Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  The cover for Cosmo’s Factory was funky, just all of us hanging out at the Factory. Stu’s nickname for Doug was Cosmo—it had something to do with the Cosmo Topper character on the old TV series Topper. That cover made him famous. I told the guys I thought it would be cool if we took a shot of us with our favorite things near us at the Factory. I thought it was a way of fleshing out the personalities in the band. It was sort of anti-showbiz. I told my brother Bob, “Go buy a camera and we’ll take some pictures.”

  I wasn’t the final judge of that cover shot. We had four or five test prints and we settled on that one. Unanimous vote. I remember thinking that wasn’t the one I would have picked. I thought Doug looked a little funny. I wasn’t judging it like, “Is this great art?” No, it was more like, “This is who we are.”

  Nineteen sixty-nine. No one had a better year that year than me. Three hit albums in one year. It was like winning the World Series, but in music. Nobody’s bigger than the Beatles, but I’m told that worldwide we outsold them that year.

  Cosmo’s Factory came the next year. I felt this was a culmination. The record is just chock-full of good music—even on the album cuts, like “Ooby Dooby” and “My Baby Left Me.” Six hit singles, and this was not a greatest-hits album. I thought that we would make some sort of turn after that. And we did.

  CHAPTER 10

  Tom Leaves

  THE NEXT CREEDENCE single was “Lookin’ out My Back Door” and “Long as I Can See the Light,” which we recorded around May or June of 1970. I’m somewhat surprised that I came up with such a cool metaphor in “Long as I Can See the Light.” I’d never heard of a candle being described as a beacon, a safe haven that you come back to. It’s about the loner in me. Wanting to feel understood, needing those at home to shine a light so that I can make my way back.

  I’m not sure if I realized what a beautiful song it was when I wrote it. Other people did. I didn’t do that song for years. I didn’t feel that natural with it. Now I do it all the time, and it resonates. I’m not sure I ever really felt at home until now. Home is what I’ve experienced with Julie.

  “Lookin’ out My Back Door” was the first time I played Dobro on a record. I’d gotten it in Nashville, and learned enough to play a little part.

  That song came because of my young son, Josh. I wanted to write a kids’ song. One inspiration was And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss. Another was a children’s book by Margaret Wise Brown, The House of a Hundred Windows. My mother would read that book to me and sing this folk song, “Pretty Kitty,” by Josef Marais and Miranda. The only character I remember in the book is a kitty cat. He’s in this enormous house, looking out all the windows. He sees a train going across the prairie. Then he sees a parade, and a harbor with a ship. At the end of the book, he comes to the front door and it’s open. The kitty cat is sitting there, looking out the door. Does he walk through it? I don’t know if it’s happy or sad. That memory chokes me up. Somehow that kitty is connected to “Lookin’ out My Back Door.”

  Some little kids came to visit us in the studio after we recorded that single, and we played the songs for them. They were from a school for the blind, which was rather ironic given the titles of the two songs. After they left, I went to talk with my brother. Tom was on rhythm guitar, and he was supposed to be playing with the pickups in the middle position to make a full, more acoustical sound—a bed for what was the lead guitar and vocal. But Tom put his guitar on treble and it sounded jarring, spiky, like fingernails on a chalkboard. Real… bright. He did it on both songs and it was very noticeable.

  Tom had kind of sucker punched me. I have rabbit ears and I notice everything. It made me nervous, because it was a change from the way the records had been arranged. Afterwards I brought it up: “Hey, Tom, your guitar is really bright. It’s too bright.”

  Tom said, “Well, I can’t hear my part. I did that so I could hear myself more.”

  But once you do that, it’s too loud for the bass, so you turn that up. Now you can’t hear the lead guitar or the vocal, so you turn them up. Now you’re back where you started, except that everything is louder. I’d never forgotten what that guy had told me in his homemade studio way back in tenth grade: you can only put so much water in the glass before it spills out. Plus, that’s just insurrection, chaos. If you’re on a football team, you can’t just have everybody runnin’ off and making new plays. It’s not good for the team.

  Tom was more vocal in his mutiny. At around this time, the rest of the band started meeting at night down at the Factory and playing without me. I was always telling the guys that we needed to be tighter as a rhythm section, like Booker T. and the MGs. They were trying to improve, and it was working. But something else was happening too.

  My brother Bob was about seventeen then. Back in ’68, it had been my idea to hire Bob to work for the band. My motivation wasn’t nepotism at all—it was just a good thing to have smart people around. And Bob has been at my side ever since, helping get stuff done. Years later, he told me that during these rehearsals Tom would start complaining about how the rest of the band should be writing songs and singing them. Bob called it “Tom’s rant.” I found this out only a few years ago. To learn from one brother that another brother was at least the partial instigator of all the turmoil ahead just makes me shake my head.

  At the end of October 1970, we were just about to start recording our next album, Pendulum. I arrived at the Factory, and the guys were looking real serious and tense—more than usual. They said, “We want to have a meeting.”

  We went back to this little area where there was a conference table that we’d gotten from Stu’s dad’s law firm. And they started in. It was a confrontation. “This is the deal: we want to be able to write songs. We want to be able to sing those songs. We want to be able to have more say in the music and in the running of Creedence Clearwater Revival.”

  I can only say that by this time I was worn down. Throughout the life of Creedence, there was quite a bit of tension. It had started with “Proud Mary,” when I insisted on doing the background vocals myself. Since then, the tension had continued to mount. There had been many times when I just had to keep my cool and get the job done for the good of the band. I was just tired of taking it on the chin and not fighting back.

  Now all three of them were voicing the same opinion. I could see that to go forward, this band was either going to do it this way or not go forward at all. I thought, If I’m still gonna have this dream of mine, this rock and roll band, I’ve got to compromise. We’ll stay alive by doing this. So I caved.

  I said, “Okay, how do you want to do this? What do you want to do?”

  “Well, we all want to write songs.”

  Tom had written some songs before Creedence, but Stu and Doug had never written a song before—and they wanted the first song they ever wrote to be recorded by the number one band in the world. Well, you’re supposed to work your way up, aren’t you? That really did bother me.

  As I have been quoted as saying, the worst thing that ever happened to my band was the Beatles, because the guys in my band thought they could be the Beatles. Not only did the Beatles have three of the greatest ever songwriters, they had two great singers plus another pretty good singer—and actually a fourth guy with so much personality that it worked for him too. We didn’t have that. And then comes all the arranging, producing, and the rest. These guys had no clue about what was necessary. A vision. That’s just the truth.

  Early on I thought maybe somebody else might write. Tom had written in the Golliwogs, but he didn’t want to push to find better words or a better place for the melody. Once, sometime in 1970, Tom said to me, “I have some songs here,” and he handed me a cassette. I went home and listened, and there were no instruments, no vocals, just Tom humming. Humming! It was almost comedy. Can you picture this? You’re listening and after a minute, for emphasis, he hums louder. Then softer. After five minutes I turned it off. The truth is, it was up to me to write the
songs. And produce and arrange them. To my mind this new concept was shaky—career suicide.

  I explained to them that we were trying to get a record out by Christmas. “It doesn’t have to be right now,” they told me. And they continued on about how they wanted to have much more say—it wasn’t going to be a dictatorship anymore. It was going to be a democracy.

  At that moment I felt like one of those characters in some movie where everybody is deciding the future. There’s the one guy who knows what’s really going on, and he’s saying to himself, God help us now. Because that’s certainly how I felt. I didn’t think, Hooray! Let’s do this! I was like, Wow, this is going to ruin our band.

  But I didn’t say that. In order to keep the band from breaking up, I capitulated—“Okay, from now on you guys can be singers. You can write the songs.” We all still had the unanimous-vote rule going, though everyone seemed to have forgotten. There really wasn’t much else to say. I just wanted to go forward and get the next album done.

  Do I feel like I was a tyrant in Creedence? I don’t feel that I was, even now. Was I sure-handed, a perfectionist, even bullheaded about what I wanted? Yeah, you bet, sometimes. And sometimes not. Those moments when I had to teach a song or an arrangement, explain why something didn’t work—I think I was pretty gentle and supportive. Part of a team. I didn’t sit there and berate or belittle someone in front of everybody else. That just wasn’t in my makeup.

  You know, bands and marriages are similar in some big ways. At least my band and my marriage—but in marriage, I’m on the other side. There are some moments in a marriage when you don’t necessarily agree with your spouse, when you get into this place of “I don’t see it, I don’t get it.” When I don’t, I don’t kick and scream about it. I just tell myself, “Y’know, it has all worked out really great so far.”

  There’s times when Julie just knows something so clearly. And my wife has a better track record than I ever had as the leader of Creedence: 99.999 percent of the time she’s just really right. When you have a great marriage and you’re with somebody that you have ultimate faith and ultimate trust in, you just go with their sense to know stuff, even when you don’t see it right then. It’s happened with us over and over and over.

  Are those moments tyranny? I don’t look at it that way. The difference is trust. All I know is that I trust her, and that the result of that trust is the best of all possible worlds—for me and for her.

  And I think that’s what wasn’t happening between the band and me during the time when Creedence was actually recording and making hit records. I was darn sure of what we should do. I was darn sure about my songs, darn sure about the arrangements, and I sure knew when I heard a clunker—“Hmm, no, that’s not right. Do this.” But the trust wasn’t there.

  As I said, a band is like a marriage. A brotherhood. And at least in the good times, people are professing their love to each other, which is certainly how I felt. But there can come a time when people don’t have faith in you anymore. They’re not trusting you. They’re wanting to do something else and they’re letting you know.

  It’s a very volatile situation. When you’re in the middle of that, I’m sure you’re not seeing everything clearly. It’s like being lost in the middle of a stream: you’re splashing so hard, you don’t know what’s swimming by or where’s the shore. You’re just trying to stay afloat. You’re freaking out.

  I was not perfect. I was not always totally at ease and calm and open and everything else that you would hope. At some point I really couldn’t talk with everybody else. I just kept thinking, Well, if I could just work harder and make it better, then they’ll understand. One more hit, one more success, and then they’ll see. I even thought Fantasy would see the light, that Saul would honor me. In that sense, I was probably delusional, desperately hoping that all the success from my music, my leadership, would convince them to do it my way. But in the end, they didn’t care about that.

  Pendulum certainly wasn’t made the way we’d made the previous albums. The idea was that we’d go into the studio for a month, experiment, jam, make Sgt. Pepper. Sgt. Pepper was the curse of every other rock and roll band that ever lived. The Beatles could do it because they were the freakin’ Beatles. No one else could, including Creedence.

  The guys didn’t want to do the work. They just wanted to go into the studio and come up with songs by osmosis, spontaneous combustion. To me that was scary… a disaster… can I go as far as to say catastrophic? After all the years of growing up, through the Blue Velvets and the Golliwogs, we had finally evolved into what really worked, and now we were going to blow that up, just go hang in the studio like the Grateful Dead?! In reality, what happened was that there was a lot of rambling and, “Well, I don’t know what to play here.” Basically, nothing was going to happen if I just sat there.

  My song “Born to Move” was on that album. There was a place in the track where the bass part was missing something, a hole there. Just a space of, I think, four bars, right? At this point I felt like the old graybeard shaman that the young bucks had banished to live outside the village. So I had Stu come in to play something in that spot—just a transition to fill the space between the two pieces of the song.

  Over and over we went, finally spending two hours of a four-hour session, and he never did come up with anything. Finally, I showed him what to play and we moved on. It wasn’t in him to ever create a part. Stu is a Top 40 jukebox guy. You know that guitar part at the beginning of “Green River” or “Up Around the Bend”? Musicians call those things riffs. They are a specific set of notes and rhythms that catch your ear. A lot of songs have riffs—“Day Tripper,” “Satisfaction,” “Louie Louie,” “Smoke on the Water.” In all the years I was around the guys, I never heard one of them come up with an original riff. None of the guys could play a solo.

  So here we were in this studio that we’d booked for a month to make an album. Facetiously, I began to say, “Well, we’ve got a month.” But in my heart I knew we could stand there and stare at each other ’til the cows came home and we would still end up with nothing. At some point after a few days, I started to go home after the daily session and write. I grew up with these guys and I’d learned how it worked—and how it didn’t.

  The only thing we ever really collaborated on as a band was the six-minute-plus instrumental with sound effects called “Rude Awakening #2.” (Which begs the question, what was “Rude Awakening #1”? Maybe that was the fight we had over the “Proud Mary” vocals.) The Beatles had done this “sound collage” called “Revolution 9”; that type of thing was in the air. I’d recorded a beautiful fingerpicking song that I did with a split pickup guitar. I liked the song, but the stuff added on after it is just free-form nonsense. Doug farts on the track—that was his contribution. So that’s the one and only Creedence collaboration. A masterpiece? No. Much of the rest of Pendulum was me going, “Okay, I’ll go home, write a song, come back, and we’ll record it.” The meticulous preparation was gone.

  Pendulum happened during a period in my life when my head started to feel really dry. I don’t know exactly how to describe it or what it means, but my head felt physically dry. I still worked as hard on Pendulum, but there aren’t as many great songs. “It’s Just a Thought” wasn’t necessarily my best effort. I could’ve possibly made a better song out of “Pagan Baby.” During my short career in Catholic school, we were always having a collection for the pagan babies. There was a tin can bank in class, and you’d bring in change and drop it in for them. Pagan babies—what a wonderful phrase. With some sarcasm I wanted to turn that into rock and roll, with implied sex and all the rest—maybe that pagan baby isn’t so unfortunate after all! I was almost a little too serious about it, but it was a cool idea, and I probably could have made it better with more time.

  I concentrated on the single, “Hey Tonight” backed with “Have You Ever Seen the Rain.” One of the complaints the guys had was, “We don’t like it when we rehearse the two songs for the single fo
r six weeks.” Ironically, the band was tighter than ever due to the time they’d spent rehearsing on their own and all our touring. There was nothing specific behind “Hey Tonight.” You have car songs, food songs, beach songs. Every once in a while there’s a “tonight” song, like “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas.

  “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” is about the breakup of the band. I was feeling, “Man, we achieved all our dreams. And you guys are only talking about negative stuff.” By your own volition, you bring in a huge rain cloud and cause it to rain. On your own perfect dream. That’s the way I saw it. I was watching the band disintegrate right in front of my eyes.

  There was a guy hanging around at the time named John Hallowell, who was writing a book called Inside Creedence. The book was far from great, but he was around. And when he heard “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” he cried. John knew exactly what the deal was from hearing the song. The other guys didn’t seem to know at all. But he knew it was over. He came to me after hearing it, and the first thing he said was, “John, really?” The other guys in the band had no idea about how I wrote the songs. They have no knowledge of the inspiration or personal motivation that led to all those songs!

  The disastrous direction Creedence had taken was symbolized by an event that I dubbed the Night of the Generals. That title came from a movie about Hitler’s Third Reich as it was crumbling. No one was following orders anymore. Everybody’s in charge, everybody’s a general. On December 12, 1970, Creedence had its own Night of the Generals.

  The rest of the guys in the band were very, very concerned about our image. I used to chuckle to myself when the press said, “Creedence—they’re just a Top 40 machine.” You’d read quotes by Bay Area musicians like Jefferson Airplane, saying things like, “Y’know, we’re really not trying to have hits. We just want to have quality music.” “We don’t want to be commercial”—it was a catchphrase, like “What’s your sign?” I thought, Yeah, right—you just want to play in an attic where no one hears you, and maybe your mother will buy one copy of your record. Why make a record at all if you don’t want to be commercial? I could see through all that crap—“I’m an artiste, I’m too good to ever be on Top 40 radio.”