Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  Interestingly enough, after I took the test I found John in the kitchen reading some article in the newspaper about Paul Anka and his song “(You’re) Having My Baby.” True story. John starts talking about how he hates that song* and starts singing it at the top of his lungs. I couldn’t believe it. How was I not going to tell him this news at this exact moment? I just sat down and handed him the pregnancy test. He didn’t know what it was. I said, “I’m pregnant and we are going to have a baby. I can’t believe you were just singing that song.” This was certainly a gift that neither one of us knew was coming. It was a blessing.

  At around this time, John and I had dinner with our friends Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa. Bruce talked to John and told him that he had so much going for him now—a wonderful relationship and a baby on the way. That he should focus on all of this and try to live within that. Bruce mentioned to John that when he and Patti were going to have their first baby, he went to all of Patti’s doctor’s appointments and said how he’d loved every minute of it. That went right into John’s soul, and he, too, didn’t miss a one. We have three kids and he’s been at every appointment.

  John: I was really, really worried at first, because at that point I was going to be forty-six years old—“Oh God, am I gonna be able to roll around on the floor with my kid? Am I gonna be a good daddy, or am I gonna be like some professor who comes in the room, sees the kids, and then leaves?” I needn’t have worried. The instant that Shane was born, it was like all the switches in my head just went click! There was no hesitation. I was in it.

  We learned that we were pregnant early in 1991. Shane was born on October 15 that year. Then pretty quickly we were pregnant again, and Tyler was born on October 26, 1992. The boys were fifty-three weeks apart! Lyndsay had started first grade in September 1989, and it just seemed like Julie was always pregnant. So many of our family pictures from those days show a mommy-to-be. I absolutely loved that time in our family. Julie became even more beautiful to me. With joy in my heart, I took to saying, “She is that most beautiful of all creatures… a pregnant woman.”

  That might surprise most people about me: I love babies—absolutely love babies. If we could have seven more, I would do it. Julie wouldn’t! I just go all goofy. I really enjoyed that part of our experience with each baby that came: Shane, Tyler, Kelsy. I got every single second out of it that I could. Seeing the world through their eyes—it just keeps you in that place. There’s still wonderment in everything.

  When Tyler was an infant, he would wake up in the middle of the night. I was trying to help Julie as much as I could. I’d get the bottle ready and we had this cool little papoose thing he’d lie in. He’d have his little bottle, and I’d sit with my Dobro and practice. I figured I had to get up early if I wanted to get good. Before that, I stayed up partying and got up late. The babies changed that.

  Julie: The doctors let John help deliver Shane at the hospital. And as soon as Shane was born, that boy never left John’s arms. Shane would fall asleep on John at night. It was such a beautiful thing because I knew that somehow that love was something John really needed and wanted.

  And now when John performs his show, that little boy Shane is by his side. How great is that? No one can ever take or steal that away from John. Shane might never know what that means to his father or his mother, but I can tell you that this is a wonderful, beautiful gift we have been given. It’s a big, big deal. We pinch ourselves every night knowing how lucky we are to have Shane up there with his father, playing his heart out while John and I just melt with pride, joy, and pure happiness.

  So John was getting better and better, but he was not quite well yet. He was still struggling with his music. There were times when he would disappear into his music room. I could hear him yelling through the soundproof walls. I knew he just wanted to make music, this music man who’d had his soul ripped out of him. He was fighting big-time to get it back.

  He felt so frustrated when he would try to write a song—he still didn’t have that back. John was really struggling to make music. I knew that if he could just get through making Blue Moon Swamp it could make all the difference for him.

  Unfortunately, the drinking had continued, and although it was not as often or as much as before, it tied in with moments of despair when John was trying to work everything out. I just didn’t know if I could go on watching him drink himself to death.

  I was pretty torn up after going through years of this. I had a gallbladder attack while I was pregnant with Tyler and wound up in the hospital. And I ended up getting myself home. Because when I was released from the hospital, John didn’t even pick me up. I had to take a taxi home. He just couldn’t handle it. That was sad for sure, but it was real. This is something he feels very bad about today, but it shows he really wasn’t functioning normally then.

  John wasn’t well enough inside to handle anything else. He took sleeping pills at night, and I knew he wasn’t going to answer the phone. It seems really sad now, looking back, but it was the truth, and I was deeply troubled by all of this. At times I felt really alone. Half of John was there but the other half wasn’t, and I knew it.

  One day I poured out several bottles of alcohol on the floor of the garage and told him that he had to stop. John was on a mission to destroy himself. At that time, the lowest of low, when I had really had it with all this chaos, he said to me, “Once you become perfect, then I will.” That statement was very hard to hear. When someone says that to you, the message is, “I am not going to get help and I am lost.” That stung pretty hard. I hung on, but by a thread. There was part of me already gone. I had joined group therapy for support, and everyone in the room would look at me and wonder why I was still in the relationship. In many ways I wasn’t. I just couldn’t figure out what to do.

  There was a moment when I really thought I couldn’t emotionally handle all of this. I ended up in some lawyer’s office, and that was a low time for sure. That Blue Moon Swamp period was hell. It took ten years to make that record, not just the five in the studio—it was over 3,650 days before we saw another song from John. What made me hang in there was that, number one, John is just a wonderful, beautiful man. I saw the pain he was suffering, and it just broke my heart. But John always let me know how much he loved me and cared for me in his own way. As he put it, I was the joy of his life. How could I leave John? I just couldn’t do it.

  I saw the innocence in John: Imagine a little boy with a bicycle. This boy loves to ride his bike everywhere, and it brings him so much joy he rides it every single day. Then one day he suffers a horrible fall and he stays away from that bike for years. He won’t even go in that garage where the bike is, nor does he feel he wants to ever get back on that bike. It had hurt him so badly. He’s scared of what might happen to him if he climbs on that seat. Until one day he gets up enough courage and self-determination to get back on that bike, trusting that he can do it again and that bad things won’t happen.

  John now knows that someone is holding the seat and running alongside him. That I’m cheering him on while he rides down the road. He understands that I’m always there for him. That I have his back. John never had that before in his life.

  This beautiful man just wanted to play a guitar and write songs and live a happily-ever-after life. I really, really felt that John would be okay if he could just make this record. I may have seemed naive, but I was committed to seeing him through this, no matter what. John was going to make that record. I came so close to leaving, but I just couldn’t walk away—I needed to see him through it. I cared for him so deeply. Not knowing how it would end up, I believed in John and wanted to be there to do anything I could to get him well enough to finish that record.

  I know that John wonders how I got through it all. It was personally very traumatic and crazy, for sure. Looking back, it was as if I was guided to do this. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was just meant to be.

  John: I wasn’t fully a grown-up then. I was keeping some of my ol
d habits—I’d still go down a hole, get drunk, be rather quiet, say something I shouldn’t. So it was remarkable that Julie had as much patience with me as she did. Julie had a lifesaving grip on my hand and was pulling me out of that hole one step at a time. And it was… hard. It was hard on Julie because I was such a pain in the ass to be around.

  Julie: John worked on that record year after year. No days off. No lunches.

  As someone on the sidelines, I found it really hard to understand how it could go on for five years. Or how you can be in the studio for all that time.

  John isn’t difficult, but rather critical. He knows what it should be. John won’t sign his name under the picture until it’s just right.

  At the time, I wasn’t involved in really helping John with music because I didn’t know how. Had I been involved, I could’ve said, “Drummer’s no good. Next!” John kept hoping. He doesn’t like to be that guy.

  There were a lot of tears over Blue Moon Swamp, a lot of strain on our relationship. Hard times for sure. John wouldn’t leave the house all day or night. I’d leave to get away… to stay sane. I wasn’t sure of anything. If the kids and I were around, it would mean that he was distracted. I’d leave him Marie Callender’s TV dinners so he’d at least have something to eat. I’d send my friend Betty Clearmountain to check on him, but he wouldn’t answer the door or the phone, except to talk to me a few times daily. It took everything that John had—and more—to get Blue Moon Swamp made. He was so hell-bent and focused.

  But we’d still go to dinner every Thursday night and have our date night.

  John: I said to Julie, “This album’s only gonna come out one way—and that’s great. It’s not gonna be lame.” So I would tell her again and again—I would tell myself—“This is only going to end one way.” But there was just one obstacle after another, and it dragged on and on.

  Julie: On January 17, 1994, two days before John was supposed to be in New York City to induct Duane Eddy into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame*, the Northridge quake hit California in the wee hours of the morning. We were home. John is the calm one; I’m not. I was running down the halls with two babies in my arms, yelling, “It’s the big quake! It’s the big quake!” We fled our shaking home, wall and glass crumbling all around us. Just hours before, I had moved Tyler’s crib away from a huge TV in case of an earthquake, as I did every night, and it had landed right where his crib had been. Our house was demolished and we had to rebuild from scratch. John was so focused on Blue Moon Swamp that you couldn’t ask him to do anything, like turn on a light switch or get you a cough drop. Any distraction was too much. I was so exhausted by it all that I escaped with the kids to Indiana.

  After the quake, the house started to flood, and John stayed there, surrounded by buckets catching the water. At the time, we barely had any money because of the court cases and Fantasy withholding royalty payments. But we were grateful to be alive. Ninety-five percent of the house was destroyed, right down to the framing. And then my grandfather passed away.

  John: In the middle of all this, Julie threw a fantastic surprise party for my fiftieth birthday. She’d even prepared a movie about me, with the kids talking about Daddy.* We played music and really had a ball. I drank out of a moonshine jar. Bruce Springsteen got up and sang a few songs. And Julie was on tambourine in an unforgettable white dress.

  Blue Moon Swamp wasn’t going well. I was going to work every day and didn’t even have one good track yet. Have I ever met a deadline in my life? I hate ’em. But I’m good with getting Kelsy to school on time.

  If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s don’t let a deadline force you to put out something inferior. By 1995, I’d been in the studio for four years. I’d spent a lot of money, because I’d been there every day. There was a point when Julie really wanted me to get done. A long time ago I took to saying, “I married a real woman. I didn’t marry a doormat.” Sometimes it felt like I was in the principal’s office.

  The music wasn’t living up to what I wanted until Kenny Aronoff came along. I think he was the last drummer I auditioned. Once Kenny arrived, I didn’t have to make any more phone calls. I think the very first song we did was “Rambunctious Boy.” I thought, Wow, he gets this. I’m gonna have him come back. Kenny did everything I threw at him.

  I consider him the best in the world. If you’ve got a great drummer, you’ve got more than 50 percent of it right there. It’s like the frame of a house. Kenny keeps really good time—at times it’s perfect time. But his style, his feel—he’s a little bit ahead, yet the hi-hat is right on the money. That feel is what I love. It’s got kind of a lean to it, and that’s what rock and roll is.

  Kenny’s also got a photographic memory. I’ll go, “Hey, try doin’ this.” We’ll go listen, it’ll work, and then after that he’ll always do it every time we get to that point in the song. Even though that sounds a bit like science, it never comes off that way. As far as technique, just handling the drums, Kenny is an amazing and wonderful drummer—but he’s also an emotional drummer, meaning he understands the music. I’ve played with him longer than I’ve played with any other musician.

  Blue Moon Swamp all came together in the last year and a half. Usually when people work on something for a long, long time, it kind of sounds that way. This was the opposite: in the beginning of the five years in the studio, it sounded labored, and in that last year and a half, it sounded free and lively. I think the closer the horses got to the barn, the more they could smell the oats—“Man, here we go! C’mon!”

  Now when I hear it, Blue Moon Swamp is one of my favorite albums. “A Hundred and Ten in the Shade” took a long time to write. I had the title since the seventies. I made a couple of different attempts but never quite got it. It finally came together on one of my writing trips out to Newhall, California. I’d take this beat-up route they called “the old road,” which took you to the first commercially successful oil well in the state. I’d sit out there all day and never see a soul. Now it’s all built up, developed. The place I went to doesn’t exist anymore. I remember working on “Rambunctious Boy” and “Southern Streamline” out there as well.

  The great Eddie Bayers played the drums on “A Hundred and Ten in the Shade.” He understood the feel of that one really well. But we didn’t have one complete take where everything was perfect, so I spliced that all together. Once you finally have a good song, you want the production to live up to what the song is. I wanted stand-up bass on the song. It’s bluesy, very Southern, but I wanted somebody who understands musicals—Show Boat and Porgy and Bess. Quincy Jones recommended John Clayton. That was so right. He brought his gut-string bass and played wonderfully!

  Then I wanted to find background singers—gospel guys. I kept saying, “I’m looking for a sound that’s as old as the dirt.” Jerry Douglas suggested the Fairfield Four. There’s actually five of them. A true gospel group, they have a real bass singer—the whole thing. The guy I took to calling Little Joe was a big guy with a big, high voice. Incredible.

  These guys don’t use headphones. We just put live speakers in the room, and what that meant was that my guitar parts—which I had chopped up from different versions to make this one master take—bled into the vocal mics. So later, when I decided to get the guitar part really clear and strong, there was no way to get rid of the original guitar on the recording—I had to play it again and exactly match what was there. That track was a privilege to be a part of.

  With “Blue Moon Nights” I was thinking about Sun Records. When I’d explain the song, I’d say, “Imagine if some kid walked in off the street to see Sam Phillips, and he’s got a sackful of songs, and one of them would go like this.” There’s such an affection coming from me about that music, and I just really wanted to get all that in the track—and it wasn’t by playing it eight million times. It’s more about thinking about it a lot ahead of time. To get yourself into that emotional and mental place. I love doing that.

  “Southern Streamline” started with the m
elody. I love train songs, probably because of my dad. I’d hear this melody and this urgency—“Mama, I’m on fire!” I wanted to get better at guitar, specifically Telecaster—country Telecaster. So this was a way to get some of that on this record. I played my custom Telecaster, which at one point belonged to the Eagles. (They had a hollowed-out place behind the pickguard that they used when they needed to hide something. I’m sure that was a long time ago.)

  I used an old Vox AC30 amplifier with that guitar. You can fry eggs on top of them, they get so hot. When I was a Golliwog, this guy let me use his Vox and I blew it up. I wasn’t very impressed. But as I got better on the Telecaster doing the chicken-picking, string-bending thing, I began to adopt the Telecaster-AC30 combination as a really cool sound. (Turns out Brad Paisley’s in love with Vox AC30s too.) That sound is all over the record—“Rambunctious Boy,” “Southern Streamline.” I wanted it to be really smokin’ guitar. I’d play it until I had a solo worked out, and then stick to that and do it ten or twenty times because I wasn’t really good enough yet to just whip it off. That’s how my earlier records were made: I’d hook onto a part and practice it over and over, and with scrupulous editing it could come out pretty good.

  We did a lot of experimenting. Like for the lead guitar on “Rattlesnake Highway” and the Telecaster on “Southern Streamline,” we used the room the old-fashioned way, placing different room mics, hearing what that sounded like: “Here’s the Vox AC30 with a mic in front of it. How about if we do it on hardwood? Carpet?” We were trying all kinds of stuff to get as exquisite a sound as possible. “Bad Bad Boy”—that’s where I discovered the Gibson Goldtop. I use that all the time now. It’s just got the coolest tone. The only song on Blue Moon Swamp that I don’t like much is “Walking in a Hurricane.” I worked on that for years and years. To my mind, it didn’t really come off completely.