Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  Stu said, “Well, we did kinda leave you twisting in the wind.”

  They knew this, but during the ceremony they still pretended to be shocked. As if they were pure as the driven snow.

  Anyone who has ever been in a band knows how disgusting it is that these guys sold their voting rights to an outsider. They have shamed themselves forever. Nothing will ever change that.

  If the fans were disappointed with what happened at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, I regret that. I’m very sorry about that. To the fans, all I can say is, things in the real world change. Particularly if things that are unpleasant happen between the members of a band, you’ve got to understand that they may not be happy to see each other again. But if you asked me a hundred more times, when the conditions were like this, I would do the same thing. I didn’t—and don’t—respect these people for what they have done.

  The year before Creedence got in, the Yardbirds got inducted. I was there. That was funny. Jeff Beck is the world’s greatest rock and roll guitar player, and of course he was in the Yardbirds. When it was his turn for his acceptance speech, he said, “They kicked me out [of the band].… Fuck them!” And that was that, ha ha. My mouth dropped open. And then my brain caught up with his words. That was absolutely right. What other emotion could he have? He stuck up for himself.

  I had tried to reconcile with Tom long before he died. I’d think about Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, how they had a feud for years and didn’t speak, but they reunited, and their mother was so happy.

  I wanted to do that with Tom for our mother. I mean, “How hard can this be?” That picture of the Dorseys was in my head: The two brothers reconcile and their mother is so happy. So I started a dialogue. I think I wrote him a letter—“It would be a shame not to do this for our mom.” We talked on the phone at least once.

  I said, “Tom, I think we should each write down all our issues, the things we think we’re mad about. Write it all down, get it out in the open, and we’ll talk about ’em.”

  I’m trying to do this the right way. Face it. Deal with reality.

  So I write a letter. The very first thing I say is, “Number one, Tom, you sued me”—referring to the lawsuit that he and Doug and Stu initiated against me over the songwriting royalties in the Canadian bank during the Castle Bank era. “Two, you sided with Saul.” And so forth. There were probably about eight points on my list.

  I get a letter back and he says, “No! I didn’t sue you.” Tom’s reasoning for why I couldn’t say that he sued me was the fact that on the morning of the Castle Bank trial, he walked up to my attorney and said, “I’m not suing John anymore.” That was in 1983. But I’d already had to deal with the lawsuit since 1978! That meant going to depositions, meeting with and paying my attorney to prepare a defense, and dealing with all the anxiety that goes with the legal system. Many thousands of dollars later, Tom decided to drop the lawsuit. In his mind that meant he didn’t sue me.

  So I sent him the cover page of the lawsuit filing, which said “Tom Fogerty vs. John Fogerty.” I don’t think we got any further than that. Unfortunately, our mom passed away.

  I’d still get crazy letters. When Saul sued me over “Zanz Kant Danz,” Tom wrote to me, taking Saul’s side and ranting about how the “Kant” in the song’s title stood for Burt Kanter, one of the Castle Bank heavies. He ended the letter, “Saul and I will win.”

  In the late eighties, Doug was proposing that Creedence re-form even though Tom was very sick. (The world didn’t know that he had AIDS then, and I sure wasn’t at liberty to be talking about it. It was family business. Until his son, Jeff, started talking about it openly after Tom passed, I wasn’t going to break that trust.) All I could think was, Oh, great—Doug and Stu want to drag Tom around the world in a wheelchair.

  I thought they really wanted to do this for themselves. It was bizarre and disgusting to me. Immediately you get cynical—“Okay, c’mon: what’s the angle here?” Maybe I’m just sticking up for my brother. I wouldn’t think he’d want to be carted around in a wheelchair for some concert.

  I went to see Tom a couple of times in 1990, shortly before he died. He was very thin and fragile-looking. Always wearing sunglasses, even indoors. And still kind of detached, in that way he had been, going all the way back to 1969 or 1970. After I won the plagiarism trial, I ran into Tom. He said, “Congrats on the trial.” Like it was a science project. He had become so aloof, maddeningly detached.

  Even the very last time I saw Tom, he told me, “Saul’s my best friend. I can count on him.”* He came out with that out of the blue. Tom forced you to suspend reality. His reasoning wasn’t based on the laws of the universe, like gravity and how light travels. You had to abandon logic to have a conversation with him. We just made small talk, like two old-timers at the country store watching the log burn: “Yep, it’s gonna be a tough winter, don’t you think? The leaves need to be raked…”

  I’m not good at BS. I see no point. Time is precious to me. But what could I say? He was fragile, dying. So I was the good soldier, the dutiful brother.

  Tom passed away on September 6, 1990. I was sad that life had been taken from Tom. And that sadness was mixed up with all the other emotions. I was pissed that Saul had mangled our relationship, because he certainly messed it up. Tom was an unwitting pawn. But all that sure doesn’t mean anything wherever Tom is now. I used to say, “I can’t wait. I’ll meet him again. I’ll yell at him. We’ll have a showdown in space.”

  But I’ve forgiven Tom.* I’m not angry anymore. Tom may have been motivated to get money for his family because he was dying. I can see how that would hinder a person’s judgment. I don’t carry that around, and I think that’s important to say. I love my brother. I sure loved the old family days, the way we were as kids. I don’t have to chew on a bunch of perceived infractions from the dim past that don’t affect anything anymore. It’s resolved, and somehow Tom knows it’s all right, wherever he is.

  In 1995, Stu and Doug formed an outfit called Creedence Clearwater Revisited to go out and play my songs on the oldies circuit. You can probably guess how I felt about this. Just imagine: you’re driving down the road one day, and you see a sign next to the Walmart—“Tonight! One night only: the Beatles!” Yeah, right. You know something is wack. Then you drive a little further down the road and you see a Kmart, and the sign says, “Tonight: Creedence!” Sadly, that could actually be true.

  I never thought we’d be a K-tel compilation band. Acting like one-hit wonders, so desperate in their old age that they’ve got to get together and fool the public into thinking this thing is somehow the remnants of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Which it’s not. Man, I never intended to be in a band that turned into that.

  As I’ve explained, we even talked about it specifically. We had agreed long ago that any version of our group that called itself Creedence Clearwater Revival would have to include all of us, or else it just couldn’t be.

  How did this happen? It turns out that Stu and Doug had pounced on Trisha, Tom’s widow, a couple of years after he died and gotten her to sign over her well-wishes—not her vote, because Tom had already sold that. I’m going, “Well, wait a minute. They sold all their votes to Saul, so shouldn’t it be up to him?” I can’t tell you how disgusted I am with Doug and Stu. You’ve got to be a pretty slimy, sneaky person to do that. And I’m pretty disappointed in her for signing it away.

  Why and how was that ever allowed? People say, “John, you oughta sue them!” At first I took it to court. To my way of thinking, these guys were trying to rip off the public and confuse them. I won, and then it went to a higher court and they reversed the decision. I thought it was wacky. I daresay judges who actually understand what rock and roll bands are about are few and far between. Stu and Doug had a letter from Trisha giving Tom’s vote to them; it gave them a majority, and in business a majority vote wins. But we’re not IBM; we’re four guys who made a vow, a pact. Try explaining that to a judge. And then there was that feeling of, “T
here’s John again. This guy does nothing but file lawsuits.”

  Finally, around 2000, I thought, Why is it my job to make sure there is truth in advertising, and purity in rock and roll? Why am I the guy who’s got to go spend the rest of my life battling this crap so that this stupid charade that calls itself Creedence Clearwater Revisited won’t be allowed to foist its phoniness on an unsuspecting public? This can’t be my job anymore. Instead, I worked out a way to charge them a royalty, but these two guys are so devious that they’ve refused to pay that—and it was a very tiny amount, let me tell you.

  And right now they are suing me because I’ve advertised the fact that I’m doing Creedence songs when I present an album like Green River in concert. The distinction? I don’t pretend that I’m Creedence: I say I’m going to play some Creedence music (all of which was written by me). I wouldn’t bat an eye if Stu and Doug decided to tour as “Stu and Doug.”

  I hope it’ll all get sorted out at some point. I just hope that people don’t go to see them expecting something good. There is an old truth in the world, I don’t know who said it first, Plato or Socrates: When you have no taste, you can do anything.

  Reporters always ask me if Creedence will ever reunite. A few years ago, someone asked again, and I was surprised that I didn’t have my usual reaction, which is not until hell freezes over. But I’m not angry anymore. So my answer was this: while it isn’t something I’m actively trying to make happen, maybe there’s some situation where it could happen. I don’t know.

  This of course got back to Stu and Doug, and their reaction was something to the effect of, “We would never have a reunion, it’s too late, and besides, we have Creedence Clearwater Revisited and we’re doing so well. Why would we want John in our band?” Oy.

  I guess they’re still angry. In early December of 2014, just as I was finishing this book, I learned that I was being sued by Stu and Doug over trademark issues. This came right after I’d done a tour of Canada focused on all the songs I wrote for Creedence in 1969. Unlike those guys, though, I didn’t claim to be some version of Creedence; I was just doing the songs I’d created.

  Y’know how it is when people act overly paranoid, and you realize they don’t have much?

  I could get into all the details, but you’ve read enough about this stuff already. I won’t inflict it upon you again. The important thing to understand is that this time, it didn’t really get to me. In the past, the people around me didn’t want to deal with this stuff. I had to fight it by myself. Now I have so much support from Julie. She just rolled up her sleeves and got into it. This time I wasn’t alone.

  CHAPTER 20

  Revival

  WE LIVED IN Nashville for about a year, from the summer of 1999 to the summer of 2000. Ricky Skaggs was doing a tribute to Bill Monroe, and he asked me to join him on “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” What a great experience! We recorded at Ricky’s studio with his band and the legendary steel player Kayton Roberts! As if that wasn’t enough, I also got a guitar lesson from Ricky. Later, I had a private lesson with his incredible guitar player, Clay Hess.

  On another day that could only happen in Nashville, I was going into a Starbucks on Franklin Road, and who do I meet but Randy Scruggs coming out the same door? Turns out he’s doing a tribute to his dad, Earl Scruggs, and asks if I would like to join in. “Sure,” I say, “but you gotta give me a guitar lesson.” We arranged for the lesson to be on a different day than the recording session, and that was some great instruction. The session itself was wonderful. Earl and Randy were there, along with Jerry Douglas on Dobro, Chad Cromwell on drums, Glenn Worf on upright bass, and Glen Duncan on fiddle.

  During a break in the session, I had tried to impress upon Julie that even though Earl was now in his eighties there was a time when his playing “would rip your head off.” After the session Randy invited Julie and me to come over to Earl’s house for a little visit. Of course, Earl is the inventor of “Scruggs style” banjo picking—a revolutionary leap in the world of acoustic music. So at some point I asked him to tell me about the beginning of it. He said he had discovered the technique as a boy and was practicing to get it perfected when he was twelve years old. He was chomping at the bit to show his older brother, who was married and lived about a mile away. It was his brother’s custom to walk over to Earl’s house on Saturdays. So one Saturday when he was ready, Earl was outside with his banjo waiting for his brother to come walking down the road. (As a musician I’m relishing the idea that his brother is going to be the first person in history to hear this mind-boggling technique.) I said, “Well, Earl, did you show off?” And he says, “I hit him with both barrels!”

  One day in early 2000 I had an electrifying thought. I realized that I was living in the midst of some of the greatest guitar players on earth. I was dying to figure out a way that I could somehow get a peek into this very high level of musicianship. I called my friend Joe Glaser. Joe is a world-class luthier and all-around guitar doctor. He had worked on some of my guitars, but more important he was a guru to all the guitar heavyweights in town. I talked to Joe about wanting to get really good, especially on Telecaster-style guitar. What happened next was pretty darn cool.… Joe arranged for me to get lessons with some incredible guitar players, and the experience was amazing! I want to thank these guys who were so generous with their time and their knowledge:

  Bill Hullett, Ray Flacke, Jimmy Olander, Tom Hemby.

  Thank you, fellas. It is still much appreciated.

  It was years before I could play the things they showed me…

  Julie: John is a very simple man. He isn’t about fanfare or celebrity. Sometimes he can be a bit quiet. Some might think he’s withdrawn. Not really, though. He would be happy to play music on his porch with his family beside him, and never step outside of that world.

  John doesn’t use a cell phone much. It took him forever to learn how to read a text. He doesn’t answer a door, or a phone. Although this can be annoying at times, I like that guy. It’s pure, wholesome, and just plain simple. He is truly happy that way. Sometimes we all chuckle at Dad, but we get it.

  I wasn’t really involved in John’s career. I was the mom. Then slowly I ended up taking more responsibility because I could see that he needed help. It just evolved into the big job. Now I’m trying to get out of it! I’m not his manager. I’m just helping my husband and making sure everything is okay. I enjoy making fun opportunities for John. He can manage himself. But he does need someone to prod him along a little bit.

  John: Among other things, there were financial shenanigans going on with lawyers, and Julie got to the bottom of it. I began to respect Julie’s counsel so much that she became my manager. She doesn’t like me to say that. Very late in life I had finally tried to have a manager, and it didn’t work out. I’d be talking to Julie—“Go call up X and get him to do such and such”—and then one day I just looked at her and said, “Let’s cut out the middleman.” But what I really meant to say was: Let’s keep the middleman (Julie) and fire X (the manager).

  Having Julie in my corner has affected my life in so many ways. I’ve really been working hard on getting better as a guitar player for close to twenty years now. It was something I’d always wanted, but I’d stopped going after it long ago. I didn’t have the confidence, the self-assurance. You don’t make long-term plans when you’re not quite certain if you’re going to be around very long.

  Committing to something like that is huge. Julie and I—we make plans. I like living life that way. I know that “Yes, I can work on it today, and I can work on it a year from now.” It’s not going to get pulled away from me. My life isn’t suddenly going to be in a suitcase on its way to Singapore—or Sing Sing. I’m a routine kind of guy. Julie says things like, “John eats the same granola every day for seven years, and then he changes to oatmeal.” I like routine. That doesn’t mean I get routine! I’m chasing her all the time, running around and trying to figure her out. It is far from boring.

  We have alway
s had an incredible relationship. So what is the secret to that? A wise man said it this way, and I really agree: equal parts lust and respect. We have a very happy and healthy love life. The way I would put it is: “I envy no man.”

  Julie: I drive him crazy. John moves like a turtle sometimes. I’ve gotten him to do so much more than he would ever do on his own. I’m the one who can nudge him off the porch to hit the road, attend some dreaded awards show, make an album, or even write a book. He needs to be out there. I’m working on him all the time. Sometimes I have to use “You are doin’ it!” in a loving way. John is not one to “just wing it.” It’s just not him. He’s very particular and knows exactly what he wants. We are pretty connected and I know what he needs. We won’t do anything we aren’t 100 percent committed to.

  What do I do? Well, everything. I mean everything. The set list, John’s wardrobe, hiring personnel, booking the tour, working out offers, coordinating John’s schedule, doing artwork, doing ad mats, coming up with album titles like Revival or The Long Road Home for the greatest hits compilation–live DVD. Those titles are all personal. The truth? I even iron John’s clothes before he heads onstage. Yep, the plaid flannels. The crew gets a big kick out of that. I’m onstage making sure the sound’s good and the show is running the way it should, and that John knows I’m right there beside him. If something goes wrong, he’ll come right over and tell me. I’m just there to push away the clouds so the star can shine.

  After Blue Moon Swamp was done, John was willing to start touring again, but there were many things to learn. There was a lot of waste. We struggled to find the right crew, and there were many shows in the beginning that I didn’t think he’d get through. But John brought all of us with him. John wouldn’t tour without me—and I couldn’t leave the kids, so he brought the whole family.