by John Fogerty
One night at Dino and Carlo’s we were loading our equipment in, and some guy, a fan, reached out his hand and it’s got twenty dollars in it. Well, you might as well have given me a cool million. I asked, “Should I split it with the band?”
He said, “Swing with it.”
“You wanna hear a certain song?”
“No—swing with it.”
The rest of the guys let me keep it. It was such an act of generosity. I might as well have won the lottery!
Another night, Saul came by and watched a couple of sets. We were doing “Susie Q,” “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do),” “I Put a Spell on You,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” most of which ended up on the first record. Saul said, “I think there’s enough there that you can make an album.” That was a step forward. Besides “Susie Q,” we had already recorded “Porterville,” which had come out as the first single under Creedence’s name on Fantasy’s subsidiary label Scorpio, because Saul hadn’t quite taken over yet.* “Porterville” is very reflective of mid-sixties rock, British influence, psychedelic—stretching out, playing a little long. That guitar sound is like the Airplane on Surrealistic Pillow, although I didn’t have any good equipment. Clean with a bunch of echo on it. I’m pretty sure we took that single to KMPX too. I don’t know how often they played it, if ever. The flip side, “Call It Pretending,” I considered pop in our old style, so I didn’t even put it on the album.
We’d been doing “I Put a Spell on You” live, but not for long—I might’ve done it at the Monkey Inn. I loved the song, and loved Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s whole thing. It was so out there and all by itself—“ MYUHAHAHAHA!” Back in the fifties, he’d get wheeled out in a coffin and it would take him forever to open it and jump out. I’ve got to do something like that! Do they have plaid burial clothes?
That sustained drone solo in Creedence’s version of “I Put a Spell on You”—that’s the Rickenbacker and the Kustom. The weird sounds you hear at the beginning were done later in the mix. Those are my son Josh’s baby toys. We had a jack-in-the-box, some pull toys, and one of those tops that hummed once it started spinning—whoosh whoosh whoosh hummmm. We recorded them, and then played them back at different speeds. The song fades out with that. It sounds like a spaceship—it’s supposed to be the other dimension. On my five-cent budget, I was trying to come up with things that were cool, and it worked. We did all the overdubs at my other old haunt, Sierra Sound. Tambourines and maracas—that’s what I remember.
On “Gloomy,” I wanted something ominous, so we took boxes with gravel inside and marched on it like soldiers. That didn’t turn out to be as cool as I’d hoped.
Saul actually asked to put his name on the first album as producer—“I want people to know that Fantasy is under new management.” After that I made darn sure I got credit: “Arranged and produced by John Fogerty.” I’d gotten that from Chet Atkins records, which is funny because many of his productions are just Chet and a guitar (but sound as full as any record with two hundred musicians). I liked the phrase “Arranged and produced by” because it was the absolute truth.
That first album—Creedence Clearwater Revival—came out on May 28, 1968. My first album on my twenty-third birthday. I’ve seen other dates listed, but sorry, Charlie: they got it wrong. I remember because I was on the radio with deejay Tony Pig, playing the album for the whole world. The liner notes were written by Ralph J. Gleason—that’s where he says, “Creedence Clearwater Revival is an excellent example of the Third Generation of San Francisco bands.” Meaning we weren’t quite as good as the Grateful Dead or Quicksilver Messenger Service. If you look at the cover of our fifth album, Cosmo’s Factory—which is a shot of the band hanging out in the rehearsal space–office we called the Factory—you’ll see a handwritten sign pinned to the top of one of the posts in the room: “3RD GENERATION.” That was for Ralph.
As I mentioned, we had decided that everything in the band had to be voted on, and it had to be a unanimous decision. If one guy said no to whatever was being decided, then that was it: we didn’t do it. And if something was voted on and came to pass, it stayed that way. It didn’t change later unless we voted unanimously to change it. This is the way Creedence operated, and continued to operate for years and years, even after we broke up.
We also agreed that if the group ever broke up, we wouldn’t allow one or two of us to run off and call ourselves Creedence Clearwater Revival. We had seen other groups do this over the years, like the Platters or the Diamonds, where some fraudulent version would be out there with one or maybe none of the original members. We agreed that either we were all in the band or else it just couldn’t be.
And I gave the other guys equal share in the songwriting income. As I’ve mentioned, for a very short time the band used a pseudonym that referred to all four of us as a songwriting entity: T. Spicebush Swallowtail. (Doug knew a little bit about the world of entomology, and a spicebush swallowtail is a species of butterfly.) It’s used on both sides of the “Porterville” single. In the all-for-one spirit of Creedence, we were going to use that for all the songwriting credits. Early on, we didn’t know that I’d be the guy writing all the songs—but now that the first album was done (and I was already writing songs for our next album), I began to realize that the credit wasn’t fair. It was a matter of pride. I felt that if I had written the song, it should have my name on it.
Now, I didn’t want to keep changing the agreement the way the white man did with the Indians, so what I said was, “I will share all the songwriting money equally until the end of 1969.” So the guys got royalties for songs they did not write, on four albums that each sold well over a million copies by the end of 1969.
I did that so the other guys would not feel anxious about the money. I was sharing, being generous, because this was my band. The only thing I was counting on was this agreement of unanimity in the group. We were blood brothers, and we gave our word. That’s still the law to me.
Creedence was starting to make a stir. You could see we were comers. But we weren’t there yet.
Just as the first album came out, we played this weird pizza place near the Stanford University campus. It was a college hang, a daytime gig, small potatoes. We’re setting up and I overhear two guys in the audience talking. I was dressed very casual for this gig, and this guy sees my white canvas sneakers and says to the other one, “Oh man—I thought these were, like, cool guys.” Meaning my wardrobe sucked, and this was a great big hole in his vision of the band. Instead of being crushed or remaining oblivious, I knew exactly what he was talking about. You want to see what you hear. When I first heard the Animals, I said, “We’ve had the Beatles, we’ve had the Stones. The Animals, man: what are they gonna look like?” I figured it would be guys in loincloths and bones going, “Aaarrrrh!” They were the Animals. Then they come out and they all had these neat little suits on. It was a bit underwhelming.
So this guy staring at my sneakers was absolutely right. That changed immediately. I never wore those to a show again. Because how I look ought to go with how I sound: cowboy boots, Levi’s, plaid shirts. Basically, my vision of myself. Image is important, however offhand it might seem. Even offhand is a thought-out thing.
But cool guys or not, good things were starting to happen to us. The very first time we went to Hawaii was in September 1968. This was a Dick Clark show in Honolulu, opening for Vanilla Fudge. We each got an airplane ticket and a hotel room—I think it was the Driftwood Hotel.
I get to my room, haven’t been there but five minutes, and decide I’m going to go see Doug—maybe we can go for a walk. I go down to Doug’s room. I’m knocking. No answer. I know we all just got to our room, so I knock again. Nothing.
“Hey, Cosmo, it’s John.”
I hear shuffling, some muffled voices.
“C’mon, Doug. Let’s go to the beach. We gotta see Waikiki.”
More shuffling. A mumbling voice. “No, I don’t wanna go.”
�
��Doug, what’s goin’ on?” He’s not acting like my friend anymore.
I hear what sounds like another voice in there.
“Shit, Doug—you got a girl in there with you?”
I was shocked. We had not been in the hotel more than ten minutes. And what was going on in my psyche was, Aw, are we gonna be like that? I didn’t know we were gonna be like those bands. Really?
Over the next few years, Doug certainly earned a reputation. Before anybody else had dropped their luggage on the floor, Doug had something going. He was the Rooster. And the whole world was his barnyard.
Now, I’m no saint, but at the time, I’m just a kid from El Cerrito, a little Boy Scout. And I’m feeling like, I’m amazingly disappointed. I guess you could say I’m not the guy who got into music to get girls—I was there for the music.
“Susie Q” was what I was into. Man, that song—the first piece of music we did that was in the major leagues. We’d finally stepped up out of the sandlots where the Golliwogs and the Blue Velvets were, and I knew it. I knew what to do. It was clear.
I was not afraid. I was superconfident, as a matter of fact. The only thing I was afraid of was the so-called sophomore jinx. The one-hit wonder. History is littered with the wreckage of all the one-hit wonders who failed on that second attempt. And I wanted to be the one that didn’t. We had our one hit, and by God, I wasn’t going back to the car wash. I didn’t want to be a Golliwog again.
So I was ratcheting up the game and trying to inspire the people around me to do the same thing. With the guys in the band, I was able to talk a pretty good college rah-rah pep talk. I kept saying, “We have the spotlight! It’s on us! And it’ll stay there if we do something good. Otherwise, guess what?” When I looked at Fantasy Records and Saul Zaentz, I saw that they were clueless when it came to rock. We weren’t on Columbia Records, that’s for sure. I was on the smallest label in the whole world, and the advertising budget was fifteen cents. Saul wasn’t going to spend any money—as Stu always said, “Saul’s idea was, ‘Spend pennies, make millions.’” We didn’t have any machinery behind us, nor did we have anybody that understood that we needed that machinery. We didn’t have a manager. We didn’t have a publicist. So I took a hard look at all of this and said, “Well, I guess I’m just gonna have to do it with music.”
The more music I do that’s great, the more it’ll overcome all those things that we don’t have. I had to put on a work ethic like nobody ever saw before. I saw a musical career as something to work at. Work. I was really driven, and I’m proud of that. You might think that it’s a curse or some kind of disease—it certainly isn’t something you should keep on doing all your life, every day, forever. It’s not healthy for yourself and those around you. But if you have a specific goal, a short-term goal, and you believe it’s reachable, that’s how you do it.
That meant I had to be a whirling dervish. My family and I were living on Kains Avenue in Albany, right outside El Cerrito. I had started to write songs for the next album, and I was putting a lot of thought into it. I had the luxury of a few months to write—time hadn’t gotten compressed yet. We were living in a little apartment. In a lot of ways it was better than the house I had grown up in. It was new, and it had the cottage cheese ceiling, which I thought was cool then. At first we couldn’t get a TV because I didn’t have enough credit. I could barely write a check, with my twenty dollars a week from Tom and the little bit we’d gotten from our gigs.
There were no pictures or art on the wall—just a plain beige room. And I would sit on a little chair halfway between the “kitchen” and the front room, writing. I had my yellow pad of paper, and my little songwriting book. I would stay up every night into the wee hours, writing songs and arranging songs—it was literally all I thought about. For every good song there were twelve I rejected. I’d just sort of stare at the wall. I was slowed down, very much with my own thoughts. I discovered that I would kind of go into a trance, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. There were things that were not at hand, but in my mind, they could become very real to me. I was not stoned or drunk or anything like that, but as I concentrated, I would go deep.
I was trying to come up with something new. I was thinking, Where’s this thing going? What’s it going to be?
CHAPTER 8
I Guess I’m Just Gonna Have to Do It with Music
SONGWRITING IS A tricky thing. You have to get real quiet, allow yourself to be alone. At least I do. Set aside time, or you’ll never get to it. We’re all very busy in our lives, and there’s a lot of noise: the TV and your kids and their homework and your dog’s barking, paying your bills, returning that crap you ordered because it doesn’t fit—all the stuff of life. And songwriting is really much more in the opposite direction: it’s about solitude and being quiet, because that’s the only way that hidden stuff in your soul can finally be heard. You have to say to the world and to yourself, “I’m going to go to my room. I’m going to be quiet. I’ve got a guitar in my hand, a blank sheet of paper, and now here is the deal, right there.”
Every writer will tell you: you sit down and face your blank sheet of paper. It is the most freeing thing in the world… and the most terrifying. You see, that blank page is a window to infinity. You can go anywhere, do anything, create something that has never existed before. It is curiosity and imagination, all mixed up with a lot of luck and pixie dust… while you pray for inspiration. One moment you have nothing, but the next moment you could have a masterpiece! It’s just plain scary.
You have been telling yourself all year—all your life—I’m a writer. And maybe you even got some feedback. An award, or you wrote a song that did well or got some notoriety, so you can actually stand in front of a group of people and be thought of as a songwriter. “Here he is, a songwriter.” So now you’re stepping up to the plate again, your big bat in your hand. You sit there with your blank piece of paper. Okay, songwriter, write something. And you’re back to being just a guy with a blank piece of paper. Like nervous Ralph Kramden on the Honeymooners: “Humina, humina, humina.”
Monday I may be sitting there with a guitar, a couple of pretty lame ideas. Then I get distracted. And I start fiddling with some old musical ideas, and then it’s Tuesday. There I am sitting there, I’ve got a ham sandwich, and it’s afternoon. And then it’s Wednesday. Well, you can see what is coming.
It gets to be Friday, and I’m starting to have a bit of concern. I haven’t written one word and I have to record next Monday. The slot is booked, the band will be there. And what are we going to do? I have had a couple of thoughts, but those thoughts have been a little lame. They’re not giving me that feeling that they’re right. And if there is any one thing that a good songwriter knows, it’s when stuff is good, and when it’s crap. If you don’t know the difference, you are going to have trouble doing this as your life’s work. Because we all are capable of doing both.
The real trick is knowing when you’ve got crap, because then you’ve got to start over. And if you do enough of that crap, at least with me, that’s when I get to the good stuff. I can’t skip the pages where the crap is. Every single time I start on a new song, it’s always a bunch of pages of crap first, and then finally something good will happen. Out of nowhere, a phrase will go through my head, like “train of fools,” and I’ll start writing a song. This is the beauty and the magic and the mystique of songwriting.
So maybe you get a breakthrough, finally get the main thrust of a song, but it’s not complete—at least it works that way with me. All songs gestate over a period of time, and they need to be cooked through. And with an album, they’ll all be bubbling on the stove. You’re doing a whole meal. You don’t just do the gravy.
In the process you may write a cliché. Once one person has said, “I see my unborn children in your eyes,” the next guy who says it is in for a lynching. So that drippy, drug-induced, overly fatigued stuff doesn’t fly with me. I thought the idea here was economy. Especially in rock and roll. Don’t use a lot of word
s when you can say it with two. That whole “first thought, best thought” school is not for me either. I rewrite. I edit. If I have an image in my mind and write a line trying to capture it, and over time I realize that I could say it better, make the image even clearer, and make it a cooler line? I don’t think Woody Guthrie would flinch. It would be a better song. That’s craft. I certainly try to do that.
Songwriting peers I admire include Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Brian Wilson. Of the old guard, certainly Leiber and Stoller. Every song was a cool story: “Young Blood,” “Smokey Joe’s Café,” “Shoppin’ for Clothes.” Elton and Bernie have a weird method: Bernie writes a poem and sends it to Elton. Brian Wilson has a cowriter most of the time—he’ll write the melody and get somebody to do the lyrics.
There were a few songwriters from the days before rock and roll that I admired.
Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Arlen, and Johnny Mercer. When I was a teenager, I read a book about songwriters and I think these guys were interviewed. One of the writers said something that really hit home with me. He said, “When you are working on a song and something is not quite right, a little bell will ring in your head. You have to pay attention to that bell and fix the song. Otherwise, the bell may not ring for you anymore.”
With me it’s almost always melody first. I’ll start with melody and then get an idea—what’s it about? I’ll have an unfinished melody and unfinished words. They have to cohabitate at some point.
To my mind, if I’m writing a song, it probably means there’s going to be some work to it. “Fortunate Son” was written in twenty minutes, but darn few are like that. And I’d probably been thinking about everything that was in that song for three or four years. I didn’t know it would start, “Some folks are born…”—that came from nowhere. But the thought process had been going on for a long time, and after a lifetime of being a songwriter, I never expect, “Blam! There it is.” If it’s a brand-new song, I expect the line that I get right now—if indeed it’s a good one—might not even be in the first verse.
