Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  Musically, I was always trying to go somewhere new. Listening to the radio, you got the sense that some artists—early Elvis, the Stones, especially the Beatles—were restless and didn’t want to repeat themselves. The Dave Clark Five did that same sound for four or five singles in a row. It’s been said that AC/DC—whom I love—continues to make the same album over and over. I was determined that Creedence would go with its strengths—mid-tempo songs with a lead vocal, sometimes harmony—definitely no shuffle beats. What I told the band at the time was, “We’re gonna show them what we can do well and eliminate what we can’t do well.” I also wanted different feels, different approaches, different guitar sounds. I thought it was boring to always sound the same. Boring! That was a one-way ticket to the land of the one-hit wonder for sure. “Proud Mary” and “Born on the Bayou” were two completely different sounds on the very same single. “Proud Mary” had that gospelly thing; “Bayou” was swampy. “Bad Moon Rising” was kind of rockabilly. I wanted to go deeper.

  On “Green River” the guitar riff, the musical hook, was how I imagined James Burton would’ve done it. James would always find just the right part. I wanted that bluesy rockabilly sound rather than a pretty melody like “Proud Mary.” It’s almost as if, had I been lucky enough to be recording at Sun Records, this is what I would’ve come up with. Even though Stu played electric bass, I also had him play stand-up. They’re both in that song. That’s a real thought-out bass part. It isn’t just, “Play whatever.” I created that part because I had to.

  You can go into a studio, and if you’ve got all the great Nashville session guys and everybody gets it, a song might happen in five minutes. Or it might never happen. I had been in my band long enough to know that it was going to be much more like the latter. What usually happened was, nobody knew what to do. These were not guys who could invent parts. That bass part on “Green River” could’ve been a country ticktack bass line, but that would’ve been lame. I love country, but we were not a country band. I had to figure out a bass rhythm that wasn’t exactly Sun Records, because they weren’t making this record—I was—and I can tell you it was thought out long before I showed it to the band, and certainly long before recording. Stu was not going to invent his own part, but if you gave him something that made sense, he could learn that and play it well.

  Stu has taken credit for the distinctive (and relatively tough) bass line for a later song, “Down on the Corner.” But that’s not how it went down. Stu had a lot of trouble with that bass line in the studio. Because of Stu’s large but fragile ego, I had been spoon-feeding that part to him. What that meant is I already had the parts figured out before I showed it to the band. It had to be that way. I was the one who solved the puzzle of what worked together to make a great arrangement for the song I had written. Then at our rehearsals I showed it to Stu a little bit at a time—“Here, try these notes.” After a few minutes, letting that much sink in: “Okay, now try these notes.” Then as Stu fumbled with what to do next: “Okay, how ’bout if you add these notes?” After a few days, Stu had been presented with the whole bass part. Eventually, we spent six weeks rehearsing the song, but Stu still couldn’t do it when we got to the recording session. It was very tense. Tom was already sitting out because he couldn’t keep the rhythm going all the way through the song, so we’d decided that later we’d overdub his part a piece at a time. And now Stu was having a meltdown. Finally he yelled at me, “Well, this is no good! And besides, this ain’t rock and roll!” And I’m thinking, Right—because Stu can’t play the part, he’s gonna tell me what is and what isn’t rock and roll?

  I remember this very clearly, as it was one of those times when I had to be… quiet. Very quiet. The thought in my head was, I didn’t come here to fight. I came here to make a record. Looking back, I should’ve been like one of the Kinks or the Troggs, picked up a guitar or a hi-hat, and just horned the guy—“You stupid-ass bimbo, this is not that hard. It’s just that it’s got some rhythm in it, and you don’t have any!” My job was to make a hit record, so somehow I defused the situation and we all conquered the song. Nope—I didn’t hear “thank you” afterwards.

  It’s funny: of all the guys in the band, Stu’s personality was the most negative. And vocal. In the fall of 1969, we taped The Dionne Warwick Chevy Special alongside Burt Bacharach, Glen Campbell, and George Kirby. We pulled up for the taping at the CBS building, and there was a long line of people dressed up in funny costumes, trying to get on Let’s Make a Deal. I made the band stay in the car while I explained to them that I didn’t want three or four different people voicing their dissatisfaction over this or that to the production staff. I said it would be much better if just one voice addressed the needs of the band. I said, “Bring your issues to me, and I will tell the appropriate people.” By the time I got inside, Stu was already in the face of the director, Art Fisher, complaining about God knows what in a very unpleasant and aggressive manner.

  The first time we went over to England to play Royal Albert Hall, Stu had issues with the promoter. When we got back to the States, he popped off about him in the press. The next time we were in England, I was standing at the hotel elevator and some guy goes, “Are you John?” And I got served with papers. If anyone was going to speak in the wrong place and with too much aggression, it was Stu. That personality was always coming at you.

  CHAPTER 9

  “We’re with Ya, John!”

  REMEMBER HOW QUICK everything was happening? “Susie Q” had been a hit single, “I Put a Spell on You” had been a radio hit, the first album had been a hit, and the next album, Bayou Country, was a hit, with “Proud Mary” and “Born on the Bayou.” Both songs on the next single, “Bad Moon Rising” and “Lodi,” had been hits, and now “Green River” / “Commotion” was climbing the charts, with the album Green River just about to be completed. It was right about this time that the guys in the band started saying, “Remember Saul said if we had a hit record we were gonna tear up the contract and get a bigger piece of the pie?” Well, we weren’t hearing anything about this from Saul. He wasn’t knocking on our door. By now he’d moved into a new building in Oakland and had several more employees.

  So the band said, “John, you go talk to Saul.” And they kind of pushed me out the door. Meaning they didn’t want to confront Saul. I’m the leader of the band—at least in this instance—and they want me to go see him. So I went and sat in Saul’s office and started talking about the meeting we had at his house and how we were promised a bigger piece of the pie. “We would now like you to honor that promise,” I said. He ignored that and immediately started talking about how he’s thinking of taking Fantasy public.

  “What’s that mean to me?” I asked.

  Saul explained that he was going to let Creedence buy stock in Fantasy, and that this would add up to 10 percent of the company for us. I kept asking about his promise to tear up the original contract, but he kept bringing it back to the stock. He said, “So in return for letting you purchase part of the company, we want you to sign a ten-year contract with Fantasy.”

  We’d already signed a contract with options adding up to seven years, and other than what the casual, everyday, average American has heard about business and the stock market, I really didn’t know what any of this meant. When I explained this to the band, I made that clear—“I’m not taking this on myself. I don’t want to be blamed for this later.” I wanted our professionals to sort this out and explain it to us. By this time we had an accountant, Edward J. Arnold, and a lawyer, Barry Engel, who was with the firm that Stu Cook’s dad was a partner in. We sent them to meet with Saul’s people.

  When they came back, they explained that Saul wasn’t offering 10 percent of the company—just the opportunity to buy 10 percent of the stock offering that represented 11 percent of the company. What it boiled down to was that Creedence, which was responsible for 99.5 percent of the records Fantasy sold, was being offered a ten-year contract, and in return we could buy 1.1 percent of the
company ourselves. That didn’t look very appetizing.

  I want to stress that point, because in later years Saul Zaentz said, “We offered John Fogerty ten percent of Fantasy Records and he refused.” And he sold that falsehood to at least two of the members of Creedence Clearwater Revival, even though we had all heard the real offer back in 1969. I know my brother Tom used to quote that one. And I’ve heard Doug Clifford quote that. Plain and simple, it’s just not true. And in fact, Fantasy never went public, so there was no stock offer anyway, and no 10 percent offer.

  There was a lot of tension between the band and Saul now. I’d still go in and talk to him, but the mood had changed. When Fantasy had their second annual company picnic in 1969, it was not so friendly. The executives sat away from us at one end of the field. I think that’s where Saul told me he was going to give me back my publishing. He said, “By contract, I don’t have to—I could have it for another three years—but I’m giving it back to you at the end of this three-year period.”

  I thought those words meant that he was giving me back all the publishing on the Creedence songs I’d written. No. What Saul really meant was that any songs I wrote in the future (specifically, after January 1, 1971) I would own. He was keeping everything I wrote until then and wasn’t giving anything back. Unfortunately, by 1971 the band was on its way to breaking up, and I’d only get one more song on the radio, “Sweet Hitch-Hiker.” Screwed again.

  At the time, I started feeling actual physical pain over all this, although I didn’t know at the time that this pain was an ulcer. At twenty-four!

  Next, Saul started talking about offshore tax planning (first via this individual Harry Margolis, and then it changed to Chicago and this guy Burt Kanter) and how this would be his way of giving us a bigger piece of the pie. At the time, Creedence wasn’t even incorporated, and we were getting taxed at 90 percent. So we were sold this idea that our royalties would be paid to an offshore entity so that instead of paying 90 percent of every dollar we earned to taxes, we’d pay something less than 10 percent. Our accountant and lawyer advised us to do it. We were told that this was all quite legal, that it had to do with foreign treaties, and that this was what the big, rich, old-money people like the Rockefellers and the Kennedys did. We were also told that Burt Kanter was a former IRS agent and had the inside scoop. It was only years later when we were preparing for trial that I found out this was a lie.

  After much deliberation among all four members of the band, Creedence entered into Fantasy’s tax plan, which was tied to this outfit in the Bahamas: Castle Bank. I’ll tell more of this story in a bit, but needless to say, it was a disastrous move. This was all part of a new contract dated June 5, 1969, that was marginally better than the last one. (I believe this contract was backdated, as we were still talking about all this throughout the summer of 1970. It hadn’t been formally agreed to until late 1970 or even into 1971.) We’d get back ownership of our name, which Saul had claimed for himself in the first contract, and Fantasy was forbidden from sticking our songs on schlocky compilation albums without our consent. Yet we owed Saul 180 masters, which he’d own forever. So much for tearing up the old contract.

  Later on I’d be blamed for these decisions, but they were made unanimously by the band with advice from our professional team. And the truth is that in the early days of Creedence—even going back to the Golliwogs era—Tom was considered our business leader. He was older, had a family and a grown-up job, credit cards, and a house. The situation was still this way when we signed our first contract with Saul back on January 5, 1968.

  Soon after that, Tom talked us into hiring Max Weiss as our manager. I really didn’t like that idea, but Tom felt that Max had been “left behind.” There were other financial decisions that bothered me, but the capper as far as Tom goes was in the summer of 1968, after “Susie Q” had been released and our first album was doing well. Tom accepted an engagement for a fee that was far below what we were now worth.

  It was then that I put my foot down. I said, “We should only have one voice talking to people about our fee. You don’t seem to understand how our career is going.” I could see that I had a much clearer idea about our career. Unfortunately, the worst damage had already been done: signing that contract with Saul.

  Strangely, we weren’t approached by outsiders, although the notorious Allen Klein met with us sometime in 1970. And get this—we told him about our horrible contract with Saul, and he looked it over and said these exact words: “There’s nothing I can do.”

  There is some weird rock and roll irony about Allen Klein.

  He met with the Stones… they almost broke up.

  He met with the Beatles… they broke up.

  He met with the Kinks… they broke up.

  He met with Creedence… yep, they broke up.

  There’s long been a rumor that Creedence was the first band to sign on to play at Woodstock. We were by no means the first. In the spring and summer of 1969, we were playing up and down the eastern seaboard, and I remember seeing billboards from Atlanta to New York with that logo of the hand on the guitar and the little bird perched on the neck.

  By the time Woodstock came together, we were approached through our new booking agency, Associated Booking Company. I know we wanted a headline spot on the best night. At that point we were obviously heading to be the number one band in the world—well, actually number two (behind the Beatles, of course).

  Right before Woodstock, we’d been taping The Andy Williams Show all week in Hollywood, and we had to rush out of there and catch the red-eye to New York. We touched down just as the dawn was coming up—I remember because I was thinking about “Midnight Special,” a Lead Belly song I was going to have us record. After a drive up to the Catskills and a few hours’ sleep, some very shaky little World War II helicopter took us to Woodstock. I had visions of every rock singer who had died in a plane crash dancing in my head.

  When we finally got up over the field, the crowd took my breath away. They say there were half a million people there, all between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. It was humongous. I know I felt more than nervous: I was scared. I think I was one of just a few people who had that particular emotion.

  I actually went walking out in the crowd. Had a little hat on, and kind of hid. Somebody was selling water—a gallon for five dollars. And I was aghast. That was so mercenary to me, that somebody was making money off water. So I came back to the guys even more nervous. I was worried that all these people would get moving in a stampede and that people would get hurt. Even though we were the so-called peace and love generation, we’d never been tested that way. I didn’t want something bad to happen because all the naysayers—starting with President Nixon—would just go, “See? I told ya! Make no mistake about that: you people are just no good!”

  Then it got dark. It was getting later and later and later, and the acts that were supposed to be on at six o’clock still hadn’t been on at nine. I got the sense that the whole thing was being held together by the thinnest of threads, and I was just trying to be mellow, ready for whenever it was our turn.

  We would be following the Grateful Dead. Finally the Dead went on and played for an hour or so, and then their equipment broke. After what seemed like a long, long time, they started playing—again. And they played for a good forty-five minutes or whatever. All I know is that we ended up going on way late in the night.

  We came charging out like we always did, James Brown–style—bang! We started with “Born on the Bayou.” By the second number I was looking around and I saw… nothing. Blackness. Shadow, but no movement. I finally looked closer, because you can really only see the first four rows or so, and it was like a scene from Dante’s Inferno, the souls coming out of hell. All these intertwined young people, half naked and muddy, and they looked dead. The Grateful Dead had put half a million people to sleep.

  So I walked up to the mic and said something to the effect of, “Well, we’re havin’ a great time up here. Hope you’
re havin’ fun out there!” No response. Dead audience. Could’ve heard a pin drop. It was like Henny Youngman on a bad night. And finally some guy a quarter mile away in the distant night flicked his lighter, and I heard him say ever so faintly, “Don’t worry about it, John! We’re with ya!” So I played the rest of the set for that one guy. I was connecting with somebody—that’s all I cared about. We definitely warmed the audience up for Janis. By the time she came out, everybody was up and rockin’ again.

  Creedence isn’t in the movie. I was the one who vetoed that. Besides the crowd being asleep, Doug’s drum broke, so it didn’t sound good after a couple of songs. There were also issues with lighting and I think even with the monitors. I didn’t look at the movie as being a historical document, the way I might now: I looked at it as a career opportunity. I think the promoters went broke immediately. Somewhere in the vague recesses of my mind I’m not exactly sure that we ever actually got paid for playing Woodstock.

  My mind-set was, why should I show the whole world we’re doing badly? I didn’t think that was going to help us. We were doing great everyplace else.

  I have great memories of all our supporting acts—Ike and Tina Turner, Bo Diddley, Wilbert Harrison, Booker T. and the MGs, Tony Joe White. We picked them. Coming from the R & B end of things, we certainly weren’t seeking out the Cyrkle or the Cowsills. No, this was about payback. We were honoring our influences, people who were still out there making music. It was a cool thing to tour with them, and I thought it would be a great thing for Creedence’s audience to see.