Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  It might end up at the end of the lyric. It might end up in another song, or living alone inside a notebook for years. That’s the journey. I must say, I do hear a lot of songs that sound unedited, not worked on. Everything’s so… plain. I think, “You could’ve said that better.” In my mind, that’s the job. You’re supposed to say it better. Hopefully there’s a point of view you want to present, an opinion. Otherwise, why should I listen? All good songs engage you because they get you to feel something.

  After I got out of the service, I decided to start collecting and writing down phrases that would help me with songwriting. This was part of concentrating on music, being serious about it. In earlier times, I’d feel an inspiration to write a song every so often. Things would occur to me, and then a week later I’d try to remember it. And it was like, “Doggone it, I had the map to the Dutchman’s gold. He told me exactly where to go, and now I can’t remember what he said.” So I decided I’d get a little notebook and write it down.

  I was a kid with no money, so I had none of the things that an adult has in his life, like a pen. Or paper. I just didn’t have any of that kind of stuff lying around. So I went down to the local drugstore and bought a cheap little vinyl notebook and a little package of three-ring-binder paper and a pen. This was my songbook. Sometime soon after I brought it home, I made the very first entry: “Proud Mary.” For some reason that phrase had come into my brain, and I thought it was a good song title. It sounded cool. But I had no idea what it was about. Proud Mary? I didn’t know what that meant.

  It could’ve been about a person. I remember thinking, Maybe it’s about a woman who’s a domestic. She lives in a humble, small house. She has to put on some kind of uniform, like a cleaning lady. Has to ride a bus. Gets off the bus and goes over to the big rich people’s house. Maybe that’s who Proud Mary is.

  Then one day in the summer of 1968, when “Susie Q” is on the radio, I walk up to my apartment and I see, on the steps, a big white envelope with a government seal. I’m not really expecting any mail, so I ignore it. It was like the phone I never answered or the doorbell I didn’t respond to. I’m still that way.

  After about three days of stepping over it, I finally look down close and notice it’s got my name on it—“Private John Fogerty.” I say, “Holy mackerel! That’s for me!” I open the thing and it looks kind of like your high school diploma. My honorable discharge from the army. This is a big day! I read it again to make sure. And I run over to this little patch of lawn and I actually do a cartwheel.

  I ran right back in the house and picked up my Rickenbacker. I’d been working on these chords, and now I had such a rush of energy and good feeling, like a weight had been lifted off—it was just, whewwwww. And out came the first line: “Left a good job in the city.” I went, “Yeah, that’s kind of what just happened.” The idea that I just felt so… free. Open. I started to get some words together.

  I got into it. And I got more into it. That riff came about from messing around with Beethoven’s Fifth. My mom referenced that when I was growing up: while pregnant with me, she went to a Beethoven concert and I was kicking up a storm. Playing Beethoven’s Fifth led to that riff, which sounded like a paddle wheel to me. When I get onto something good, I’ll play it over and over and over again, because number one, it feels good. But you start to get little offshoots, more sparks happening. “Big wheel.” “Yeah, yeah—the big wheel! Wow, what is this about?” You’re not self-aware. You’re just going with the thing.

  By this time maybe an hour has passed. I go to my notebook and there’s “Proud Mary.” That title jumped off the page. Oh my—you mean this song is about a boat? Without saying anything, it said everything. It was female—ships are female. Proud. Wow, there it is! Proud Mary! At some point along the way I’m singing, “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the river.” Finally, when I realized I had a verse and a chorus—it wasn’t every word, but it was mostly there, and in other words, I had a song—I knew I had entered the land of greatness.

  Pardon me for not sounding humble. This thing had landed on me and I recognized that this was truly great, far above me. Far above anything I had ever even thought about. I had grown up with my mom talking to me about Irving Berlin and Hoagy Carmichael, how they wrote standards. I knew, “Man, this is a standard.” Meaning it was like “Stardust.” Or “White Christmas.” I had never even brushed up against anything like that.

  I had always wondered what that would be like. Before this ever happens, you’re planning on having a musical career, you love music, you’ve studied all these other people. You don’t know how it feels, how they felt when they got something that right. I hadn’t sat in my room saying, “Someday this will happen, so how will I act? Well, I’ll put on my hat and grab my cane and I’ll go skipping down the lane.” No. I didn’t have a clue. You’ve been outside the fence your whole life. Then one day your mind takes a couple of fortuitous turns and you’re inside the fence. And you have a sense that you’re gonna stay inside the fence.

  I was right on the cusp of my birthday, twenty-three years old, all alone in this pretty low-rent apartment, and it was like a spaceship had landed. I never assumed I was the pilot. More like, “You’re allowed to see this.” It’s given to you. It really does feel that way. You’re looking at this shadowy, cloudy shape, you start to go in a direction, and whump! The veil is lifted and suddenly there’s a song, a great song. It was like being struck by God. I was sitting there quaking with this paper in my hand. I really, really knew—I just did. I was literally shaking, just jittery: “Oh my God…” I’m going on and on about it because that’s how special it was.

  Happily and luckily, it wasn’t the last time I got to feel that way.

  We recorded “Proud Mary” later that year, down in Los Angeles at RCA Studios during the Bayou Country sessions—it was October 1968. We’d recorded one more time at Coast, but being sort of naive I didn’t specify an engineer, and instead of Walt Payne they gave us this young kid, and it wasn’t anywhere near the magic of “Susie Q.” So I convinced Saul that we needed to go to a better place, and he had a relationship with RCA because they pressed Fantasy’s albums. Well, that was Elvis’s studio! Sure!

  We were fortunate enough to get an engineer named Hank McGill, a funky, cool older guy who lived on a boat* and had a lot of experience. We weren’t getting the suit and tie here; we were getting a guy who loved music. We recorded in a room big enough for a symphony orchestra, but we just ignored that. Hank set up some soundproofing gobos and made a tiny little room within the room for us to record in.

  When I showed “Proud Mary” to my bandmates, I felt that they really didn’t see any difference between this song and anything else we had done. I got the sense, “Yeah, it’s one of our songs.” Well, I didn’t feel that way. Which is why I was so precious about recording it. A good song but a bad recording was a combination that had happened to us a lot, and at this point I wasn’t going to settle for that.

  Now, I had been in the award-winning a cappella group at El Cerrito High for two and a half years, a choir of fifty voices. I had heard doo-wop since 1953, where the bass sang real low—“ Bow bow bow,” all that kind of stuff. There were variations, but basically the bass guy was following what a bass player would do—follow the root note most of the time—but the other guys were staying in one place and just adjusting a little bit. You might call it the core chord, and it didn’t go wooo up there with the melody: it just stayed right down here, and the melody went around, over it. That’s what I adopted as a teenager back in my bedroom with my add-a-track tape recorder—and that’s what I adopted later on with the Creedence records when I sang all the background parts myself.

  One of the big parts of “Proud Mary” came from paying very close attention to male gospel harmonies. The “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the river” has to explode. You don’t just go “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’”: it’s “RRRROllin’, RRRROllin’, RRRROllin’.” You’re slurring up to the note
real quick, and your vocal energy happens all at once. You have to explode. Well, when you have three or four voices all doing that at exactly the same time, you get what I heard the good vocal groups do, especially male gospel groups: the Swan Silvertones, the Sensational Nightingales, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. That stuff really stirs my soul, and I wanted that sound on “Proud Mary.”

  Up until that time, when a song required background vocals, some or all of us would sing them. But after our album had been out awhile, I really found fault with the sound of the background vocals on “Porterville.” They fit in more with punk, that whole attitude. They had a snot-nosed, bratty sound to them—“I don’t care! I don’t care!” Kind of ragtag, and I didn’t like it.

  After the music track for “Proud Mary” was done, it was time to put on those background parts. I’d rehearsed it with the fellas for weeks, teaching them harmony by doing folk songs or sing-along songs like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and by practicing the “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the river.” So we recorded it. What I heard back sounded as rough as “Porterville.” Angular, unsettled, abrasive. Amateur. Not smooth, not musical. Nor experienced. Or classy or elegant.

  The voices just didn’t blend, and my heart couldn’t let it stand that way. Somebody had to be brutally honest and say, “This isn’t gonna get it. This is probably gonna get us laughed at.” And there wasn’t anyone else but me to say it. “Proud Mary” was the best song I had written up to that point. I knew it was really, really special, and I wasn’t going to settle for less. I had done that as a Golliwog and it just hadn’t worked. When I was very critical about each element of the song and the performance, it was better, and I wanted us to be very, very, very good. I wanted us to make something for the ages. To be great. Like the Beatles.

  So I told the guys I knew what to do—“I’m going to sing all the parts, overdub them myself. And I will make it sound that way.” Well, the other guys were really upset over that. They weren’t upset because it would be better; they were upset because they weren’t doing it. I was doing it. There were a lot of angry words, a lot of tension. Tom, Doug, Stu—they were all mad at me. I stood my ground. The other three guys left the studio, so I proceeded to do exactly what I knew how to do: sing all the background vocals. That became “Proud Mary.” That’s what you hear on the record.

  When I was done with the background parts, I went and joined the other guys, who were having dinner at a restaurant called Two Guys from Italy. I ordered spaghetti. I remember, because I played this scene over in my head for years and years, even in my time far away from show business. This was my band, my brother and my friends that I had grown up with, and there was all this friggin’ tension.

  I made a speech, the heart of which was, “It doesn’t matter who in this band does the work. What matters is that this band makes the best record that it possibly can make, because it’s us against the rest of the world.” I thought my speech calmed things down for a couple of years. But in reality, the fuse had been lit. It was years later that Julie fully explained it to me: they were jealous. That “Proud Mary” incident was a pivotal point in the history of our band. I may have been doing arrangements before, but now I was doing almost everything. A time bomb was now ticking.

  After the dinner we went back to the studio and Hank played back “Proud Mary.” The guys were standing around. Our friend and road manager, Bruce Young, was there, and he heard the background parts and went, “Sounds like the Ink Spots!” I wish he’d said the Mills Brothers, but the sentiment was exactly right!

  How the band acted was very telling, because this scenario played out again and again. It was almost as if they did not know it was great and had to be told by someone else.

  That song. In the mid-seventies, I was on a moose-hunting trip with a couple of buddies up above Athabasca, Alberta. At that time I was far away from show business. We were all in some Athabasca bar the night before leaving for the hunting camp, and the band there did “Proud Mary.” I was about ten feet away from the stage, but I had a mustache and glasses, so nobody recognized me. Basically, I was in the Arctic Circle, the North Pole, the end of the earth. And here’s some Eskimos singing “Proud Mary.”

  Those Creedence songs I created—every guy in every bar can play them and sound just like the record. Even with medium musical ability, it sounds pretty dang good. The music is so easy to imitate. You don’t have to be a Berklee College of Music graduate or have a $10,000 guitar. It’s almost folk music, it’s so simple.

  “Proud Mary” was one of those songs where I had actually melded into mainstream polite society. President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, danced to “Proud Mary” at their inauguration. I was like, “Wow. Eat your heart out, Bob Dylan.”

  I actually did that song at my own wedding to Julie. I got up and said, “Everybody else has done this song at a wedding. By golly, I’m gonna sing this at mine!”

  “Proud Mary” was the first of our two-sided hit singles. Usually a somewhat lesser song goes on the flip—the B side. But I didn’t want to do it that way. There was a lot of discussion with Saul. People said, “You’re going to get split airplay. You’re wasting it.” But I didn’t want to cheap it out. Elvis had many double-sided hits. Same with the Beatles. Instead of, “I’m gonna hold this one back until three albums from now,” the idea is, give ’em as much great music as you can—now! The fans will know.

  “Born on the Bayou” was the other side of “Proud Mary.” I first got the inspiration for the song during sound check at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. There was a long bill and we were last. When you’re last on the bill, you play first. Everybody else had done their sound check and was long gone. They wanted us to get ours over with and leave our stuff there because they were going to open the doors and get us up on the stage and then out of there.

  So we’re doing the sound check and I’m playing my Rickenbacker, hearing my cool Kustom amp with the vibrato doing its thing. I think I was doing “I Put a Spell on You”—that sound in the key of E. And with the guitar warbling, doing the tremolo, I got struck by a bolt of inspiration while playing that vibrato E chord. I just started going “Mmmmmmm nahrnahr,” and suddenly I’m yelling out a sound, not even words, and I turn around to Doug: “Doug, just give me this ‘Doom dat doom bap.’” I say to Stu, “Just play in E! Play in E!”

  I’m screaming nonsense vowels and consonants—“AEEEEewwaaaaAAAaaaaaAAA.” Random words and sounds lead me into something, and every once in a while it sounds like an actual word. I always tried to pick words that were really cool-sounding to sing. That’s a lot different from the way many songwriters write, but it’s because I’m the singer too. I’m a rock and roll guy. There are words that are really just cool-sounding to sing, and I’d find that word. “Puppy,” “doggy,” or… “hound dog”? “Shazam”—now there’s a cool word. This was an important ingredient, along with pronunciation of the word itself, which was almost like a musical instrument to me.

  So I’m there at the Avalon, singing my nonsense words, and I start to hear a melody. I’m inspired, really turned on, just ignited. This was just the coolest thing. Because it means it’s going to turn into a song. This I know. Suddenly everything stops. “Hey—what happened?” I turn around and my amp has gone dead. The stage manager has pulled the plug.

  He says, “You gotta get outta here. Let’s face it: this is a waste of time. You’re not goin’ anywhere, anyway.”

  And I glared at him and I said, “Oh yeah, buddy? You give me one year and I’ll show you who’s not goin’ anywhere!”

  Look, he could’ve said that to any one of nine other bands that were there, and he’d probably have been right. But he said that to me. And that’s not what I believed.

  Well, a year later we couldn’t even play that place. They couldn’t afford us.

  A few days after that night, I’m home, it’s late at night, and I’m sitting in my chair, staring at that spot
on the wall. Thinking about the bayou. This is right when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. By now we had a nineteen-inch Sears TV and I watched the coverage live. With the sound off.

  It was a sad time in America. And one of the craziest times in civilization ever. Later that summer was the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the youth clashing against Mayor Daley and the gestapo police. At times I was totally removed. I was thinking about the bayou.

  I can’t really tell you why. I was quite taken with the world of Mark Twain—Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. The same way I loved Stephen Foster. It resonated with me, seemed familiar. Warm and friendly. Like Twain was somebody I knew. Or like it was me in the story. And old movies like Swamp Water with Walter Brennan. That inspired me a lot. Something just possessed me to write about these places I’d never been to. I actually didn’t even have a guitar in my hands when I wrote “Born on the Bayou.” I could come up with a verse and play it all the way through in my head. I can still do that.

  People ask me where I get that influence, because I’m certainly not from the South. Well, the first ten inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are all from the South, and they all really influenced me. That process—it’s a mystical journey. You go from a time when you’re honoring other people, the influences you love, and then you begin to discover things you can do that are new and fresh. You begin to have your own personality—you’re not just borrowing or copying from somebody.

  Maybe you can chalk it up to reincarnation. I mean that quite seriously, but also in a humble way. I take no credit for it. It came so naturally. And it just kept coming. I mean, where in the world did all that really come from? I’ve had guys from Louisiana tell me, “We used to argue over whether you’re from Thibodaux or the next town over.” Was it a past life? Maybe. There’s a lot of room in my head to believe in that sort of thing.