn (“Lookin’ Out My Back Door”), an expression of the longing to be home while on a journey away (“Long As I Can See the Light”), affirmations of the importance of love expressed as heartbreak at being dumped by a partner (“My Baby Left Me”, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”), the exalted musical peaks that can be scaled when longer instrumental pieces are attempted (“Ramble Tamble”, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”).

Ultimately, Cosmo’s Factory is a joyous celebration of life in all its aspects, which is fundamentally what rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be. The album spent nine weeks at the top of the American album chart, from August to October 1970, and is today considered a classic – although it took reviewers for Rolling Stone magazine until 2004 to realize this by allocating a five-star rating to it. The All Music Guide to Rock (2002) agrees, and New York critic Robert Christgau in his Rock Albums of the 70s (1982) gives the album an A rating, signifying “a great record both of whose sides offer enduring pleasure and surprise”. Cosmo’s Factory also occupies position 262 in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2005). This, I think, underrates the album significantly: it is well within my personal all-time top ten, a copy stays permanently in the 6-CD changer in my car, and it gives me enormous pleasure every time I listen to it. I wish the album a happy birthday as it reaches middle age, without (musically) having aged a day in 40 years. Cosmo’s Factory is rock ’n’ roll music’s definitive album, and no collection is complete without it.