by John Fogerty
The light-gauge string thing started when Tom and the Blue Velvets had some band pictures done at a little photo studio in Oakland. They were moody black-and-white pictures, and we were dressed up in suits. Just sitting there at the photo shoot was a Stratocaster guitar. It had that sunburst look and was all curvy. For a long time that was the only good guitar I’d ever held. But what really caught my eye was the fact that it had slinky strings, lightweight and really bendy. Like rubber bands.
I picked it up and went, “Wow, what’s goin’ on here?” I was using Black Diamond strings, and positioned in their normal places they’re pretty rigid, taut. Holding that Strat just made me think, How can I do that? So I would go down to Louis Gordon Music and, along with my normal set of strings, I would buy an extra high-E string. I would put the first E string in its normal first-string position. Then I’d put the other E string in the second-string position and move all the other strings down one spot lower than intended, making them all lighter gauge.
Later I found out that James Burton did the same thing, but he was using a banjo string for the high string. I didn’t have enough knowledge for that move. But fairly early on I was into the light-string thing. It was a fortunate coincidence that I picked up that Stratocaster. It showed me that I could really just bend the heck out of those strings, which became an essential part of what I did.
Around the time we made the record with James, we would get together with Tom and do stuff. We were the Blue Velvets, his instrumental backing band. When I was in the ninth or tenth grade, we were at some guy’s makeshift studio near Vallejo. It was the Blue Velvets plus Tom. He was singing. This guy had a couple of reel-to-reel tape recorders. Something was going wrong with his equipment, so we took a break. At one point he was fixing something on the tape recorder with a crescent wrench. Like a guy from an auto shop working on audio equipment. It was funny.
I don’t know where Tom disappeared to. Stu went off to buy some smokes and Doug went with him.
“John, you wanna come?”
“No, I’m gonna stay here.”
“Why?”
“Because I might learn somethin’.” How often do I get to be at a recording studio?
So I’m just watching this guy with his wires. And he says, “Y’know, when you’re recording this stuff, remember: it’s kind of like a glass of water.”
“Huh?”
“You guys are making all this racket, but you’re gonna have to put the singer on there.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“And you gotta put the lead guitar on there.”
“Yeah. You mean it’s like, ‘Is my glass half empty or is it half full?’”
“No, no, no—not that way. You got a glass of water—that’s your record, the thing you’re trying to capture on tape. Remember that you can only fill the glass with so much water. After that, it all spills out. It’s not going to be on your tape anymore—it’s wasted. It’s a mess, and ugly things happen. So if you’re going to have something at the top—like a vocal—other things have to be less, so it doesn’t overflow.”
Analog tape saturates in a beautiful way—the old blues records, Bo Diddley and Chess Records, rock and roll in the golden age, Manfred Mann singing “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.” If you sit right there on the red and everything’s calibrated right, that’s where rock and roll lives. The great engineers learn how to manipulate that. We don’t stop where it starts to go into the red—that’s the holy grail.
Digital can’t do that. When you’re recording in the digital world, you’re backing off from that, wimping out. It can’t go into the red. To paraphrase that wise old guy, the glass is overflowing, and it’s ugly. Digital breakup is not a pretty sound.
So what this guy taught me that day stayed with me the rest of my life. When the guys came back, they were snickering—“Well, did you learn anything?” Later I tried to talk about it. They laughed.
My bandmates didn’t really desire to know that stuff. I had to kind of drag them along, kicking and screaming. Sometimes they were in it; sometimes they’d go off with a girlfriend or to a party. And I was left there—“Oh. Yeah, okay.” Stu actually told me a couple of times, “Well, music isn’t my whole life!” In Stu’s case, it wasn’t. In my case, it was. I’d caught it, and it had caught me.
I was the guy who always wanted to learn. I thought, I’m gonna research this. I’m gonna scratch at it until I can figure it out. It was about learning—learning what it was and how to do it. This was way more mental than, “Oh, poor me, I can’t do it because I’m in a crappy recording studio.” The great thing about rock and roll was that most of it was coming out of garages on some little label that said Del-Fi or Sun. They were making not only okay records but the best records.
Even though we were all very, very young musicians, I was always ahead of the other guys musically—and therefore, right from the get-go, I was the guy showing them what to play. Doug kind of knew that the foot went on one and the snare beat went on two, but that was about it. It was up to me to really study songs on the radio, discern what people were playing, and how that worked within that arrangement of that song. I was the translator. I could decipher. Most other people just hear music as one big sound coming at you. When I heard music, I heard the parts.
Hearing music live went a huge way towards my understanding, and the shows I saw at the Oakland Auditorium were another big influence. Those big revue extravaganzas where each artist got a half hour—James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Duane Eddy, Ray Charles. At all the shows that I saw at the Oakland Auditorium I was in the front row. I was in the front row for every one. I remember standing in line with Doug and Tom—Tom was the transportation, the wheels. We would get down there at three o’clock in the afternoon and be the first ones in line, so when the doors opened a few hours later we’d haul ass and sit front and center. That’s how I could see so much detail.
I saw James Brown when I was fourteen. There was such precision. He’d sing one song—“Please, Please, Please”—and then, suddenly, pow! James goes down on the ground with the splits. Then he’s up on his feet and into another song. Bam! His legs are going crazy. Another song! Bam! He might’ve been on for twenty minutes, but he and the band did twelve songs. The idea was to explode in a very short period of time. Energy! At the end, everybody’s mouths hung open—“Whaaaa happened?” I loved that.
Larry Williams jumped off the stage with his guitar, and all these girls surrounded him. Bam! When they pulled away he was naked to the waist. They had shredded his shirt. Jackie Wilson came out in a tuxedo and all the women totally lost it. White girls, black girls—didn’t matter. Jackie was movie star good-looking, with moves that were graceful, effortless, like a panther. Deejay Bouncin’ Bill, the emcee, came out and told the women, “You’ve got to get back in your seats, back in your seats,” because of the fire marshal. With Jackie Wilson it just kept happening. The cool R & B backing band we saw there several times had a song called “Spunky Onions” (it had started out as “Funky Onions”), and the guitar player hit what I now know is an augmented chord. Tom turned to me and said, “You should really watch what that guitar player is doing.” He wasn’t telling himself that—he was telling me. I wondered about that later.
There was one show at the Oakland Auditorium that turned out differently than all the rest. As usual, we had gotten there in the afternoon so we could be first in line. Well, they opened the doors as usual at six or six thirty. Then we sat there for the longest time with nothing happening. The time for the show to start came and went. Still no word.… By now the auditorium was full and everyone was ready for the show. It got later and later and nothing was said to the audience. People started to murmur and were getting a bit upset.
Forty-five minutes to an hour after showtime, there began to be a stirring coming from the back of the auditorium. As we turned to see what it was, a few guys came walking down the center aisle on the main floor. They proceeded to walk right past the front row of people toward the stage. A
couple of guys had dry cleaning bags over their shoulders, and slowly the audience began to realize that these guys were musicians—part of the show. As they got to the stage—which was raised up from the floor maybe four feet—they each hopped up onto it.
The audience relaxed a bit, thinking that now the show would begin. One of the guys sat down at the grand piano and started to play the opening of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” which was a current hit on the radio. When he got to the part where the right hand does a little break and then the verse-ending riff, he fumbled and couldn’t do it. He tried that riff a few times but could not play it cleanly. Well, the other guys had gathered around the piano, so one of them pushes this guy off the seat and sits down and tries to play the riff. He also fails and gets pushed away by yet another “player.” I think five or six guys had a go at it. Finally, I believe Bouncin’ Bill—the emcee—came out and scooted them backstage. Watching this scene, I said to myself, This isn’t right. It seems so amateurish. I made a vow to myself that I would never let this happen at “my show.” I was fourteen years old.
I believe it was later on in this same show when I got some more “showbiz instruction.” Bouncin’ Bill announced the next act, the audience cheered, and… nothing. No one came out. He announced them again, and still nothing. After a couple more times, Bill went backstage, and suddenly a whole bunch of guys came flying out onto the stage, all dressed in matching suits. Bouncin’ Bill was obviously pissed at this bunch, so he went to the mic and said, “Somebody had a royal flush and he wasn’t gonna come out until the hand played its course.” That was another lesson—as in, “Gee whiz, don’t treat your audience like crap—they’ve come here to see you!”
In spite of that, we saw a lot of good presentation, good professional showbiz at the Oakland Auditorium. What I learned at the knee of James Brown and Jackie Wilson was how to entertain.
My mother sent me back to Catholic school in the ninth grade—St. Mary’s, where my older brothers had gone from ninth through twelfth grade. There wasn’t a whole lot that worked out for me there, but they had a boys’ glee club at St. Mary’s. Now that was awesome. One of the songs we learned was “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” from South Pacific—“ We got mangoes and bananas…”
When music is all you’ve got going, you cling to it. When I first started up at the school, the dean was this guy named Brother Neil. He let me know right away, “I had both of your brothers. I got an eye on you. I’ll see you in detention.” And he did.
After that year, Brother Neil ran off with the receptionist, quit the order, and got married. Some of my friends were getting hit on by this brother or that brother. We were kind of disgusted. For me it was another slat gone out of the white picket fence that is the Catholic Church.
At one detention I was supposed to write something a thousand times—some sentence like “I will not chew gum in class.” Well, my pen ran out of ink. And in detention you’re not allowed to talk. I couldn’t tell anybody or get up or raise my hand. So I filled in all the rest with the empty pen. If you looked close at the paper, you could see the imprint of the inkless pen. The brother looked at it and said, “Are you crazy?” Of course, I should’ve known—back when I was born I had inherited original sin from some guy millions of years ago. I should’ve known that you’d better not run out of ink, right?
One time when I was staying after school, this brother, an older gentleman, had a talk with me. I was having a hard time in school, so coming to class wasn’t necessarily something that made me go, “Whoopee!” So the brother was giving me this talk. Now remember, these are religious people. You’re not really supposed to be talking about sex, except that you’re dealing with teenage boys with absolutely raging hormones, meaning they may go twelve seconds without having sexual thoughts, if the thoughts haven’t already knocked them unconscious. And at some point the brother asked if I thought about sexual things, and I said yeah. And he says, “Well, maybe your underwear is too tight.” I sure remember that phrase. I don’t even know how I responded. And I’m thinking, Oh, here we go. I got a brother hittin’ on me.
Music—thank God. We had formed a little musical group at St. Mary’s. Baynard Cheshire played guitar alongside me. Baynard had a little National electric guitar, and sometimes I’d swap and let him play my Silvertone. Ron White, a guy who could really play, was on drums, and John Tonaga played piano. I don’t think we had bass. I can’t remember if the band even had a name, although we might’ve made one up on the spot. I know I brought those guys over to play once at El Cerrito High.
When our little group played at St. Mary’s, the principal was Brother Frederick. He was a little short in stature. (I only noticed because he seemed to be overcompensating. We learned the phrase “Napoleonic complex.”) At the time, I had been listening to Elmore James, and he’d inspired me to learn a vibrato technique that involved holding down three notes in the key of E, like the high part in Link Wray’s “Rumble.” You just hit it once or twice, and shake like crazy to imitate Elmore’s slide. So there we are in the gym at St. Mary’s, playing some fast rock and roll instrumental, and I start doing that E thing. I’m shaking, and the sound is coming out BEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOW! The kids are all digging the rock and roll. If you want to say “in a frenzy,” I won’t argue.
And suddenly it just goes quiet. Someone pulled the plug! I look up and there’s Brother Frederick, frowning, and suddenly it becomes apparent that I have committed the sin of all sins, because my body was shaking while I was playing. I didn’t even know! I still don’t. It’s rock and roll—that’s what you do! Brother Frederick had turned it into plenary indulgence, Hail Mary perversion: “This insidious music is going to be the ruin of the whole school!” Right then I think I lost all heart for finishing out at St. Mary’s. I thought, God, this guy’s such a jerk. Right out of Bye Bye Birdie!
Halfway through the tenth grade they took me out of St. Mary’s. I don’t know if the school just said, “We don’t want him here anymore,” or what. But I was relieved. I got to start fresh at El Cerrito High. My grades and attendance certainly improved, but it took me a while to get my bearings. On my first day the biology teacher called on me to answer a question, so I stood up to answer as I had been trained at St. Mary’s. There was sort of a murmur in the class. I sat down and the teacher said, “That’s a wonderful answer—and by the way, you don’t have to stand up here.”
For a second I felt embarrassed, but then I looked over at this girl who was smiling at me in an unthreatening way. She was a cute girl with glasses, and she asked my name. I was like, Wow, there’s girls! Everything was so friendly and easy. Man, I loved El Cerrito High!
When I was sixteen, having a car was definitely the thing. I wanted to get a learner’s permit and a license, but my mom resisted. My older brothers had gotten tickets and she didn’t want the hassle. I had gotten a job at a gas station when I was fifteen—Tom had worked there; I’m sure that helped—so I saved my money and finally, at seventeen, I went and bought a car and just put it in our driveway. And I said, “Well, Mom, I probably oughta get a driver’s license now that I have a car.”
It was a green 1948 Ford Fastback, forty-eight thousand miles on it. It was a great car—the upholstery was perfect. I’d bought it for a hundred dollars—I’d tried to talk the guy down to ninety. This car had a Motorola radio with a little electric motor that went grrrrr over to the next station when you pushed a button. I put in toggle switches so the radio would jump between my favorite stations, KEWB and KDIA (formerly KWBR). I wanted to build a hot rod and screwed the car all up by taking it apart. What I didn’t know was now the battery wasn’t charging, so I was forever in situations where the car wouldn’t start. I’d have to push the friggin’ car down the road and pop it into gear. Because of my own foolishness that car gave me some intense, interesting moments in life. I ended up selling it for forty bucks to a guy who worked at the gas station with me. He still owes me twenty.
My first real girlfriend was a s
traight-A student and kind of insisted that I be one too. There’s nothing like that kind of girlfriend to give you incentive to turn into a good student. I was fifteen; she was a year younger. She left me for a guy named Fred. I had an old lady car; Fred had a hot rod—exposed engine, a lot of chrome. He was a year older than me. He was in auto shop; I was in geometry. I guess my girlfriend liked the rugged, rough-and-ready thing at that point in her life and said, “Yeah, I wanna be in that car.” That was a harpoon in my side. Talk about a broken heart.
I put that teenage emotion into a song I wrote, “Have You Ever Been Lonely.” You know how there are these little signs that there’s something wrong, and there’s some other guy who seems to be pretty friendly with your girl, and you’re the last to know? I wrote that song on piano. It had a little of the vibe of Arthur Alexander’s “Where Have You Been (All My Life)” or Ron Holden and the Thunderbirds’ “Love You So”—Tom would sing that one and I’d play piano. I play a piano solo in “Have You Ever Been Lonely” that’s in the same style.
We cut the song in 1961 for Wayne Farlow, who had a little label called Orchestra Records. We had already done one single for him. The label said “Tommy Fogerty and the Blue Velvets.” When we were rehearsing the song in my living room, Wayne said, “I can’t hear the solo. Play it in a higher register.” So I moved it up one octave. Now, we could’ve just turned up the solo when we made the record, but this gave the song a different character and it made the solo stick out from the rest of the music. That’s called arranging, and it was very good advice—a lesson to keep in mind for the future.
