by John Fogerty
I told the evaluator that I was very upset and didn’t agree with the war. I didn’t sleep very well. By now Martha and I had an infant son, and I had experienced a couple of dreams where I was literally stabbing babies with a bayonet. I told the evaluator I’d lost a lot of weight. He said, “Well, how’s your libido?” I didn’t know what that meant. I looked at him and said, “What’s a libido?” I think the fact that I was that stupid—and that I didn’t have a big, long, over-the-top scenario, wasn’t really there with a prepared case—might’ve swayed the day a little in my favor.
I saw a lawyer. I remember writing to various causes, even the Black Panthers. I was trying anything I could think of. I even showed up at boot camp with a syringe. Just planted it in my stuff, waiting to be found. I might’ve got it from Martha’s mom because she worked in nursing. It was new, unused, and I didn’t have what went with it. It was more just to be scary—“What’s this, Private Fogerty?” If they had actually said, “Okay, tell us what you do with that,” I wouldn’t have had a clue!
The head of our reserve unit was this guy, Lieutenant Ritzman. He was a second looey—typical military guy. I think Ritzman was in the reserves, just like me, but he took it way more seriously. A real brownnoser. We had this big meeting, almost like a social get-together, semicasual, and he’s doing armyspeak. A pep talk. We’re kids—he’s late twenties, I’m barely twenty—and he starts by quoting Laugh-In, I guess to be hip. Then he says, “America has a counterculture and the army has to tread carefully. As you folks know, there’s been a lot of demonstrations, protests. Civil disobedience. Unruly crowds. Where we will have to control the situation, not let it get out of hand. So when we arrive, we don’t want to be doing our formations out in the open. We will go around to a side street…”
Slowly it’s dawning on all of us that he’s talking about using the U.S. Army (and perhaps our reserve unit) to keep protesters in line, keep people down. The idea was to get into formation, out of sight from the disturbance, and then come around the corner in full force as an organized show of military muscle. At the time, I think it was illegal to use the army for that. We have a National Guard for internal domestic emergencies. He kept talking like this for fifteen minutes.
Finally, I raised my hand and stood up. I’m feeling somewhat cynical and sarcastic. We’ve all seen pictures of Red Square. You know, the Soviet Union parading its military might around the Kremlin for all to see and be intimidated. So I said, “Why don’t we just have the military parade all our rockets and tanks down the main street of every major city, y’know, like, once a month? Just show ’em the army’s muscle, our might. I think that would keep people in their place.” I sat down.
You could see the steam coming out of Ritzman’s ears. After that, I showed up at my reserve meeting with my gray Peugeot 403 plastered with signs I had made. “Warning—the Army Is Coming!” “The Velvet Glove Is Off, the Iron Fist Is Revealed!” Well, they noticed.
“Susie Q” was already happening, and with the guys in tow, I took the same leaflets down Macdonald Avenue, the main street of Richmond, near where we lived, and started taping these things onto telephone poles and streetlights. We get about two blocks and a cop car pulls up. We get arrested and taken to the Richmond city jail. It’s illegal to post signs on the light fixtures. The officer could barely contain himself. He was a patriot; we were long-haired hippie types. They held us there a few hours. I think our one phone call was to Al Bendich, the lawyer at Fantasy.
These activities started to weigh in my favor. Eventually I saw this guy, Mr. Legere, at the Presidio. He was on the army base and part of the military, yet he was a civilian. And Mr. Legere was a good guy. The first time I sat in his office and told him my tale, there was one thing he said that blew my mind: “Wow, it’s rather like a story by Camus.” I’d been in the army awhile and had never met anybody like that. I could sense that Mr. Legere was willing to help because I think he respected how I was going about it. I wasn’t a wacko. Even though I was against the war—I think he was too—I was clearly just trying to support my family. He could sense that I was trying to do right, trying to find a way to work within the system.
This process went on for several months. I was never sure how it would all turn out, but I kept trying everything I could think of. Of course, I had to keep going to reserve meetings and treading carefully through these treacherous waters. I believe I met with Mr. Legere at least one more time at the Presidio, and we spoke by phone several times throughout this ordeal.
It was starting to get near summertime, and they were going to send me to camp again, this time to Camp Roberts. I was even skinnier now. Mr. Legere seemed to think we were getting close to a discharge for me, and we were feeling hopeful about that. But one day he tells me, “I think it would be a good idea if you could get a medical to avoid that camp this summer, because you know what’s going to happen if you go.”
He was right, of course. There was going to be a great big bull’s-eye on my back—“There’s that wimp that’s trying to get out of the reserve. Let’s get him.”
I went to my doctor at Kaiser Permanente. They needed to do all these blood tests. I hate shots and having my blood taken, but I sat there like a good soldier while they took vial after vial of my blood. They needed to take thirteen vials, and I thought they were done, but I had miscounted. Feeling a little woozy from losing blood, I heard them say, “Oh no, we’re not done—we need to take one more…” I just sorta crumbled onto the tabletop and lost consciousness. At that point, I think I weighed 129 pounds.
Turned out I had a mild form of dysentery. The report said, “If you turn this guy loose in the camp, it’s not so much what it’s gonna do to him, it’s what he’s gonna do to everybody else! You’re all gonna get sick. This thing will spread like wildfire.” Thank you, Mr. Legere. Sometime in midsummer of 1968 I received my discharge, and as far as me being in the army, that was that. My army days were over.
There was a time when I could barely talk about Vietnam. Since I was lucky enough to get into the reserve, I wasn’t sent to Vietnam. I wasn’t in combat. There was such an anxiety in those years over whether or not I was ever really going to go. I managed not to. But I was and still feel very much a part of that generation, and the whole thing that was going on all around us. Yeah, maybe I looked like a hippie wacko, but as a guy in a rock and roll band who was exactly the same age as those soldiers, I tried to represent the cause as best I knew how. It would just bring me to my knees, it was so sad and very real to me. I must admit that practically every time I’d think about the guys, our vets, I would cry. I’d hear “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” on the radio and would lose it. Because it was just so senseless.
I know of so many people whose lives were ended or ruined, families that lost a kid. Let alone all the broken lives that came home—“Why is Daddy so fucked up?” People having flashbacks who can’t talk about it, won’t talk about it. All that carnage and fear. I know how I felt about Richard Nixon grinning at me through the damn TV screen like some kind of clown, calling the protesters at Kent State “bums.” Where was Richard Nixon when our soldiers were out in a rice paddy? Those soldiers were pretty much just thrown out there on their own to improvise. Hopeless. I still feel sorrowful about those times.
I remember that day in 1974 when it came on the radio that we had ended the war in Vietnam—well, we were withdrawing. The thing we had been telling Nixon to do for five years: just leave. He didn’t want to be the only president who had ever lost a war, so the damn fool had said to push on (just like in the song). Now it was finally over. I was driving in my jeep and had stopped at a light, and I can remember just shaking my head and going, “Let’s just make damn sure we never do somethin’ that stupid again.” As I looked through the windshield, this thought formed: Y’know, I still don’t know what we were fighting for. Down through the years, I’ve wanted to have that be the last line of a song: “And they’ve still never told me what we were fighting for.”
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The real answer is, we were fighting for businessmen, fighting for guys to get rich. Not for me, not for my friends out there in the field, but for the guys who own companies wrapped up in military contracts, the guys paving the roads, building the buildings, making the bridges, and finding the oil—all that crap. Those people who want your kid to die so they can get rich. And if you look at our kids today, that’s still pretty much what they are fighting for.
The Vietnam generation is aging but has remained soulful. In the nineties I was helping with a benefit for the Berkeley Hall School. This is where all our kids went to school. It was a sweet little place, and Julie and I tried to support it in whatever way we could. They were having an auction, and she decided that something special I could contribute was some autographed handwritten lyrics. So I wrote out the words to “Bad Moon Rising” and signed them. I usually print, since my handwriting is horrible, plus my signature’s a mess—I don’t have the John Hancock gift. So I worried about it.
The event arrives and we attend. I wonder how my little contribution turned out, so I go to have a look. It’s been framed, and I’m standing there reassuring myself: “Okay, John, it’s not that bad.” And I feel the presence of somebody beside me, someone I don’t know. He looks at the lyrics and says, “You’re John, right? That’s your song, ‘Bad Moon Rising’?”
“Yes, sir,” I say.
He says, “Your song means a lot to me.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Can I tell you a little story? I was in Vietnam.”
Now he’s really got my attention. Nice-looking guy, dressed well, looks good.
“I was in a little group. We called ourselves the Buffalo Soldiers. We had a little encampment, and every night our assignment was to go out into the jungle, find Charlie, and engage Charlie.”
The wheels are spinning in my head now.
“So we called ourselves the Buffalo Soldiers to kind of brace ourselves up. We had a little PA system and lights. Every night, just before we’d go out into the jungle, we would turn on all the lights in our encampment, put on ‘Bad Moon Rising,’ and blast it as loud as we could.”
I’m looking at him, thinking, this was crazy—suicide. “Why did you do that?”
“Because we were about to go into the jungle.”
“And you’re announcing it?”
“Yep. ‘Here we come.’”
And I thought to myself, How profoundly courageous and fatalistic. They knew they were doomed. Whose crazy idea was this assignment? Sometimes all is lost and all you can do is be brave. No matter how you feel about it, there’s no other choice. These guys were being brave to the nth degree.
“Anyway, John, I just want to thank you, because your song really helped a lot of us in what we had to do over there.”
I shook his hand. I wish I could remember his name. He had done what was asked of him and didn’t cry or whine about it, as opposed to me. He had done something I didn’t do, something I’m not sure I could’ve ever done. And he certainly had my respect.
In his heart he has a connection with that song and me. And to hear from others like him that my music helped them in some way, helped GIs endure what they had to go through? You feel a little sheepish in the presence of something like that. I sure wasn’t taking any bows.
I just looked at him and said, “I’m really glad you made it through.”
You could say that one good thing happened to me in the army. It was 1967, and I went on duty right at the end of January and didn’t get out until July, one day before I would’ve qualified for all the benefits that the government can give you—“Okay, let’s get his butt outta here. Otherwise he’s gonna get the GI plan.”
They drafted millions of guys and didn’t know what to do with us. They’re trying to keep you busy from the time they wake you up at five thirty in the morning until you finally get off at seven at night. They’re keeping you moving the whole time. So you’re marching, marching, marching every day.
I was sent to Fort Bragg, Fort Knox, and Fort Lee. By the time I got to Fort Lee, summer was raging. They had this massive, mile-square parade field made out of asphalt. The heat coming off that black asphalt felt like an oven, and you’ve got on your army fatigues, boots, and rifle, and you just march, march, march. You could go for miles. It was endless.
I started to get delirious. In the military, you try to make the toes of your boots shine like glass. Black glass. Shiny like an expensive car. You could see yourself in them. Spit shined. As I’m marching along, I imagine that there’s this one smudge. This stinkin’ smudge. I go to shine it, and it keeps moving—“I’m over here!” I’m rubbing it, but it moves and won’t go away. I’m a little crazy at this point: delirious, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. And somehow this evolved into thinking about music.
I started thinking about a story—a character from the wrong side of the tracks, sort of a put-upon guy, whose dad was frowned upon in the community because he may have stolen something, committed some kind of crime. It was me, but it wasn’t me. Not specifically my own life, but enough of me in there. It could’ve been a Tennessee Williams play.
I kept doing this, day after day. I’d kind of click on the station in my head, and the same story would start to play. It was comfortable… soothing. “Okay, I’m going there. Okay.” March, march, march. Grunt, grunt, grunt. At some point I became self-aware. At first it was like you’re swimming in a stream—your mind is so busy that you don’t realize what you’re doing. You’re just trying to survive. “The army thinks they have me but they don’t. They don’t have what’s in my mind.”
I thought, Man, you’re onto something here. This is better than “Have you ever been lonely, have you ever been blue, boo, hoo, hoo,” and all the teenage angst songs I had known. This was more meaty, it had some serious stuff in it, and it resonated with how I felt. And I realized, I’m writing a song. It was music. That song eventually became “Porterville.”
I think more people listen to “Porterville” and identify with the guy who feels like he’s on the wrong side of the tracks than with the mob that came and took his dad away to serve his time. They probably don’t want to be the lawmen. They probably don’t want to be the dad in the song. In other words, the character telling the story—he’s the common man. A perspective. How I look at the world. Which runs pretty much throughout all the songs I write, or at least the good ones. Because “Porterville” really is how I look at the world, and have for a long time. That’s where I’m comin’ from, as people say. It isn’t made up, it isn’t a fairy tale, it’s not fake. I might take poetic license describing a situation, but the personal truth, the truth of my station in life, is in there.
You’ll notice I never say “Porterville” in the song. I wanted it to be a small town. I could’ve named it “Merced.” Or “Turlock.” I just wanted a certain feel to it and eventually found Porterville, and that sounded exactly right.
So this thing I did while I was marching in the army really became my first narrative song. Something was coming into my head—it was above me, it was above anything I had done before. It had a scene in it, a place that felt right to me, an emotion about why something is right or wrong. It was about something. I hadn’t done anything like this before.
It’s one thing the army did give me that will last a lifetime.
It was a new way of looking at a song.
CHAPTER 7
Susie Q
WHEN I CAME off active duty in the summer of 1967, the band had a different frame of mind. Before I went into the army, we weren’t great, particularly with the timing issues—“What’s a shuffle beat?” Before that, practicing was something we did to learn a new song or when we were getting ready to record. Now we were going to be more serious. We decided—all four of us—that we wanted to start getting good. So we made a regimen of practicing every day. This was maybe going to be our last fling at this big dream.
Doug and Stu had moved in together, kind of out in the country, in
El Sobrante. They had rented a little house that was actually painted pink. And because of a certain book, they called it the Shire. I remember rehearsing “Good Golly, Miss Molly” there, and “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do).” And, of course, “Susie Q.”*
Every day Tom and I would drive out together. We’d sit, drink coffee for half an hour, and talk—most of it about music, a little about politics: Eugene McCarthy, the Vietnam War, Nixon. That was good, motivational.
And we’d talk about records we’d heard. One album that had come out while I was in the army was Albert King’s Born Under a Bad Sign. Here was Booker T. and the MGs, my favorite band, backing this guy that I hadn’t heard much about before. Albert was so awesome on that record, and the band played with such command. We all loved it. I bet that happened countless times—musicians my age taking note of Born Under a Bad Sign. Cream certainly did. We kind of adopted that as a high-water mark. Unbelievably enough, a little over one year later Albert King would be opening for us at the Fillmore.
We were deep into a pretty healthy time for the band. We were gung ho. Tom made a statement: “John is our leader. When John says, ‘Jump,’ we should say, ‘How high?’” It was acknowledged that I seemed to have a clearer idea of what we should be doing musically, because not only was I able to sing, but I understood the music enough that I could teach. This was different from a bunch of guys showing up who could already play. It was clear that I knew how the instruments should sound. My arrangements of songs and my own playing and singing had become more focused too, and I was having more visions of the future. Because with everybody trying, I had the belief that we could actually achieve our dream. All this is happening within months, really.
