Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  The Blue Ridge Rangers had been out a month or so when this eight-year-old kid and his dad came to my door for an autograph. The dad pointed out that their copy of the record had a defect in the grooves. He pointed to a walnut-size “bubble” and sort of drew a circle around it with his finger. When I got out my copy, I saw the same thing. I couldn’t believe it. Consumers were erupting in the streets over the quality of the product, and who were they coming to? Not Saul, but me. I went down to Fantasy and told Ralph Kaffel (the president of Fantasy), but he wouldn’t take ownership, nor redo the pressings. And I was mad. If they’re going to make millions, shouldn’t they check the product? They never did.

  Fantasy had their own mastering outfit, and the assistant there was a young guy with an Afro named Mike. He heard my story, took it upon himself to investigate, and went on a stealth mission to the RCA plant that pressed all of Fantasy’s albums.

  He found out that there were four grades of vinyl used at the plant, and therefore four levels of quality and cost. Elvis was on RCA and got the top grade. Guess what grade my album got? The cheap shit. Number four. That’s why there was a bubble in the vinyl. But nobody was going to tell me that information. Mike was the whistle-blower. I do believe the poor guy lost his job.

  This was my breakaway from Creedence, my first album on my own, and Fantasy couldn’t have cared less. They had enjoyed all the riches from what I’d done and acted mystified over my defective album, like I was nuts. When The Blue Ridge Rangers came out, none of the executives were even around. Not a one. Everybody was on vacation now. What a bunch of losers.

  Of course, I learned from this experience and vowed never to let this happen again. As usual, I seem to have adopted another job—that of quality control—as part of my lifelong quest to improve and try to be the best that I can be. Remember, this was in the age of vinyl. One of the things I did was to get my own rather average record player to test all records that I would make from now on. I wanted a record player that would represent what a kid would have, not the audiophile equipment of a millionaire. So I got a simple portable player from Sears. I named it “Skip Tracer.”

  After the Blue Ridge Rangers album had been out awhile, Al Bendich, one of Fantasy’s attorneys, arranged a meeting with me. He told me that Fantasy wasn’t going to count my new album.

  I said, “What do you mean you’re not going to count it?”

  Bendich said, “You know the masters you owe us? We’re not counting this album.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s country.”

  I was stunned. I couldn’t believe they had that power. I could record for them for the next twenty years and they could reject it all. I was a prisoner in Saul’s dungeon. And I couldn’t escape.

  Here I am in my little apartment, trying to come up with songs, and I was just a blank. It was almost as if I wasn’t that guy who wrote “Proud Mary”—I was working but no songs were coming out of me. To say I was having a tough time with all of this is putting it mildly.

  So I decided I would call a meeting with the people at Fantasy. I wanted to go and plead my case. According to their oppressive contract, I owed them a mountain of material, and I needed some relief. They had a nice new, big building with their own studio and had started making feature films. One of the receptionists used to call it (not within earshot of Saul) “The House That John Built.”* They also owned the whole city block. I went to the meeting by myself, didn’t have an attorney or anyone else with me.

  When I got there, I was led into a side room. Later, I would think of it as the Roomful of Soulless Men. After a moment, they filed in. Saul was there, Fantasy president Ralph Kaffel, attorneys Al Bendich and Malcolm Bernstein, plus the writer Ralph J. Gleason, who was now a board member of Fantasy Records, with his own office. Shit, I never had an office. Right at this same time, Ralph was writing articles for the San Francisco Chronicle about downtrodden musicians—I remember reading one about a sax player from the thirties who’d been screwed out of his royalties. Given that, I thought in this situation Ralph might be my advocate.

  We sat down and made small talk for a moment, and then I said, “Look, I’m having trouble coming up with anything. My brain is just not functional. I’m not able to write my songs. I’m not able to move forward, this contract is so oppressive. All I can think about is how it’s weighing on me all the time. I can’t seem to create anything.”

  Immediately Saul said, “That’s not true. The whole history of art shows that the greatest art is created under conditions of oppression and depression.”

  This is, like, a minute and a half into the meeting. “That’s not true.” That was a curious phrase. I’m explaining why this huge contract, this huge obligation is harming my artistic efforts, making it almost impossible to create, and he says “That’s not true”?!

  I was stunned, shocked. I looked into the face of each guy. There’s Ralph Gleason, defender of the downtrodden. Moments go by…

  Nothing. Not a word is said. Not one word. I realize that even though there’s a bunch of people in the room, really it’s just Saul. So I say to him, “Look. I’m going to get up. And I’m going to walk to that door. And if nobody says anything to change this, I’m gonna walk out that door. If I go out that door, I’m never coming back.”

  It was like time stopped. I walked to the door as slow as I could. I’m waiting for Al or Malcolm or Ralph to say something. Silence. I’ll never forget it.

  I went to the door, slowly turned the knob, and walked out. I never went back.

  Some people think Saul was a smart and shrewd businessman. I think he was an idiot. Think about it: you’ve got a guy who can do what I did for them the previous four years, and this is the way they treat me? Was that really smart business? Imagine what it could’ve been. What could’ve been accomplished.

  When I was recording The Blue Ridge Rangers there at the Fantasy studio, the Creedence gold records were on the wall, up a grand staircase. And this little, dare I say, fantasy would cross my mind, where I’d just run up those stairs with a baseball bat and smash all those gold records. I wish I had done that.

  Right when I felt I had nowhere to turn, David Geffen entered the picture. He was a delightful guy who was dating Cher at the time. I explained my dilemma and he said, “Maybe I’ll just buy Fantasy.” That would’ve been great. I think things would’ve turned out way different.

  What happened was this: Geffen bought the rights to have me on Asylum in the U.S. and Canada for one million dollars. In the rest of the world, I was still on Fantasy! The way they arranged it, the money was paid to me, and then I gave it to Saul. So I had to pay the income tax on $1 million that I never saw so that Saul could receive the money. The whole thing was just totally fucked. As part of the deal, I did get back five or six reels of unfinished music from Fantasy’s vaults, which included an out-of-tune version of “Long Black Veil” and a cover of John D. Loudermilk’s “Break My Mind.”* Things I didn’t want them to put out.

  John Fogerty came out on Asylum in 1975. I call it the Shep album because my dog is on the cover with me. I remember playing my version of “Sea Cruise” for the Asylum executives. David blurted out, “Well, that’s a hit song!” They were all looking at him like he was crazy. I think they were kind of kicking him for signing me. They had one of those little record players and they couldn’t quite manage to work it. I thought to myself, Oh man—executive turntables.

  Oh jeez, I was such a boob. My brain was really fractured by then. I had on a brand-new cowboy shirt with large red circles, maybe some stripes. It kind of looked clown-like. And a brand-new pair of not-quite Levi’s—more like Haggar pants that had a little crease. I looked stiff as a board. David, who looked quite relaxed in his jeans with stylishly frayed fringe at the bottom, even commented on my look. I said, “Well, I wanted to look like a million dollars.” I actually said that.

  The Shep album is not my best work. I was having flashes of brilliance in the middle of the incompetence
. “Almost Saturday Night” and “Rockin’ All Over the World” are good songs, and it would’ve been really great if somehow I’d fallen in with a producer I really trusted and had written eight more songs as good as those two. But the rest just aren’t good. “Dream/Song” doesn’t even seem finished, but there it is—it’s on a record. I hate that I allowed that to happen.

  I wrote “Almost Saturday Night” and “Rockin’” on a tuned-down Telecaster in my Albany studio. I actually recorded a demo of “Almost Saturday Night” when I was still at Fantasy. I had been moved to a different room because they’d grown weary of me having the big room tied up. That’s the one-man band again. On “Almost Saturday Night” I added a glockenspiel for a little color.* There’s all kinds of moods you can put yourself in, and one of my favorites is the one where something is just so wonderful that you’re caught up in the excitement, feeling the urge to scream out loud. Sometimes I feel like that when I’m writing, and that’s what I was trying to capture with “Rockin’ All Over the World”—“I like it, I like it, I like it!” I loved that Status Quo had a hit with that. It was like, “Go get ’em, guys!” It made me feel that I was surviving in spite of all odds.

  My next album for Asylum was going to be Hoodoo. A single managed to escape in 1976—“You Got the Magic.” It’s dreadful. Stiff and angular, not smooth and nice. Some of the words are cool, but the musical style to me is foreign. Foreign. It sounds more disco than anything else. And disco sure did suck. That was a silly era in rock and roll.

  Punk was a reaction, a rebellion against disco. I liked the Ramones. Bad Religion’s “Sorrow” is one of my favorite records ever. The Sex Pistols I didn’t get at all. It wasn’t singing. I don’t know what it was. What do you mean you’re not going to tune up? Don’t you have to tune? Spitting? It didn’t appeal to me. They weren’t disciplined. They were making a whole shtick out of being undisciplined. I guess that sounds funny, huh? Saying “discipline” when talking about rock and roll? What I heard was chaos to me. Not good chaos—just chaos.

  The thing I found lacking with much of my own music during those days is not so much that I wandered off into other styles. It’s that the songs weren’t quite… finished. If I repeat a phrase or a word over and over in a song, it’s not me on my game. I heard “You Got the Magic” not long ago and was cringing—“Don’t say that again! You already said that in the last verse! Find a new word.” My best songs do that. But my brain wasn’t functioning like it did in the good times. I’d go to do something musical and it was like… lobotomy! There’d be nothing there. Like forgetting how to ride a bike. Weird.

  Joe Smith was now the head of Asylum, and just before my new album Hoodoo was to be released, he requested to meet with me in Los Angeles. Very gingerly, he said, “This isn’t very good, John. We’ll put it out if you want us to. We just kind of feel like it’s not up to your level.” You can’t be any more generous or diplomatic than the way Joe Smith handled it. That was hard for him to do. You have to be able to be brutally honest if you’re ever going to be worth a crap.

  It was hard for me to hear it, too. Nobody likes to hear, “You stink!” But they didn’t really have to twist my arm too much. I kind of knew it in my heart. “On the Run” was one of the songs on Hoodoo. I could never quite get all the words to make sense. Funny: about a week before I wrote this chapter I was still trying to write that song. People under duress will do stuff because of a deadline, let it go, call it finished when they really don’t think it’s finished. My head just wasn’t right. I was in a bad way. The one-man-band thing was really hard. And the stuff with Saul was eating me up. Those were the hardest times I ever went through up to that point.

  Joe Smith was right, of course, and I knew it, so I went back home and instructed my engineer, Russ Gary, to destroy all the Hoodoo tapes. Some things in life it’s better not to get snagged by. It’s better to move on. I didn’t want to have this come out after I’d died in some plane crash. One of the things Joe said to me was, “Why don’t you go home and fix whatever it is that’s bothering you?”

  I’m sure glad I don’t feel now like I felt in those times. The hand I was dealt was shitty, a really bad hand. In many ways, I was far worse off than I had been before “Susie Q.” Music, my career—it all seemed to be in the rearview mirror, with every avenue blocked off. And it took me a long, long time to get through it. I was a pretty frustrated guy, a miserable person. Completely immersed in all this bitterness, anger, and confusion. At least mentally, I’m forever asking forgiveness from anyone who knew me then. I sure was a shithead. And my gift was gone.

  Members of my own family were so weird about it all. It was always, “John’s goin’ off again.” No one wanted to know the depth of it, to understand how blatantly unfair it all was. I was pretty much alone in the struggle.

  One day I went into Capwell’s, a store in the little El Cerrito shopping center, to buy socks. I was trying to talk to the girl behind the counter, and suddenly I was just neutralized. I didn’t know how to go forward—I was so lacking in self-confidence that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t explain to the salesperson which particular socks I was trying to buy. So I turned around and left without buying anything. It seems so pathetic now, that feeling of just being completely stuck, unable to engage.

  It didn’t help that I was not sleeping well. There was actually one time when I was awake for three days straight. Three days straight. By then you’re a zombie. I was so bothered. And so angry. I couldn’t shut it off! It would not shut off.

  Eventually I began to self-medicate—a pleasant phrase that means drinking as much alcohol as possible.… Such a horrible decision. It kind of worked, although I was a bum. That’s the John who’s a horrible guy. When Martha and the kids would go to bed, I’d just stay up and get drunk. I’d drink, sometimes smoke cigarettes, and finally fall asleep. I don’t like publicizing this. Certainly it’s not a time I’m proud of.

  At some point I went to a sleep clinic in Berkeley, where they teach you how to get into your alpha state. You’re supposed to slow way down and go, “Ohm, ohm.” I never really did learn that, but in the course of these sessions, I’d sit in this reclining chair and start telling this nurse my situation—almost like that person was a shrink, but of course they weren’t. I’d sit down in the chair, and out would pour all this “Arrrrgh!” pain.

  It was now 1980, and some rather earthshaking things had occurred. I had come to feel that the whole Castle Bank offshore financial plan was a scam. And even though I had been led into it with the guidance of some of my own advisers—making it sort of their fault—I felt that every day I stayed in the plan was my fault. It would be my choice to stay or go. So I had tried to withdraw from the plan, which I will explain in another chapter of this book.

  The result was that as of 1980, all of my life savings had been stolen, and several years of royalty payments from Fantasy that I had never received were now being claimed to have been deposited directly into a defunct bank. Fantasy had steered the band into this thing in the first place, and this financial plan was basically Fantasy’s baby. (The Castle Bank owner-director, Burt Kanter, was on the board of Fantasy Records. Saul had told me personally that he had given Burt “carte blanche” to run his affairs.)

  When I left Fantasy for Asylum, I still owed Fantasy four albums—not in the U.S. and Canada, but in the rest of the world. That’s what stunk. I got away from Fantasy, but I was still on Fantasy. The Shep album was only the first under that deal. I remember blurting out to the sleep nurse, “I still owe them three albums! The Bee Gees’ whole career is three albums!” I didn’t mean that in a derogatory way. I meant, “Look how much great music can be contained in only three albums.”

  When I blurted that out, I realized I had to fix this situation. Fantasy had cheated me out of my own songs, had paid a pittance of a royalty and then had stolen it all back. Stolen my life savings. And I was supposed to give them more music? I never got any good at the sleep alpha thing, but I kne
w I had to take care of owing Fantasy more material in any part of the universe if I was going to survive.

  I decided to give up my artist royalties in lieu of having to give Fantasy any more music. Because in my mind I was getting paid a pittance for the Creedence stuff anyway—one-quarter of our very low royalty rate. I’d get a foreign royalty statement from Fantasy that said earnings were $480,000, and by the time they took their deductions they’d whittled it down to $30,000. So I swapped those royalties for freedom. If you don’t think it was a good deal for me, remember: Saul would have owned Centerfield, Eye of the Zombie, and Blue Moon Swamp—which came out in 1997! And I would not have been paid correctly.

  My brother Tom made it clear that he didn’t think this was a good idea. Saul must’ve told him I did it. I’d get letters from Tom trying to convince me that I’d made a mistake, bragging about how much he’d made in royalties, how he and Saul were pals and wasn’t I a dumb schmuck. Tom bragged that he’d earned a million and a half dollars in ten years of Creedence sales. For probably twenty million albums, that’s a rather paltry rate!

  I may have been giving up money, but man, I was free.

  Two things helped me keep my sanity during this time: running and going into the woods. I had taken up running in 1974. I’d seen a picture of myself on a fishing trip and my gut was hanging out, and I thought, My God! I’ve got to do something about that. In my world, no one really knew about conditioning, so I thought, How about if I just run? My place was a few blocks away from Albany High School, so I went over there and ran around the track: run a lap, walk a lap. A few days into this I decided I was going to sprint all the way back to my office. I got one block and I collapsed on a lawn.

  This is when I was still smoking. Since high school I’d smoked about a pack a day. I was disgusted with myself over how out of shape I had gotten. I thought, What a pathetic old man you are! You can’t even run one block? I was only twenty-nine! It was at that exact moment when I became a runner.