John Fogerty has newly recorded some of the best -known songs of his long -resisted band for his new album “Legacy: The Croedence Clearwater Revival Years” – a step à la Taylor Swift, which is best to understand the highlight of his decades of effort to recover these hits.
Fogerty spent years in a number of ugly legal disputes with the late manager Saul Zaentz, who belonged to the rights to Creedences Songs. The best known is that Zaentz once unsuccessfully sued him because he supposedly plagued his own song “Run Through the Jungle” in “Old Man Down the Road” from 1984.
Two years ago, Fogerty returned the publication rights to his Creedence songs, a triumph that he found as a liberation after decades as a “prisoner of war”. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Fogerty looks back on his time at Creedence, talks about his early influences, shares thoughts about mortality and legacy and much more.
In the midst of these conflicts, Fogerty felt so alienated from his past that he refused to play the songs on stage at all. (It was Bob Dylan who helped him over his resistance by pointing him out that people would think of “Proud Mary” as a song by Tina Turner if Fogerty did not sing him.)
Two years ago, they received the publication rights on the songs of Creedence Clearwater Revival. That was a long way.
I wrote the songs and was very proud of my performance all my life, even if so many things turned against me in legal and financial terms. And even in terms of public awareness, one could say. I read a review about me somewhere in Europe in which someone wrote that I was not a well -known name. This is also true in many ways. It was a bit frustrating not to have this recognition, because I gave myself the name Creedence Clearwater Revival.
I knew the songs were good. I am very proud of that. When everything went wrong after the separation of Creedence, I still knew that. And I also felt really bad. One of the things I am talking about is to get my Rickenbacker back. This is very symbolic. I understand that now. At that time I didn’t know that – I gave away this guitar. Why should you do something like that? I played this guitar in Woodstock! And I wrote songs on this guitar. I played them on so many plates – for example “Up Around the Bend”. I gave the guitar to a 12-year-old boy who asked me if I had a guitar for him. I was so desperate and depressed that I thought I could get rid of all my problems and just start again. But it wasn’t that simple.
What did you learn all the years later when you re -recorded these songs?
I was really not prepared for how deep I had to go. It was not just a guy who sang “Proud Mary” every evening. It was a guy who tried to be 23 years old, to remember how the radio was back then to remember what was going on in the world and get to this specific point, why and how he wrote “Proud Mary”. I learned to put my mind or soul back into this time. [Meine Frau] Julie later told me that she looked at my facial expression. After a few months I had a lot more respect and awareness of what had happened in 1968 or 1969 – in a way I did the same as the Beatles, but I did everything on my own. I didn’t have two other people who wrote songs with me.
How did you make this incredible creative thrust in 1969 when you released three classic albums in one year?
Towards the end of 1968 I looked at “Suzie Q” and basically said: “Now I’m a one-hit wonder.” I was considered manic. I stayed up every night, wrote songs all day and kept thinking about what would be good for my band. I did these three albums by working harder than any other I knew – I had two or three jobs, two or three layers.
You are known for having many disputes with your former Creedence bandmates. But was there something special about this group of people, or do you really believe that you could have done it with three other musicians?
To think that you could just take anyone and let him play something – through my experience as a band leader, I learned that the matter of luck is. When my two boys came to the band, it just fit immediately. This is good chemistry. I really have to acknowledge that [meine Söhne] Shane and Tyler feel that I am looking for, right? Of course, this also applies to Tom [Fogerty]the deceased rhythm guitarist from Creedence. Even if Tom was limited as a guitarist – he had no sophisticated technology and no years of training – he still had a great feeling of rhythm and was able to play great rhythm part. The same ultimately also applies to Doug [Clifford] and Stu [Cook].
I think a large part of the process was that I constantly told you what I wanted. … these are the four people who made these records. And that has not been repeated in history. So these four people are obviously unique. That may sound like my reserved way of paying recognition, but it doesn’t mean that. I think the stamp that these four people put on this panel was created naturally because we were all with our hearts – everyone wanted to reach this mysterious place high up in heaven. And we did it.
As a child, in 1953 they dreamed of playing in a band one day – and in their imagination, their adult I was a black. This is pretty amazing when you consider how racist this time was.
It is the same when you are nine years old and can imagine being baseball player, Willie Mays. The music that I loved in the early 1950s was R&B because it was the really soulful, pure and deepest place I wanted to be. The thought of racism was quite strange to me. All of my sporting role models and my musical heroes were rather black. With Elvis I clasped this reality a little, but with Pat Boone it didn’t go on. When Pat Boone “Ain’t That A Shame” covered, I found the stupidest thing I had ever heard in my life.
Have you ever questioned your right to sing blues or sing a song like “Cotton Fields” from Leadbelly that Creedence has covered?
I am very aware that I am a white boy from the middle class. Incidentally, this question still arises today. When I wrote “Proud Mary”, I immediately came to mind “Boinin ‘” and “Toinin'”, and I don’t even know why. Many years later I heard howlin ‘Wolf say something similar and thought: “Maybe it came into the song.” It seemed to me to be fine as long as it was sincerely. If it is pied or stupid, I would slap the guy myself, even if I were.
I think there is no longer any doubt that your songs will live on. How does that affect your attitude to death, if at all?
[Lacht laut.] If you see TV these days, you can see all of these commercials for medication that means that side effects can occur … and at the very end is “diarrhea and death”. You could make a song out of it – “diarrhea and death”. I have to admit that I really didn’t notice the watch and the end of the field. When you reach 80, you think: “Man, that’s a scary number!” But I always knew that my songs would live for a long time. When I wrote “Proud Mary” – and that was the first time that this happened to me – I looked at the side and thought: “Oh my god, I wrote a classic.”
Few musicians ever had such a fantastic year as they were in 1969. They published “Bayou Country”, “Green River” and “Willy and the Poor Boys”. After that it got really hard. I wonder if it is possible that in these twelve months they had so much incredible creativity that they burned out themselves.
Of course there was a reason why I produced and published these three albums this year. At the end of 1968, nothing was certain for my band, which I called Creedence Clearwater Revival. At that time I told myself that the name was much better than the band. It was a world-class name, but the band was not world class. We were basically still a top 40 jukebox band that played in small clubs in Northern California. I looked at “Suzie Q” and said: “I’m now a one-hit wonder. It took us so long to come here. Now you only have five minutes for the next step, because then the spotlight will fall on Led Zeppelin or someone else. If you don’t bring anything new now, it’s over for you.” I literally said to myself: “John, you just have to do it with music.” I looked around and there was nobody near me. I am in the middle of the ocean in a canoe and look around and I see nothing that could help me except what I can do with my own hands.
You didn’t ruin your voice. Somehow you can still sing in the same pitch. What have you discovered vocal that gives you this kind of screaming force without tearing your voice?
If you scream on musical, controlled and effortlessly, you don’t ruin your voice. But if you are so passionate that you let all your mental problems flow into your vocals, it can quickly lead to destruction, which has happened to me countless times. Another thing that happens to people, especially when they are nervous and their worries like me, is that they get stuck in the stomach. Many people get stomach ulcers. On the way there you get heartburn. Without medical help and education, you don’t notice that it comes up in sleep and hits the vocal cords. The next day you wake up and sound like Wolfman Jack or something. I had this often in the nineties and have slowly learned to control my diet, you could say and just stay calmer.
How would you like to be remembered?
In the past I thought I was supposed to hide all the bad music I made and the things that I did when I wasn’t doing well. I was ashamed to live like this. I was an alcoholic. Alcohol dominated my life. I was unhappy and really didn’t have much sunshine in my life. I was ashamed of what I was doing and was ashamed of myself. The encounter with Julie was really crucial for me. With the help of a wonderful person, I finally overcome that. During this time I basically tried to stay alive. I felt like a prisoner of war. The war was against Saul Zaentz. I was in solitary confinement, in bright light, so I could never sleep.
And my way of keeping myself and struck back was to deal with … but under these circumstances the songs I wrote were somehow lifeless and in time, rigid and not happy at all. So I don’t like her when I hear her. I still remember how I felt.
I am the happiest person in the world. I really have the feeling that I lived long enough and have met the right person who, for the right reasons, gives me the feeling of being happy. Because real life, the real situation is more important than any career. And the lucky thing was that Julie became part of my career. So we do that together. I am probably a musician who loved the music and I have tried to respect that all my life.