John Fogerty recounts his military deception, the $144 million lawsuit against Fantasy Records, and the betrayal by bassist Stu Cook. He details how "Fortunate Son" emerged from Vietnam-era frustration and contrasts the romanticized rock star image with his authentic desire for family life. Reflecting on the music industry's exploitation of artists like Johnny Thunder and the band's disintegration over songwriting rights, Fogerty concludes that true inspiration stems from honoring the creative muse rather than cultivating a fake persona. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, you're also one of the first rock and roll artists that wrote songs that became very popular about how you're getting screwed over by the record business.
You know what I mean?
So Leonard Skidder did it, working for MCA, they did that song.
Well, no, you're getting a legal lawsuit that's probably going to take away, A lot of your money, and you're going to go through three, four years of anguish.
Well, anyway, ended up in a trial.
He was suing me for, at the time, an enormous amount of money $144 million for his whatever, metal anguish or something.
The logistics, I guess you'd call it, I had made a new song called The Old Man Down the Road.
It was on my album.
It was my comeback.
on center field.
And I had finally gotten away from Fantasy Records, which is where Credence was, and Saul's Ann's, who owned it.
So, you know, when you finally escape and get success over somewhere else, the former people tend to be jealous, I guess.
And so he was suing me.
What had happened, though, I found out in the trial, the bass player from Credence, Was another one of those people, I guess, that couldn't stand that I'd now had success in a later life.
He went down to fantasy and saw Mr. Saul's ants and said, John is ripping off Credence.
You should sue him.
The irony in all of that is that I had taught Stu every single note that he ever played in Credence.
It was not his own create.
As we talk, you'll see.
I was the guy inventing the arrangements.
And so to.
Take possession of credence was pretty ironic and pretty over the top.
Anyway, he talks Saul into suing me, and that Saul had unlimited funds.
Well, it's a blessing to the world, I think, that I prevailed.
I mean, you know, what we're really talking about is when you come into the consciousness of the world, I guess, and you have a certain style, if you're lucky.
And so you start creating whatever your art is.
You're an actor or you're a painter or, in my case, a musician.
And people start liking the style.
Well, how unfair would it be that at some point somebody takes ownership of your style, and now say you have to go back and invent some other style, be some other person.
You know, it's just that would be really difficult.
Imagine Dylan or Springsteen or all the other people that have their own style having to, you know, reinvent and change to something else.
Well, it's just insane to even ask an artist to do that.
It's insane because, look, so many artists sound like other artists anyway, and no one has a problem with that as long as they're not ripping off the notes and the lyrics.
There's a lot of people that sound like people.
But the idea that you could get sued for sounding like you with new music and new lyrics is that's one of the most insane things I've ever heard of.
I can't believe that didn't get thrown out immediately.
I mean, you have these creative artists that make this music that everybody loves, and then you have these hyenas that work behind the scenes that are the ones that are collecting the majority of the money from it, and they're not making any music.
And to the average fan like myself, that's abhorrent.
That you came out on the good side of it, but it's also great for people to know, and it's really great for young artists to be aware as they're coming up, especially as they're beginning their journey, that this could happen to them.
Yeah, and there's all kinds of you know, um, bad people around just waiting for you to slip up and sign something that will give your rights away, that sort of thing.
I get such a joy out of music, you know, I mean, I just, it started that way when I was a little kid.
I mean, didn't even know what I was doing or what that was.
I was hearing this sound and, you know, and I liked it and I just kind of went with it.
I didn't try to analyze it too much.
And of course, later with all the things, you know, the different roads you go through trying to get to someplace, Happily, I still get that same joy.
I mean, I just, I'm just so glad.
You know, a lot of this, of course, is from the care of my wife, Julie.
And I'm the only guy from Credence who's ever actually mentioned that he's an evil person to the extent that quite publicly, my brother Tom, right during this same time, was saying that Saul was his best friend.
The first trial was about basically the band had lost its life savings.
All of us in Credence.
The record company had gotten us into this offshore tax plan.
And I'm saying this with a smile because nowadays it just sounds so, you know, some guy comes walking up to you and got a trench coat on a corner in New York City.
Hey, buddy, you know, you're probably going to avoid that guy.
But the record company was in this tax thing.
And for all we knew, we were going to be paying.
90% income tax, right?
I mean, the tax laws are pretty stringent and pretty high.
And so they offered us, or basically kind of ushered us into this plan, an offshore tax plan, and it would allow us to pay a lot less taxes, probably somewhere between 10 and 20%, something like that.
So it was a huge financial savings for us.
I can tell you that the name of this particular thing was a bank in the Bahamas called Castle Bank.
And we had it checked out, I mean, the people on our side in the band had it checked out by our people.
Our own accountant, the bass player's father was an entertainment lawyer and had a big firm.
They, among other people, represented the Oakland Raiders, so we thought they were pretty solid.
And they checked it all out and said that it was okay, it was legit.
So we did it.
But time went on and it seemed to be not legit to the point that somewhere in the 70s, the bank disappeared and all our money in it disappeared.
The bank was being used by the CIA to funnel money for covert military operations, including those at Andros Island, a staging area for anti Castro activities.
So they were stealing your money.
unidentified
How?
I just found that.
I don't know.
I just typed it in and went to the Wikipedia and I was like, whoa.
The funny thing is, I had decided to get out of that plan, right?
And I'd gone down to see my own people, my accountant, my attorney in Oakland.
And told them, I just want out of this thing.
I don't like the idea that you got to call, you know, whenever I want some money, like an allowance, you got to call up some bank account somewhere over there, and it takes, you know, some time, some few days before I actually receive my money.
And it was starting to smell.
It was starting to, and now we're talking 1975, 76.
And so I actually had the meeting and I said, I want to be out of this plan.
I don't want to.
Oh, I said, one of the things I said to the meeting of professionals look, take a shoebox, put all the money I've ever earned into the shoebox, and now hand me the shoebox so I can see how much money I have earned.
Because I didn't know.
It was just going straight into this fund, right?
Into this Castle Bank.
But they couldn't tell me.
So I leave, I get down to the parking lot in the basement of this tall building in Oakland, and I'm with the guy that runs my office, and I say, shit, we're going to have to have another meeting.
Because even though I told him I want to get out of the plan, I didn't stand up like on the table and say, I'm ordering you and you and you get me out of the plan.
I realized they could weasel some more time until I actually pointed.
So the next week, I showed up and did that.
I'm ordering you get me out, okay, out of the plan, right?
Um, Pretty quickly after that, a week or two, we hear that the bank has closed.
There's a telegram that apparently was sent on Valentine's Day, and the bank president has died.
After that point in time, I really never wanted to talk too loudly about stuff anymore.
Oh, my goodness.
So there eventually was our lawsuit.
Well, actually, it was my lawsuit.
I started.
Got with a lawyer, a tall building, I call it, and proceeded to start proceedings against this fantasy, our own attorneys and experts, the people that designed this plan, all the rest, right?
But I was the only one in the band that did that.
The rest of the guys kind of just went along and weren't making any waves.
And I was pretty adamant.
I'm telling you this because at some point, Later, more than a year had passed, maybe a year and a half, my lawsuit had been rolling along a while.
And then the other guys asked to join my lawsuit because the statute of limitations had run out on them being able to sue anyone.
Because they literally tried to stay in the plan.
I was willing to take the penalty, whatever it was, for being the dumbass that let himself get into some financial thing like this, right?
I felt like Joe Lewis.
I thought I was going to need an act of Congress to forgive the debt.
These experts in the meeting that I talked about who were trying to dissuade me from making a noise and trying to get out of the plan told me eventually, John, if you receive all the money at once, you will pay more than 110% in taxes of what you have earned.
Yeah, it's kind of sad that money always does kind of distort things.
But if you were only interested in money and only interested in fame, or if that was your primary concern, there's no way the music would be that good.
I just, it, and also the prospect of creating something new tomorrow, you know, and the, what's the word?
You get certain feelings.
Well, we all do, but I've learned to, how can I say it?
Sort of, it's like being in a big swimming pool or something, you know, it's all, it just surrounds you, letting yourself enjoy that feeling and then try to figure out a way to put that into the music.
It's just, it's a long story with all these different artists that have had to deal with all these horrific managers.
And I was reading this article about Jimi Hendrix's manager.
So one of his bodyguards wrote a book where he's blaming Hendrix's manager for his death.
And he was essentially saying that Hendrix was murdered and Hendrix was about to leave his manager.
And that's why he killed him.
And I don't know if you know the story about Hendrix, but his girlfriend.
Fell from a roof or jumped off a roof shortly after Hendrix died, and apparently they were trying to get rid of her as well because they knew that she knew the whole deal behind it.
He said, well, a Gollywog, you see, is this doll that when the British soldiers were in India, the kids would have this little doll called a Gollywog.
And so that's all we knew about it.
As time went on, I mean, years and years later, long after I had been renamed the band, or I'd renamed the band Credence, found out that Gollywog was a, this was a very racial thing.
It's a different, that's why I had a little hesitation when you were talking about that you thought the music came from a, or creativity came from a joyful, good place.
But boy, you can sure look in different.
Parts of entertainment or business in general, and see some really bad people have made a lot of money.
There's a lot of people that choose that life just for financial benefit.
They choose to just fuck people over and be in that bad frequency all the time.
But that's not a good life.
And I agree with you.
I think if you live your life like God exists, you'll have a much better life.
And the golden rule is just it's provable.
Like if you're a nice person and you treat people well and it spreads a lot of good energy around you and positive momentum with all these other people, it's the butterfly effect.
It carries on to other people that they encounter too.
They're inspired by how kind and friendly and generous you are.
And it's good for everybody.
It's good for you, it's good for the people that you're.
Generous and friendly, too.
It's good for the other people that they encounter because they're inspired by it.
Or, you know, I would ask God to help me figure something out.
And amazingly, there would be through a relation, you know, somebody I was dealing with, there would be something, it was like karma, good karma coming back.
And I could see the, you know, to me, it was a result of my prayer or my openness of wanting to help get a situation resolved.
So for me, to me, there's evidence that it all works that way.
I did, what do you call that when you're 12 years old, confirmation.
I chose the name for St. Jerome basically because there's a song by Bo Diddley called Bring It To Jerome.
And Jerome was his, I think Jerome Green was his maraca player.
And I really liked the vibe of that.
I'm going to be Jerome.
That's my confirmation name.
Yeah, it was there in those ways.
There was times I was boy, you've opened a can of worms here.
Because I was so invested in being a Catholic, even though my parents tried to have me go to parochial school, Catholic school, I was in the first grade, and then I want to say they kicked me out.
And then I tried, my mom had me start again in ninth grade at St. Mary's High School, and they kicked me out again.
But it wasn't my fault.
Anyway, the one that happened is funny.
I mean, it's just the one that happened in the first grade, I had to take a bus to get there.
I lived in El Cerrito and it was the School of the Madeline in Berkeley.
And I'm in the first grade, I'm six years old.
So you had to go to the bus stop, get on a bus, get a transfer, so that then when the bus came to a certain stop over in Albany, you then got on a train, you transferred in other words, got on the train and that went another mile or so into Berkeley and at a certain stop right behind the school.
The school of the Madeline, Catholic school, you get off the train and go on down into school.
Now, what happened, my mom was a, my parents had split up, so it was only my mom in the house, and she's leaving early because she's got a job as a teacher.
So she's out of the house before me.
And so it's up to me to get myself together and get to the bus stop on time.
Many, many times I was late.
I missed it.
So I had to get the next bus, so I'm late.
So I'm rushing to school, but I get there after they've already, they would march every morning to John Philip Souza, and they, you know, all that, and go on into school.
And I get there now, I'm late.
The schoolyard is empty.
I literally have to climb over the fence because they've locked the fence at boom, 8 o'clock or whatever it was.
And I have to scale the fence, run into class without.
But ask yourself how is a six year old getting on a bus all by himself, traveling three or four miles, then getting out of the bus, going over to where the train station thing is, getting on a train?
Going over there, and I mean, I certainly never let my six year olds do anything like that.
But to have to take a bus and then a train and go to school when you're six years old, that's nuts.
So I went to Catholic school too for first grade only.
And that screwed me off of religion for a long time.
Because I thought of God back when I was a little kid before I went to Catholic school as.
You know, God is all knowing and God is love, and God created the universe, and God is looking out for you.
He's just got some rules you have to follow.
Made sense to me.
And then when I went to Catholic school, there was a lady, and I don't remember anybody's name from back then, but I remember her, Sister Mary Josephine.
She was so mean.
She was just a mean lady.
She did the whole thing, the whacking people with rulers, telling you you're going to have to stay overnight and you're going to have to sleep on a nail in the closet.
Like, just evil.
Like, wanted you to cry.
And when I would cry, she'd call me a crybaby.
And I remember thinking after that, like, I don't want to have nothing to do with religion ever again.
And some man made thing over here, you know, they became Mormons and some.
Man made thing over there, they became Muslims, you know, and it's just all man made, it isn't actually God, right?
And so, you and man is fallible, of course, yeah, he's not infinite and he's not infallible.
And so, all these things were that, but that took a lifetime for me.
I'm sure I was in my 40s still working on that, yeah, that God's okay, John, you don't have to resist when somebody wants to make a prayer or so, you know.
It isn't God's fault that you peed at your desk when you were in the first grade, etc.
I think all religious scriptures are trying to document a real thing, especially Christianity, which is the one I've paid the most attention to.
I think they're trying to document a real thing.
But the hand of man is clearly all over it.
That's the problem.
The problem with anything that's written down, we know that just in the religious canon, the books that were included in the Bible, human beings had a decision on what goes in and what doesn't go in.
There were rabbis that kept the book of Enoch out of the Old Testament.
There's a lot of this weird stuff to it that you go, Well, why do people have any say?
Why does a human have any say in what the word of God is?
That sounds crazy.
And when you read the scriptures, you're like, Somebody wrote that down and someone told that story for.
Who knows how many years before it was ever written down?
But I think the origins of it, there's truth to it.
It's just you have to get through all these many layers of confusion to try to decipher what God's original message was and how it was received?
Who got it?
How did it even get relayed?
What was the original event that led to this oral tradition that led to it being written down?
I mean, at least, you know, I mean, there's a lot of us semi nerds, I guess, that, you know, wanted to play ball, wanted to be a jock, and just really, at some point, you know, the ones that really have it pass you by.
And you just kind of, but in your mind, everybody got their scorecard and, you know, and they're following the game and all that, and that vicarious joy of, watching Otani or Aaron Judge or whoever it is you love, you get to have that in your heart anyway.
But I mean, I'm the luckiest guy in the universe.
Okay, I didn't get to play, but I wrote a song and my song's there all the time.
It was basically the garage of a house that I had bought to be my office and my place.
So it was a size of a garage.
I would go there every day.
So in the morning I'd get in, I'd turn on my tape recorder and various pieces of equipment and stuff.
That was my process, certainly every weekday morning, sometimes on Saturday, Sunday, whatever.
certainly the five days a week.
And I'd walk in there and work on music.
I did this every day for, I mean, years and years, from 74 until Center Field came out, basically, which was 11 years later.
And so one morning I walk in and I haven't even turned on the stuff yet.
I just, for some reason, I went right to the guitar and I've turned on the amp and picked up the guitar and I'm just kind of noodling because I like to do that.
A lot of my songs have started this way, but suddenly just played and it really had that sound to it.
And I got my attention because I knew that it wasn't anything else.
And I also, I mean, this is like in a, this is how quick our brains can work.
You know, it's taken me way longer to tell it than the actual thing.
But so I've played the and I realized.
It's not complete.
It needs an answer.
And I'm also aware that it's like being on a tightrope or something over Niagara Falls.
You know, you got to have the right answer, and there's probably only one because all the other ones are going to kill it, and you'll never remember this again because that happens all the time.
So immediately, I had kept this little songbook that's only about that big with titles in it.
And I go flipping through the book, and I think I see something that's somewhere down the road.
Okay, that for some reason appealed to me, and I stuck with, okay, that's what it's called.
This song's going to be somewhere down the road.
And that day, I start, so now I turn on my tape recorder and all that.
I play some, because I had to play real drums then.
That's what took me so long, folks.
Anyway, so I make a little thing that's just the riff and then make a space of just the drums playing and nothing else so I can kind of listen to it and improvise what's going on after this riff?
What's somewhere down the road?
And of course, I start talking about he gets the thunder from the mountain, he brings the lightning from the sky, you know, and all that.
And these things are going on.
And so you got to shoot forward probably a few weeks.
I realize I'm starting to write a song, but the title somewhere down the road to me just seems lame.
It seems undefined, not cool enough, not focused, and probably not going to remember it because it sounds like just what it is.
The deal is, with my little songbook, probably two years later, after that album had come out, I said, you know what, I want to check on where somewhere down the road came.
And I went cover to cover, and it's not in there.
There is no place where I've written somewhere down the road.
The reason I'm telling you this is there was a time I had an office in Warner Brothers, and I would, when I was staying down in L.A., and I would go in there all the time and write, have some keyboards and stuff.
And one day I thought I needed a break.
I took my book and I went out and sat, it was Warner Brothers parking lot, my car is, I went out to my car and sat down because I was, trying to give myself some, you know, get going, do something.
And I thumbed through the book and I saw Change in the Weather.
I said, man, I like that.
And I look up and it's kind of a cloudy, gloomy sky, you know.
Yeah, changing the, yeah.
So I ran back in my room and I started, I went off.
I was inspired and I wrote a song called Change in the Weather.
Well, Same deal.
After that album came out, I decided to check my.
It ain't in there.
It's nowhere in my book where it says Change in the Weather.
So I nowadays tell people, you know, maybe it's a shape shifter.
And there's stuff in there, it can just kind of go, John, listen to this.
Because everybody that I talk to, whether it's comedians or authors or writers, Musicians, they say the ideas almost don't feel like they're theirs, like they're receiving them from somewhere.
I have boxes of this book out front, and I give it to comedians and artists all the time because it's just a book about the creative process, about writing.
And one of the things that he talks about is the muse, about giving honor to the muse and sitting there and calling upon the muse for these ideas.
That if you treat it like it's a real thing, it will provide you.
If you show up every day and you put in the work, the muse will give you these ideas.
But they do feel like to everybody that I talk to that's really creative, they feel like they're coming from somewhere.
Well, first of all, I think the first thing I got to say about it is I was drafted, so I was in the military, and I've gotten the Army reserves, but.
Was well and was on active duty and all the rest, so I well understood the position of, you might say, the military mindset, right?
Even though I was a young person, and this is right during the Vietnam era, and I think I really need to say that almost no one my age wanted to be in the army and go to Vietnam.
That was something you know.
I don't want to do that, right?
So I got my draft notice.
Got into the Army Reserves, so I understood that side of the coin and that side of fate, you might say.
The deal, I think the deal being okay, I'm in the military, so now I got to play by the rules.
I got to do everything that's this is what I am, right?
Yeah.
There's a little bit of the whole idea of being American and serving your country.
I'm trying not to say, oh yeah, now I'm gung-ho and I'm John Wayne and I'm going to take on Iwo Jima or something.
It was more like, yeah, but you've got to do this right.
You can't just be some guy that's on AWOL all the time and being a mess.
I wanted to do it right.
So I went through all of that.
It's another story, but eventually got my honorable discharge, which led to another song, but it's a different song.
And that was just before, just as the Credence career was getting started.
But anyhow, during the Vietnam time, you began to, you know, there was a lot of unrest, civil unrest in America and around the world.
Those times were very volatile.
But especially in America, there was a lot of protests and discussion about The war itself.
Remember, there was a draft, so young people, kind of by nature, were against the war and against the draft because it seemed to be sort of not logical.
How's that?
And in some instances, you would see on the news, you know, some senator who had the political clout that he could keep his teenage son from being drafted or get his teenage son into some cushy job.
I thought I was writing a song called Favorite Son because starting in 1952 when they sent my second grade class, I think, home to watch the inauguration, I believe, of Eisenhower, I think that's what it was, and all, you know, we had a tiny little TV.
All I saw was big black limousines.
That was my entire impression of the presidential thing and politics.
So after that, I kind of would watch parts of the conventions in the summer.
You know, there'd be these gigantic, you know, I didn't know what they were then, but these big rooms full of smoke.
And every once in a while, somebody, Your Honor, the great state of Texas would like to nominate.
You know, the state of Vermont would like to nominate her favorite son.
And so I had written that one down in my book.
And I thought I was going to write a kind of a political song.
So the band was getting pretty solid in the backing track.
And that told me, you know, I was driving a career.
I mean, there wasn't someone else telling me.
I was the one deciding and pushing and I think pushing pretty hard.
I just, I wanted a new single to be ready.
And this seemed like it might be it.
So at one point after the band had been rehearsing the music for that song, Unfortunate Son, for a few weeks, it was getting pretty good.
I said, all right.
I got to write the words.
I got to get the whole song together.
I took a little yellow tablet like that, went into my bedroom, sat on the bed, and instead of what I thought it was going to be, the first thing I said, this idea of the red, white, and blue, and they're always super patriots, you know, all this stuff, bluster and all that, blah, blah, blah, right?
And I said, how do I get that?
How do I get that?
Well, they're waving the flag.
Yeah, but what's going on now?
They're pointing the cannon at you, right?
Yeah, but it ain't me.
And I realized, oh, wow, that's something I can repeat.
It ain't me.
I ain't no, you know.
And.
Literally, I mean, I just sort of did it in front of you, almost the way it played out of me sitting on that bed.
Literally walked in and 20 minutes later walked out with the whole song.
Coming from the, I didn't have anything other than favorite son.
The rest was just the stuff that was boiling in my head at the time, of course.
Basically, because of well healed people getting out of the draft, which Kind of pissed me off.
You know, I just, you know, there were a lot of guys now that I was in them or had been in the military, and I knew there were a lot of other guys felt just like me.
I didn't grow up that I wanted to be a soldier and go do that.
It was just fate that made that happen.
So the unfairness of the situation made me want to talk about that.
It plays out over some time, it isn't just once, you know, it plays out over some time.
And that incidence where you suddenly get a hook into an idea, and then the gods, the muse, they let you continue forward with something that's way better than you ever dreamed was going to be it.
And suddenly it, wow, this is really cool.
And you're excited and you're happy, and it's Coming to be, and you realize, as I said, that was by the way, by far the quickest I ever wrote a song, and that's so quick, so fast that I mean, it's almost like instant replay.
It was so fast that you, or at least I did, I could, man, this is really good.
I mean, and you just like a minute ago, I was taking a breath, hoping that something would happen.
In other words, I don't have to feel, because rock and roll is all about dark colors and leather jackets and piercing and, you know, tats and everything.
And that scowl, you know, the elbows would all that stuff.
That's good.
I mean, you know, but I like, you know, well, it seems to be me.
I can just be unashamedly happy.
And I'm glad, you know, like center field is so optimistic and just great.
And so rock stars, well, other, I guess, but rock stars, because it was right in that era, they invented or gravitated to, in other words, one picture defines me.
When you're making something, and we talked about this, and it's resonating with you, it just seems like in your wheelhouse, it's you.
That's probably going to be really good.
It's comfortable.
Sounds like you.
You relate.
It's great.
If you ever get yourself as a songwriter, singer, whatever, well, so and so is going to really like.
That I did this, and you're off on some weird thing trying to, you know, be a change or different or something.
That's not going to work.
Absolutely not going to work because you think somebody else sees it a certain way and you're doing it for them, and God knows whatever that is, but it isn't you at all.
You probably are just out of your element, off the rails, you might say.
Well, yeah, I got to do something because there is some credence to that.
Just start working.
Just start moving.
Don't just sit there.
Do something.
Sorry.
And keep grinding, and maybe eventually it'll get to where it's natural, the good part.
Because just sitting and doing nothing, which I've certainly been accused of, that's nothing for no one.
So you start moving your feet and trying to get the juices to flow and all that.
But like I said, yeah, I wrote some songs, a whole album really, called Eye of the Zombie.
It was the follow-up to Center Field.
And I think, well, I had some other, some ulterior, not that I did it on purpose, but some other ingredients came into my mix.
I'll get there in a minute.
But anyway, the album as a whole is pretty dark and pretty, Not doesn't ring true to me.
I think it's kind of Misses the mark.
It's off That's a that album and that period of my life is a really interesting Really interesting phenomenon.
I think that I'm not the only one.
It's just that I consider myself lucky.
So I worked for you know I had this enormous band number one in the world Get screwed by the record company, lose my life savings, band breaks up, bands in the newspaper saying nasty things about me, etc.
I'm held kind of in a dungeon by the record company, and I got to either give them my music or no one else.
And I somehow managed to get through all that, and it's 15 years after.
Credence breaking up basically.
Finally, come out with an album called Centerfield.
There's happy, joyful music on it.
It goes to number one.
It's acclaimed, which is a wonderful thing.
And it's a hit.
I think what happened is the story I tell about it.
It's as if you'd been unjustly in prison, you know, convicted of a crime, put in the penitentiary for a long time, and one day they decide, oops!
You're right.
We made a mistake.
You're free because you didn't commit any crimes.
We're going to let you free.
And you're so happy, you walk out the door.
That's center field coming out.
And you come out into this big meadow where, you know, green grass and bluebirds.
And then you turn around and you see freaking San Quentin, the prison that you were in.
And now you're angry.
You look at that and you're just that's what happened.
You know, when Centerfield came out.
I should have, and was a success.
In other words, I was exonerated or vindicated.
I should have immediately gone to therapy, right?
Seen a shrink.
But that's kind of not my, I wasn't raised anywhere near any of that kind of stuff.
So I didn't know to do that.
Instead, all that stuff that I was repressing so that I could do center field, it just came out like, and I was, instead of being overjoyed, I was miserable.
Bitter and it happened all at once, it didn't like develop it, it was bam!
And for like two years, it was like you could say Saul's name, and I'm my I would implode like the werewolf in uh in uh werewolves of London or something, you know, or the what's that guy, uh, the Hulk, yeah.
Um, and so I made that album, and that's all that stuff.
I mean, I just didn't have the sense to see that it was.
Make my way through the Hollywood Hills, you might say.
I think I actually said that in those days.
And one day, just suddenly met Julie, not expecting to meet the love of my life, the person I feel that I was destined to meet, and the person that would, through her good graces, help me find myself and help me enjoy and find the joy of life again.
I'm sitting here now, you know, talking about some parts of me that are certainly embarrassed about and probably ashamed of.
I've let the shame part go.
It just happened, right?
I mean, I don't encourage anyone, and I try to tell them, no, stay away from, don't do what I did.
But I used to beat myself up a lot with the shame part.
And I think that might be part of the healing, part of the getting out the other end.
Because the more and more solid you get in the resolve of the way you're going to really live your life and not that, the kind of more the shame dissipates.
It's not tenuous anymore, like, oh, I might fall back.
You're not so scared that that could happen anymore.
Oh, we should be able to grow up and, I mean, you know, kids.
I got married the first time at 20.
I mean, there just should be a law.
You know, you're just too young.
You don't know what you're doing.
You don't know what all this really means.
Certainly by the time I met Julie, you know what though, that experience made me shy away for a few years there from the whole idea of a marriage commitment.
I was committed, but the marriage part scared me.
You know, it just, oh my goodness.
And then one day I realized I was sort of, well, wait a minute.
Sometimes we show up at stuff and there'll be a lot of characters.
I'm talking about musical things.
A lot of characters roaming around.
And, you know, I kind of look like.
Ward Cleaver, Beaver's dad, you know, Mr. Boy Scout or something walking around, you know, and she's looking at me like, couldn't you have worn something a little more rock and roll?
Yeah, maybe.
And I'm just not bothered.
I mean, it is kind of funny, though.
Actually, I've worn some cool clothes at some of the stuff.
That would all be Julie's doing, of course.
Yeah, I mean, it's almost like, you know, could you show up at a reunion of rock guys, you know, in their 50s or something, everybody pull out their blotter, you know, their police blotter.
Well, when the four people that became Credence sort of got together in, 1967, after I got off active duty, and we said, okay, we're going to go for broke.
One of the things that happened going along those lines, I would show up at the rehearsal.
At that point, we said, we've got to do this all the time if we're ever going to get any good.
Every day during the week we'd meet at noon, or actually a little before that, maybe 11, and sit and talk, and then noon was rehearsal time um, and so i'd say okay, anybody got any songs?
And people started looking down here, all right well look, I got something and we'd work on my song, right?
I mean, we're just sort of getting organized.
I've just come off active duty, i've been away from the world.
You might say uh, Then next day, same thing, you know.
At home, I'd work on some stuff.
Anyone got any songs?
Kind of every I mean, it was the weirdest quiet a week later, you know, same thing.
And finally, I just well, look, I've been, you know, I began to feel this thing inside that I gotta push.
I mean, I got, I think I can do this.
And so, eventually, I got the idea the songs I'm working on aren't quite there.
How about?
If we take an old song and I'll just trick it up, like psychedelicize it, because I'll pick a song I already know is good.
It's got good stuff in it.
And that's what I did with Suzy Q.
I just kind of really arranged it and had all this cool stuff going on.
It wasn't something I wrote.
It kind of relieved me of the pressure of having to do that and was able to just, hey, just that blank page turned into a.
Different rainbow, full of all.
Nobody can fault me because it's not my song, right?
Did all this great stuff, this cool musical stuff to it.
It got, the whole point was to get that tape on a local underground station that was actually playing unpublished tapes, you know, by certain bands.
The most famous one you ever heard about, there was a tape of Janice Joplin singing Hesitation Blues, and Yorma's playing guitar, but in the background, somebody's typing their term paper.
It was done in their kitchen.
And so it was just a, Amateur, unauthorized thing, but they played it on this one station.
It became a hit on that station.
People requested it.
There were a couple other bands that had tapes like that.
I turned a little cartwheel on the lawn because I want to remember that I turned the cartwheel and ran in the house and picked up my guitar and started playing these chords that are somewhat like Beethoven.
Oh, I start strumming this beat.
I start hearing this chorus.
See, the first thing I said was left a good job in the city.
That was getting out of the army.
Wow, working for the man every night and day.
Wow, what is this?
Eventually, I arrive at this thing where I say, Roland, Roland.
When I got done, which was about an hour, I was about an hour from when I'd opened my honorable discharge, I'm actually holding the little yellow tablet I've been writing on.
I said, John, you've written the classic.
I realized that this song was.
I had evolved.
It was way better than anything I'd ever done before.
You know, and so those meetings I'd been having, going to see the band, and was anybody got anything, and no one ever did, and I'd show my little piece of something I was working on, that kind of led, how can I say it, to the confidence to do something really great by.
Just doing it, right?
And the knowledge, I mean, I had, I was self-aware.
I'm looking at this thing, Proud Mary, and it's got Americana in it, although I don't think I had a word then.
It's got, I knew it was Mark Twain and the river and all this soulful stuff.
And wow, this for sure is the best thing I'd ever done.
I knew it was a great song.
And then the next, God, I hope I get to do this again.
That you just getting that notice that you've been relieved and you're no longer in active duty, you've got an honorable discharge, you're free, and then the inspiration comes and you write your greatest song of all time like that.
Until the last album, the seventh album, that was basically a result of the guys saying, we want to, you know, there was a big band meeting, we want to write the songs and we demand that we get to write the songs and sing the songs and make up our own musical parts.
So you guys have been resisting that because I just, I thought it was going to really, I literally thought it would be career suicide.
But what I'm getting at is that the other guys, there was no songs.
So that's that thing in, I keep using the Muli Mays, you know, metaphor, if that's what it is.
You know, that example, at some point, you're, you're, You are working with the elements in the field that you love, and then you realize how to put it together and to make it happen, if you're lucky.
And then comes the time when you actually make something that's good, right?
And I mean, but that, oh, I can't think of anyone that the first song they ever wrote, boom, was Ave Maria or something, you know?
And you worked at it and you tried to get it better and you also got inspiration.
You were also open to that inspiration.
It's just funny that the band members didn't contribute until the seventh album and they wanted to jump in.
It's kind of crazy.
But understandable.
I mean, it's human nature to be resentful, especially if you've got a huge band and one guy is the lead singer and that guy's also writing all the songs.
So when I agreed, I mean, it was literally a couple months later.
Tom left.
And so now, oh God, what's going to happen now?
So I didn't know if I was just going to call it quits or.
The image in my mind was of when Elvis got taken by the Colonel, just kind of pulled out of the other guys, and they left them in a lurch, you might say.
That's the way it looked to me.
It's like Elvis got all new guys.
And it was readily apparent because I had already seen what the Elvis comeback special, the part where they sat around in a circle and did the old songs, and he had the old guys, Scotty and Bill, or maybe Bill was gone by then.
JD Fontana or DJD Fontana.
And it was just apparent that that was the best thing.
Everybody loved that part of his special.
Most people, you just forget that anything else was on that thing other than Elvis singing those songs.
And that sort of was in the back of my mind, well, maybe they deserve a shot.
Maybe I should do this.
And so that's kind of why I went forward with it.
It's almost like flipping a coin, like, well, the.
The odds, I think my own sense tells me this isn't going to work, but maybe they deserve a chance.
Now, in later, later, later years, you know, I'm a much older guy.
I mean, there were, you know, there's some decisions that I made.
One of them was the decision to not be in the movie Woodstock.
They sent a tape of the band doing Bad Moon Rising.
It was okay.
But what had happened at Woodstock was the Grateful Dead was on before us.
Grateful Dead had all taken LSD.
It's we were supposed to be on at 8 o'clock, but it's now 2 o'clock, 2 30 in the morning by the time we get.
Grateful Dead goes on, kind of loses their way, but they're on stage for an hour and a half or something with nothing going on.
So that poor audience that's been through rain and all the rest and muddy, they just crashed.
A half a million, just boom, you know.
And that's what I get, right?
We come running out on stage and then we.
Playing a few songs, all I see is sleeping people.
And eventually, the last, I think, 20 minutes of our set finally got them up.
We warmed them up for Janice.
That's the way I always say it.
You know, they got going again.
But that was a struggle all through that.
So I get sent, and it was a bad taste in my mouth about that evening because we'd gone to so much trouble.
And at that moment, we were certainly the number one band in the U.S. and probably on our way to.
Being number one in the world.
And so I just, you know, here's this kind of ordinary tape of Bad Moon, and I just thought, I don't know, this doesn't help us, doesn't further us at all.
Nah, I'm going to pass.
By the way, the Grateful Dead is not in Woodstock either.
I didn't really see that until about a year ago.
You know, I mean, I just assumed the Grateful Dead was in Woodstock, right?
If there'd been an older guy around us, a manager that was like 50 instead of me with my bad taste about the evening, the older guy might have said, Hey, you know, your version of Susie Q Live, even though those people were sleeping, the band was cooking.
You know, you guys played good.
You can't hardly see anything anyway, the crappy old.
He said, But that recording's good.
Maybe we should demand that, look, you put us in the movie and give us eight minutes, not two minutes.
Or by then it was probably 15 minutes long.
I think that was a decision that could probably reassess if it was someone else, but that's not what was on my plate at the time.
I was only offered bad moves.
And at the time I felt I was right because we went on and did great.
And by the way, the band broke up before Woodstock came out, anyhow.
You don't have a whole bunch of people trying to prove something like their record deal or, you know, because you asked the question kind of caught me by surprise.
Well, after Credence, I didn't play for a long time.
And so, yeah, and there's a, right then that might be a moment in Chuglin where we all do a riff together and all that, and it's just so cool to all be standing there.
I mean, it was beyond, it was unpleasant, and I didn't understand why.
So after that, it was, that was difficult.
Then when I first started playing again in 86, and much more in 97 after Blue Moon Swamp came out, and I had a series of bands that were I can say, trying to put people together, parts from here and there and there.
So it kind of never really was one solidified thing.
And you would find that a lot of people had personal agendas, you might say.
They were working on their own career and all that.
And there was sort of, believe it or not, even at that level, different jealousies and things.
Again, there I was.
I could sense it sometimes.
People were.
Jealous, you know, oh my god, when you see that fix, there's no jealous, right?
Well, that is the problem with so many bands the conflicting personalities.
It's always a miracle to me that any band stays together and that they could stay together like the Stones, where they're still touring now after all these years.
I just think the thing is everybody wants to be the man.
And when you got so many egos and there's one guy like you who's writing all the songs, all these other people, they're just like, they feel less, you know, and they get resentful.
I told you about my mom noticing the music coming out of me.
One day she brought me home from.
Nursery school, where she was one of the helper teachers, I guess, one of the moms, you know, of the staff.
She brought me home and sat me down on a little chair.
Now I look back, it was a little ceremony.
She had a little yellow record, a kid's record, and it basically what she did was she played both sides of this little record.
One side was Oh Susanna, and the other side was Camp Town Races.
Do da, do da, you know, that one.
And then She asked me, Well, do you like this music?
I said, Yeah, Mom, these are cool songs, or whatever a kid says.
I really like these.
She says, Well, I'm going to play them again, Johnny.
She plays both songs, and she says, Do you know that Stephen Foster is the man that wrote both of these songs?
What do you mean, Ma?
She said, Well, Stephen Foster is a real person that wrote this music.
And I wanted you to know that these are his wonderful songs and that people do write songs.
And then she gave me the record that kind of became my little possession, right?
And I have reflected on that moment in my life for, I mean, I used to tell people, Why did she do that?
What in the world was she thinking, right?
And all through the years, That I was living at home with my mom, there'd be somebody on TV, there's Irving Berlin.
And I'd go, yeah, mom, hey, he's a songwriter.
Or she'd let me know Hoagie Carmichael was one of her favorites.
So he became one of my favorites, right?
And of course, on into the rock and roll era, as you notice, the Beatles, Lennon and McCartney, were writing these songs.
I mean, it just became a thing, a part of me.
And it all started back there with my mom and Stephen Foster.
Number one, he was a great songwriter.
So that lilt, that sort of kind of songwriting, he's also very corny.
I mean, that voice, that personality certainly became, it got contributed, it got lent to me through the records, the recordings, as Stephen didn't make any records, as far as I know.
And those songs just sort of got infiltrated into my personality.
I mean, my mom, put it this way, I think I even talked it over with mom.
I feel like Stephen Foster could have written Proud Mary.
I don't know what my mom was giving me a gift, you know, in that you just never know how powerful those little moments with your kids are, but that was a big one for me.