Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  But in this particular situation, doing something like that struck me as wrong. Stu was crossing into my territory. I shouldn’t have been asked to prop up this thing I didn’t believe in in the first place. That wasn’t what the agreement was. I said, “This whole thing, this insurgence, was about you guys getting to do your own stuff. And now you want me to fix it for you, and then you take credit? It’s not fair. I can’t do that.” I refused to do that. And the end result is what you hear on Mardi Gras.

  The album was released in April 1972. It was about as bad as I’d thought it would be. But remember: I let them do it. It was their idea. I didn’t twist anybody’s arm or hold a gun to their heads. Stu and Doug were proud of Mardi Gras. They thought they’d written some good songs. It was only six months later, after everybody tore it apart, that they started saying, “Oh, no, John made us do that.”

  The best commentary came by way of Lucy, who was there when the album was being recorded. She had a phrase when it came to food: you see something funny on your plate, a bunch of fat on the meat, it doesn’t look like something you’d better eat, and she’d say, “Looks like there’s something extra in there.” That’s what we said about Doug and Stu’s tracks: “Sounds like there’s something extra in there.”

  I know that some critics called the album “Fogerty’s revenge.” I didn’t make it with any sense of revenge. I don’t even think there was any sense of, “See? I told you so,” or any of that. I was doing my darnedest to give my best performances and to have it be as good as we could make it under the circumstances. But the damage had been done.

  A few years later I was talking to some fan, and he made the statement, “The big change in Creedence was when Tom left the band.” He’d brought along the single off Mardi Gras, “Sweet Hitch-Hiker.” On the label it says, “Produced by Creedence Clearwater Revival,” which isn’t how previous singles had been credited.

  I said, “No,” and pointed to that credit. “The big change is right there.”

  Eventually Creedence had to go back on the road. We’d been touring as a trio since Tom left. There was talk about adding Duck Dunn from Booker T. and the MGs, but we decided not to bring in a new person. My guitar was loud enough that you didn’t really notice anything missing. But that addressed the practical problems rather than the emotional ones. Doug and Stu couldn’t supply the solutions. I didn’t have my brother there and it really wasn’t a band anymore. It was back to being the Blue Velvets. You have to understand that Doug and Stu are joined at the hip. Whatever Doug says, Stu agrees; whatever Stu says, Doug agrees. They were the Corsican twins. Even though Tom and I often differed, I could count on him to be an independent vote. Without him, we were a three-legged stool.

  The vibe on this tour was different because of it. When we were a quartet, we didn’t have a zillion groupies hanging around, people offering joints to everybody, all the rest of it. One night as we were rolling along from city to city, either Stu or Doug said, “Yeah, the backstage was really boring back then.” After we became a trio, it was like a three-ring circus backstage. The whole thing was just one long party.

  The groupie thing was almost being done with a vengeance, and it wasn’t like I was still some sort of Boy Scout. Doug and Stu were talking about all these conquests. It was ego, like guys with motorcycles—“Who’s got a bigger engine?” It became more of a challenge, a rivalry: “I’ll show you.”

  Backstage on the trio tour, you could probably see three or four of the seven deadly sins going on at any given time. There was something out of kilter, to be doing things for those sort of reasons. In the Beatles, Paul and John would challenge each other to come up with a great song—I would’ve loved that, some guy sitting there who was my songwriting equal. That’s cool. But this sort of one-upmanship wasn’t healthy.

  Particularly as the group went on as a trio, it seemed even clearer to me that other stuff was more important to Doug and Stu than the music. The debauchery, the imbibing, the groupies, even destroying property. One of Doug’s favorite things to do while bored or drunk in a hotel room was to take room-service cream, turn on the television, pour the cream down inside the TV, and watch the television boil and blow up. I didn’t understand that.

  It wasn’t in my nature to just destroy things for the heck of it. I never really got it. I came from too meager beginnings. My parents were Depression-era people, and I knew about breadlines, soup lines, and one set of clothes. I saw how my parents behaved: they hoarded and saved compulsively.

  I’m actually that way myself. If something has value, even if it’s a plastic bag, I have a hell of a time just throwing a perfectly good thing in the trash when maybe my brain can invent some use for it. I just can’t light a match and watch it burn for entertainment. Maybe I can use that bag as a trash liner, instead of going to the store and paying three dollars for a box of trash liners. I’m quirky that way. It might be a little compulsive. My kids don’t have that unless I remind them of it—“You gotta turn the light off! That costs money!”

  I was just another guy in the band at this point. The other John had been more of a leader. I saw myself as a Brian Epstein, but after the band meeting I stopped acting like that. I couldn’t tell them how to conduct themselves anymore because they didn’t want me to. So when the guys acted like buffoons, the best I could do was laugh nervously about it and try to get along.

  We met the guys in Led Zeppelin on that tour. I think it was in Adelaide, Australia. Jimmy Page and I stayed up very late together having the best of times! We love rockabilly and Sun Records, and I think we both were excited to talk about what got us into this crazy music biz in the first place. Funny thing: the day before Zeppelin showed up, the security guys in the hotel came to each of our rooms. They were checking everyone in the Creedence party to see what damage we might have done. Well, our rooms were just fine—no damage—but as security was leaving, I couldn’t help but think, You guys have no idea. Don’t you know who’s coming here tomorrow? Hide the women and children, it’s Led Zeppelin! These guys start by knocking out the walls between the rooms… and then it’s every man for himself.

  I met Jim Morrison at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. He had that indecent exposure trial going on and he showed up in the wee hours at a party in my suite. I remember being in the kitchen there, saying stuff like, “Yeah, man, I really think the machines are gonna take over,” stuff I halfheartedly believe. And Jim’s like, “Oh, I don’t feel that way at all. The human spirit will always find a way to continue!” I’m going, “Is this the Jim Morrison I’ve heard about? The guy who sang about killing his dad?” He was all cheerful. I was the one talking gloom and doom!

  Tony Joe White opened for us throughout 1971 and ’72. Just Tony Joe and a drummer, really sparse. He really has a musical style and presence unlike anybody else. Funky guitar player. And his songwriting territory is so unique. “Polk Salad Annie” is one of the best records ever made. I was tighter with him than with our other opening acts. He had a real friendly, open, sunny face and that Southern thing. I used to say. “Man, Tony Joe, if only I had your looks and my brain, we could be a big star.”

  We’d hang a lot after the show—go to a bar, sit and drink and tell stories, or, as we used to say, “tell lies.” I spent a day fishing in the Arkansas River with Tony Joe and the photographer Jim Marshall. Jim was a character. He couldn’t glue together a sentence without seventeen expletives. We had rented our own Lear Jet for the trio tour. Our pilot was a guy named John Chaddick, who had been a B-52 pilot in Vietnam. To escape Russian MiGs while under fire, he’d loop-de-loop that B-52 and end up behind the MiG. He used to barrel-roll the Lear for us going across the Atlantic, and suddenly we’d be upside down. Jim Marshall turned green, white, red, and yellow, ready to puke. We did that to a lot of folks, including the governor of the Bahamas. Did he turn green!

  Tony Joe would jam with us. I had bought a little three-pedal steel guitar, a Sho-Bud Maverick. I bought an instruction book and slowly and painful
ly learned how to tune it and use the pedals. I loved country music, and the Sho-Bud was a way for me to take on that persona. We’d rent an extra hotel room that we called the Mondo Bizarro Room and play. After those shows, I felt like doing something different from what I had done onstage.

  So I was doing rock songs in a country way or country songs with a little more rock in ’em—“Jambalaya,” “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” the Fats Domino song “Poor Me,” done Hank Williams–style. And I’d do this song the actor Sal Mineo did as a kid in 1957, “Start Movin’ (in My Direction).” It was a cool song, especially if you put it into Hank Williams mode. I could tell that Tony Joe appreciated my “Jambalaya.” He’d always go, “Awww, John, that funky ol’ voice…” He’d be sitting there with his guitar or beating on a beer can or playing a tambourine. We were making a heck of a racket. Nobody ever taped this stuff; we just did it for fun. This was all pointing in the direction I’d take on The Blue Ridge Rangers, my first solo album. Turns out I was already rehearsing—sort of living out—this thing that I was going to do. Not that any of us knew it at the time.

  That tour felt like dragging the flag through the mud. Because what had been the proud vision I’d had of Creedence was being desecrated. Our last live show was in Denver on May 22, 1972. It was pretty bad.

  You felt like you knew these kids in the audience. You’d be looking down and they’d look at us like we were their compadres. They had adopted us. Kids at eighteen, nineteen, adopt some new band and that band becomes exalted. But the audience saw us a little differently on this tour. During that Denver show, I looked down while Stu was singing “Door to Door” or Doug was singing “Tearin’ Up the Country,” and there was just a big question mark on their faces. We’d been Elvis, but suddenly we’d turned into Pat Boone.

  People literally threw money at us. The audience was telling me what I already knew: this sucks. It was one of those moments when you’re standing there taking it for the team, but you understand why completely. Yet the other two guys still thought what they were doing was great.

  After the show, I reached down and picked up one of the quarters, and later went to the local jeweler and had him make a necklace out of it. The guy put it on a dog tag chain and I wore it for a few years. A reminder—“This is as bad as it can get.” Eventually I put it in a drawer and finally just lost it.

  I was really feeling like quitting. The trio was just so contentious. It had probably started to dissolve the moment Stu asked me to bail out his song. That was the beginning of the end for me.

  The public would naturally like to think that Creedence was a band, four guys like the Beatles. That’s not really true. The minute I didn’t supply the music, we were lost. It was even more evident in the trio than it had been in the quartet. And it got harder and harder to keep this dirigible afloat when the guys were doing everything they could to poke holes in it.

  Finally I just said to myself, I’m not going to do this anymore. This is dumb. I went over to Stu’s house, sat down, and just told him. I can’t remember if I talked directly to Doug. I think I tried and he wasn’t home, so I asked Stu to tell Doug. I wanted to get it over with that day. I was tired of holding it in. Sometimes in life you arrive at a situation that calls for an unpleasant confrontation. You know you have to face it and take a stand, but it makes you very uncomfortable. So you force yourself through it to get to the other side. That’s how I was feeling with this. I sure wasn’t happy about it. A lifetime’s worth of dreams and all the joy of my musical soul had been poured into Creedence without reservation. It had simply gotten too hard to go forward this way. I was sad. I think Stu was sad.

  By this time I was living in an apartment in Emeryville, so I headed back there.

  Alone.

  CHAPTER 12

  Hoodooed

  CREEDENCE HAD FINALLY called it quits, and not long after, I was down at Saul’s office—I’m not sure why, because I wasn’t really that friendly with any of them by now—and he asked me directly, “Well, is there any chance you and the other guys will get back together?”

  Just talking about it felt like delivering a news report after a catastrophe. I felt horrible inside.

  And then Saul looked at me and said, “You’re sure there’s no chance?” I told him no. I could tell the wheels were turning in Saul’s head.

  Now, we had signed a contract as a band. I thought that now that the band no longer existed, it would be null and void. But after that little discussion with Saul, I received a notice in the mail: Fantasy was informing me that they were exercising their right to renew their option on my contract. This is when I discovered that they could hold on to us individually, even though Creedence had broken up. At about that same time, they let Tom, Doug, and Stu out of their contracts, so they no longer had any obligation to Fantasy and Saul. Fantasy and Saul kept me.

  It actually played out this way: within a few months of Creedence calling it quits, both Doug and Tom released solo albums. They did not sell well. Then Fantasy released Doug, Stu, and Tom from their contract with the label. Even though Fantasy had made millions of dollars from Creedence, I guess they figured there was no sense wasting any money on those guys. It now sank in that I owed Fantasy a lot of product. Per the contract, we owed them twenty-two masters a year in 1969 and in ’70. For the years 1971 through 1974, it jumped to thirty-four masters for each year. In 1969, we’d recorded three albums, but even that amounted to only twenty-six recordings, four of which were covers, which didn’t count. In 1971, we had recorded just one single, “Sweet Hitch-Hiker,” and in 1972 came Mardi Gras, which contained eight more new songs (plus “Sweet Hitch-Hiker” and its flip side). Everything else was owed. And the unfulfilled numbers slid into the next year. And the next. The band was gone, but the obligation remained. For me, not the other guys. They were free and clear. I was not. I saw a lawyer. And then another lawyer.

  Obviously I still wanted to make music, but at the same time, I owed it all to Saul. I couldn’t give it to anybody else. I began to work on The Blue Ridge Rangers, which was released in 1973. This was my first solo album and the first of my one-man-band projects, where I played every instrument on the record. I chose to do an album of covers because, as with “Susie Q,” it entailed doing other people’s songs instead of trying to write songs. The reason I had to do it that way was my brain was locked. Frozen. I couldn’t create new songs. I was under Saul’s thumb, and I was trying to keep my sanity.

  The thought behind the one-man-band thing was, “This will be quite an achievement if I pull it off, and it will take enough time that maybe there will be a solution to all these problems.” Because I really couldn’t figure it out. And it never got better. But I started down the road of, “Okay, I’ll play the drums. I’ll play the bass. I’ll do this all myself.” I’m sure that at the time I thought, I’ll make records that are just as good as Creedence. But it was really sort of a split impulse: yes, I wanted to have success, but at the same time, I didn’t, because Saul would own my success.

  The songs I chose for the album were country songs from the fifties and sixties, plus a couple of old gospel numbers. Songs I knew growing up. The hippie country of the seventies just bothered me. Rockers who can’t play guitar well enough to play the real licks doing “Okie from Muskogee,” singing with fake, exaggerated accents—I thought that was an abomination. I revered the people who had to be good enough to actually make it in the world of country music. This other stuff was a homogenized supermarket version that could never hold life on its own. I was working too hard trying to be actually good at country music. I could never make fun of it.

  I actually had a hit with my version of “Jambalaya,” which went to number sixteen. I liked my version of “Hearts of Stone” and especially “Blue Ridge Mountain Blues,” but I felt that some of the other music was not quite good enough. It didn’t feel as relaxed or as authoritative as a real band of musicians would have made it. And it was hard for me. Perhaps I’m not as talented as
Prince or Stevie Wonder (who played every instrument on “Superstition,” which was also a hit that year), where it just flows like honey off the beehive.

  That album, plus the Fantasy singles “Comin’ down the Road” and “You Don’t Owe Me,” as well as the recordings I’d do next for Asylum Records, all embarrass me now. They’re missing the mark, not as good as they could be. In some ways I think I remembered them being more inferior than they actually are. I recently heard a couple of things from that era, and I was surprised that they were better than I thought. I may have been too hard on myself. If you don’t really know how they were made, don’t have all those emotional memories about how you were feeling, then maybe they’re okay. I was always like, “Man, I don’t want people to find out about these records. I just want them to stay buried!” So I was being pretty harsh.

  Because of Julie, I’m healthy and would never pursue doing things that way now. She helped me learn a lesson: it’s way more fun to be in great company, and that includes playing with other musicians, especially great musicians. That’s what I seek out now. I want to cross paths with as many great players as I can for the rest of my life—and I sure don’t want to play all the instruments.

  But back then, unfortunately, I was a one-man band. I kept pursuing that method for years, even when you didn’t hear about me. I had a little office and studio in Albany, California, and I spent a lot of time there, working on my own. It’s not like I was off in the woods sitting under a tree, not knowing what day it was, or in South America on a drug binge. When all the doors were slammed in my face, I kept working, kept trying. It was the same process as The Blue Ridge Rangers; I just got better at it. But in my mind, not good enough. I wouldn’t work on my own music with an actual band in the studio again until Eye of the Zombie in 1986, but that’s a whole nother story.