by John Fogerty
So when I saw Bill standing there at the Bammies, I went over to him. I figured, with his experience, he’d seen it all and could help, so I said, “Bill, I’m not being productive at all musically. I can’t write. I’m not being me—I’m stuck. And a big part of this is because I have all this unresolved crap with Fantasy Records and Saul Zaentz. Would you help me try to figure it out, try to resolve it?”
He said, “Yes. I’ll do it.” I pictured that Bill would judge both sides, come up with what was actually fair, and make a recommendation. I was going with what Celia had told me to do… as if it was that simple.
A few days later, I get a call from Bill—he’s working on a meeting between me and Saul. Within a week he has me fly up there. Bill himself meets me at the airport gate and drives me to his office.
I lay out the whole history to Bill and his assistant, Nick Clainos. I go home. Bill arranges our first meeting with Saul at Bill’s house in Marin County. Saul says his stuff, I say my stuff, and Bill is in the middle. It’s all quite correct, almost like teatime in London. Two well-respected, honorable gentlemen discussing their issues.
It really boils down to two big issues: Saul thinks I’ve slandered him and wants restitution. And I want to buy back my own songs.
At one point Saul says, “We really honored John. We offered him ten percent of the company, and he just rejected our offer.” Saul actually says this. Which is, of course, a lie.
Then out of his mouth comes the phrase, “First the lawsuit, then the publishing.” And he makes it very clear that he wants a check for $600,000 for slandering him. It’s going to take that to make the suit go away. He puts his fist on the table and says, “Not negotiable. Not negotiable.”
So Bill talks more with Saul and gets him to acknowledge, “Well, in deference to John and the respect our company has for him, we will sell the songs to John at a fair price, lower than we would sell to anyone else. I’m not gonna give away the store”—that was one of Saul’s pet expressions—“but in deference to what John has meant to us, we will have other attorneys and experts look into this, determine a fair price, and then we’ll sell the songs to John. But mind you, first the lawsuit, then the publishing.”
First the lawsuit, then the publishing. That was a phrase I was to hear a lot in the days to come.
At the end of the meeting, Nick Clainos said, “I think you both need to get new attorneys for this negotiation to work. Not the same old attorneys fixed in their positions. We need some fresh ideas.”
So then we adjourn. I went right home and got a new attorney. I’d find out soon enough that Saul didn’t.
Bill Graham—what a guy. He had an AIDS benefit at around this time in Oakland, and he asked me to be part of it—that’s how I wound up playing with members of the Grateful Dead (in addition to Steve Jordan and Randy Jackson). We had just played a really wonderful set. I come offstage, I’m getting my guitar off, and Bill is looking at me with a strange expression on his face. He says, “You really paid a high price for your principles, didn’t you?” In that way that was Bill, he laid it on me in just one sentence. Bill didn’t have to say any more. It meant a lot to me to know that he understood.
These negotiations with Saul dragged on for a long time. While this was going on, my brother Tom passed away in 1990. This was sad and personal. Running into Al Bendich—Saul’s second in command—at the service for Tom didn’t make it any easier. I found it offensive that Al or any of the crooks from Fantasy would be there. This was a family matter. On top of that, by this time I had been calling Al Bendich at Fantasy for months in an attempt to further the negotiations that we were supposedly trying to resolve. Al would just “go missing” and be unreachable… over and over and over. If I called on a Tuesday, they would say, “Call back on Friday.” When I called on Friday, they would say, “Call back on Tuesday.” This happened dozens of times… too many times to have an accurate count. So now, at Tom’s home after the funeral service, “unreachable Al” was standing there in front of me.
I said, “Al, I’ve been trying to call you.”
He said, “I hardly think this is the time or place. I’m going to take the high road.” He actually used that phrase. I was ready to kill him.
What I didn’t know then was that Julie had bumped into Bendich outside. She told him what effect all of this was having on my life, and she got so upset that she actually got on her knees and begged Al to call me.
He swore to her that he would.
He never did. That’s Fantasy Records in a nutshell.*
In early June, Bill Graham calls: we’re having another meeting. I pull into Bill’s circular driveway, and before I go in, Nick comes out to my car and says, “John, at the last meeting Saul said they offered you ten percent and you rejected it.”
I said, “Yeah, Nick, but it’s baloney.” It hadn’t been 10 percent of the entire company.
“Well, John, we were all there and he told us. So now let’s tell him we accept!”
Sure enough, Saul arrived, we all sit down, and Nick goes right into the 10 percent offer that Saul had made. “We’d like you to know that John now accepts the offer.”
Saul blustered, gathered himself, and said something like, “Well, it’s too late now.” So no matter how many people Saul told that he offered me 10 percent of the company and that I turned it down—sorry, it’s a crock of shit.
Next we got to the slander suit. We agreed that I would come up with a check to satisfy Saul—and he would sell me my songs for a price that was going to be less than they could actually get out in the world. In deference to who I am.
In the months and years after that second meeting, I spoke with Bill a few times, but many more times with Nick. Bill was a busy guy. During this time Bill had several meetings and phone conversations with Saul, and Bill (or more often Nick) would give me a report by phone.
At some point after several phone calls with Nick on this subject, he was pushing me to write Saul a big check and accept his promises. So finally I said, “Nick, this guy’s a crook. You’re asking me to jump off this cliff into the darkness—‘ Jump, John!’—and you’re telling me there’s a safety net down there, but I don’t see the net. This guy’s a crook.”
And Nick said, “No, John, you just have to have faith in Saul’s word—he’s an honorable man, and he has promised to sell the songs to you.”
I kept saying over and over, “Nick, this is the guy that has screwed me for thirty years. He’s a crook. As far as I know, he’s never told me the truth once in his whole life. Why am I gonna give him a big check?”
“John, Saul’s a man of his word. You need to give him a check, and then he’s going to sell the publishing to you.”
Right.
So we divided the payment between three parties: myself, Warner Bros., and, if I remember correctly, my insurance company. Mo Ostin did not want to pay Saul. He told me he wanted to get that guy—“I don’t wanna settle. No matter what it costs, he should be made to pay.” But I felt that this was my only path to getting my songs back. So Saul got his money.
And despite his “word,” he never sold me my songs.*
At that point, once you’ve done what you’ve agreed you’d do, you start trying to negotiate the other half. But what are you supposed to do when both sides have agreed to play with marshmallows and suddenly the other side fires a cannonball through your windshield?
Years went by—lawyers sent letters back and forth that hemmed and hawed, with a “whereas” and a “what for”—and a price was finally put forward. With a publishing company, one common way to declare its value is by multiplying its yearly income by ten. The value that Fantasy declared was… twenty times its yearly income! Unlike what was promised, there was no allowance made in deference to me, the one who actually wrote these songs. I couldn’t afford the price. No one could have.
I even went down to Warner/Chappell publishing in Century City and had a talk with the head honcho there to see if there was some way I c
ould buy the whole thing, give it to them to manage, and maybe the fees they would earn would help me pay for it. Maybe they could loan me the money to actually purchase it in the first place, and I could pay them back as the songs earned royalties.
And he just told me it was not sustainable.
Not sustainable.
I really had thought that somehow there was a way we could make it work.
But Saul had put such a high number on the price he wanted that Warner/Chappell just couldn’t do it.
That was one of the more crushing days of my life. I drove back home to see Julie. After all this time and effort, this was really like the end of the world to me.
During this period of time, Bill Graham had gone from being the man in the middle to being my advocate because Saul had reneged on his side of the deal. At one point I’m talking to Bill on the phone and he says, “John, I can’t believe your attorney let you give a big check to Saul.” Jeez. It was Bill’s guy, Nick Clainos, who’d convinced me to do that, right? That’s how crazy this thing was. Of course, I didn’t have the bad taste to tell Bill that.
Bill was so disgusted after one meeting with Saul that he related what he had told my nemesis: “Saul, one day I’m going to be traveling across the Sahara Desert with my camel train, and I’ll come upon you. And you’ll be buried up to your neck in the burning hot sand. You’ll say to me, ‘Bill—please, Bill, just give me some water.’ I’ll ask, ‘How much money do you have, Saul?’ You’ll say, ‘Eight dollars.’ And I’ll say, ‘Okay, Saul. The price is nine dollars.’”
Unfortunately, Bill died before he could take his camels across the Sahara. I would’ve loved to have witnessed that.
The negotiations to buy back my songs dragged on for years. It was excruciating. One day, in 1994 or so, I’m jogging in the Valley on a Saturday afternoon. There was this radio shrink named Dr. David Viscott that I used to listen to while I ran. He’s talking to this woman and she’s been living with some guy for nine years. She’s got kind of a mournful, whining sound to her voice. David says, “What’s the issue?”
“Well, I want him to commit. I want to get married! He just won’t commit.”
“Has he told you he won’t get married?”
“Yes, he says he won’t marry me. I want him to marry me.”
“How long have you been together?”
“For nine years.”
He’s been telling her he’s not going to marry her for nine years.
I’m jogging along, and I’m hearing this. Even for me it’s beginning to sink in.
I’m really starting to pay attention here.
David keeps saying, “Well, he’s told you he’s not going to marry you. Isn’t that right?”
“But I want him to marry me.”
By now everyone in the listening audience can hear how pathetic this poor woman’s position is. She wants what she wants so desperately. And she is so invested that she just can’t see it isn’t going to happen.
And all of a sudden I just go, “Oh!” There was an epiphany. A revelation. I’m running along and I’m laughing. I laughed so hard I couldn’t run anymore. I fell down on the grass, laughing.
It was all clear as a bell.
“It ain’t gonna happen, John! Saul ain’t gonna sell you the songs. Ever. It was all just words. It’s never going to happen, and if you don’t hear it, you’re gonna be like that poor woman.”
After that, I realized that Saul was just evil, pure evil. But at least finally it wasn’t like a sore you keep making worse because you pick at it all the time. It was time to say, “Leave it alone! Stop it!” Because nothing was going to change. It’s not right, but that’s what I have to live with. Saul Zaentz was a schmuck. Lying there laughing on the ground was me not being a schmuck anymore. Or dancing with a schmuck. Perhaps that was the beginning of my healing.
Eventually you get stronger. I could not have accomplished this without Julie. And I could not have lived through all of it without her. There’s been a lot of great moments since I met Julie. Things like that were impossible before I met her. In the morning when I wake up, now it’s, “Wow, life is good.” I don’t go, “Ah shit, I gotta pay another lawyer.”
But I also know that the day I gave up on Saul was the day I moved forward.
I guess Saul passed last year, same day as Phil Everly. I always used to say that I’d dance a jig on Saul’s grave, and throw my half-gold record from “Susie Q” down the hole in the ground with him.* Instead, when the day came, it really didn’t affect me. I thought Phil’s passing was much more important.
CHAPTER 17
Crossroads
SOMETIME IN 1990, I was standing at the grave of one of the greatest bluesmen of all time: Robert Johnson. And I was talking to him. Either out loud or in my head, I can’t remember. I was back behind an old Mississippi church. It was a hot, humid day, and this was a turning point in my life.
There had come a time, starting in 1972, when I made a conscious decision not to sing Creedence songs anymore, meaning the music I had created during the Creedence era. The inspiration for this extreme action came from a conversation I had had with Saul shortly before I walked out of Fantasy for good. We were discussing some other artist who was having a squabble with his label—it might’ve even been Elvis. Whatever beef the musician had, it didn’t matter to Saul. His position was that, no matter how bad the situation, an artist would create. “It’s in you,” he said to me. “You would have to keep doing it anyway.” Saul thought an artist would put up with any indignity to record, have a career. “Keep doing it anyway.” His words stuck with me.
Once I realized just how bad I’d been screwed by Saul and Fantasy, I had to take a stand and be a man. Do something. And one thing I decided to do was not sing those songs anymore. The situation tortured me. If “Proud Mary” came on the radio, I’d change the channel. Creating that song was one of the greatest moments of my life, but hearing it was no longer a happy occasion. I could picture myself in some dive in Vegas, sloshing my way through my oldies, bitter over having been screwed and numbing myself with booze. So, to save the rest of me, I decided to cut off my legs—stop singing my own songs. To some extent, it worked. Living was better than dying.
For about fifteen years I kept that vow.* But on February 19, 1987, a funny thing happened. Taj Mahal was playing at the Palomino Club in North Hollywood. I think he’s an American treasure, so I went. I was sitting there a little while when I noticed someone kind of hiding in a corner—it was Bob Dylan. He’d come down to see Taj too. And he told me he’d brought George Harrison with him.
Taj got wind of this and had Bob come up and play. Then George. Usually I’m kind of shy at such events. Instead, I was chomping at the bit to join them. Taj called me up, they found a guitar, and we played a couple of songs. I could see pretty quickly that most everybody had been, let’s say, imbibing. It was a little wobbly. And a whole lot of fun.
Somebody yelled out, “Bob, do one of your songs!” So Bob did. Then somebody pointed to George. As if turning a switch, George broke into a strong version of “Honey, Don’t!” I could feel the noose getting tighter. We did “Twist and Shout,” and for three minutes I sang “Ooooh” directly across a mic from George Harrison, like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. That was an amazing feeling. Bob said, “All right, John, we’ve all done a song. Do ‘Proud Mary.’”
“Sorry, Bob,” I told him. “I’m not doing my old songs. I don’t do them anymore.” I was being kind of difficult, and I knew it. And instead of arguing about it, Bob Dylan, in his genius and ever so influential way, said, “If you don’t do ‘Proud Mary,’ everybody’s gonna think it’s a Tina Turner song.”
There was no way out now. I thought, Bob Dylan just told me I’d better play my song or it’s gonna turn into a Tina Turner song. It was something only a musician could do—get out from under all the crap and find a way. So I played “Proud Mary.” And enjoyed it. Immensely. “Eat your heart out, Tina,” I told the crowd. This event
didn’t change my mind about doing Creedence songs, but I had certainly done one of them in public now.
A few months later, on July 4, 1987, I was in Washington, DC, playing the Welcome Home show for Vietnam veterans. Producer Ken Ehrlich had called and told me about the concert, which was being televised on HBO. This show was about publicly honoring our veterans. The government didn’t do it, and culturally we didn’t do it. It was like, “Hey—wake up! We should honor our veterans!” I was proud to be invited. Ken didn’t really ask what I’d play, but I informed him, “Well, Ken, I don’t play my old catalog.” He said, “That’s all right. I just want you to be part of it.”
When Ken asked me to do that show, I fully intended to just do new material. But I began to feel that I owed the vets more. Whatever I did, I wanted to be deferential to them, in the hope that they’d understand that I personally recognized what they’d done for us. The most special thing I could think of was to do my old songs from the Creedence era. Just for the vets. For that one day, I’d get over my own embargo.
I’d been playing with a Los Angeles band called the Boneshakers, and one night at a local club we took my idea for a road test. I’d had a recent hit with “The Old Man Down the Road,” so I started playing the riff, and then slipped into “Born on the Bayou.” I hadn’t even started singing, but every person in the room reacted. The crowd went wild. It’s amazing what a few seconds of a riff can do. Donny Gerrard, one of the background singers, said after the song ended, “Is that gonna work or what?”
We went to Washington, DC. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing—other than my band, and they were sworn to secrecy. I gave a vague instruction to Ken, the producer: “If something happens, be alert.”
We did the intro to “Old Man,” but soon lurched to a stop, faking the audience out. I held that chord, and then started into the swampy menace of “Born on the Bayou.” The roof came off the place. It just erupted. I’m not even sure what happened for the next forty-five minutes—I just know it was a good thing.
