As the lead singer and primary creative force in Creedence Clearwater Revival,
John Fogerty helped define rock 'n' roll history.
Both in his music career and outside of it, he's lived an eventful and remarkable
life. So let's go up around the bend and discover the untold truth of John Fogerty.
Through his work in Creedence Clearwater Revival and in his solo efforts, Fogerty has been one of
the most prominent practitioners of "swamp rock." That's a genre that combines hard rock with blues,
folk, and various forms of music native to the Gulf Coast area of the American southeast.
Acting like a Louisiana boy is something Fogerty fully embraced,
as he sang in a gritty, raspy voice with a strong twinge of a bayou-area accent
on all of his songs, perhaps most famously on the CCR track "Born on the Bayou."
But while Fogerty obviously loves and appreciates swamp rock and all that it represents,
he isn't from the area. In fact, he was born far away from the bayou,
as he arrived in the world in 1945 in Berkeley,
California. The Golden State is known for a lot of musical styles, and thanks to Fogerty,
one of those is a genre more properly associated with another part of the country entirely.
The Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Fortunate Son"
is a blistering takedown of young men who used their money, power, and connections to avoid
serving in combat during the Vietnam War. It was released around the peak of the conflict in 1969,
and thanks to its enduring cultural appeal, it's frequently used in movies set in that era.
Fogerty composed the song in just 20 minutes, as he was inspired by his distaste for the lavish
1968 wedding between Dwight Eisenhower's grandson and Richard Nixon's daughter,
which contrasted sharply with the war's violence and the protests of the day.
But in a way, Fogerty was also a bit of a fortunate son himself. Around the time that
he received his draft notice, he went to an army recruiter and volunteered, hoping to be
rewarded with a less dangerous assignment, and he wound up with a job as a supply clerk in the U.S.
Army Reserve. He went through training at Fort Bragg and was stationed at Fort Knox,
serving stateside for about two years in total. As he told Goldmine Magazine in 1997,
"Luckily for me, I didn't have to go overseas or serve three years in the hard-core Army."
Fogerty's experience is hardly the same as draft-dodging,
but he was certainly spared the worst of the war's horrors.
"I just want to say, what a great country we live in, and God bless
the men and women who protect us."
In the late 60s and early 70s, when rock bands typically favored short and punchy names,
Fogerty fronted a group with a long-winded, vaguely pretentious mouthful of a name. The
three words in "Creedence Clearwater Revival" sounded like they were carefully chosen.
Surely, one would assume, they must have some deeper meaning.
When Saul Zaentz of Fantasy Records signed the band, they were known as the Golliwogs, but Zaentz
hated that name. So he struck a deal: the band would come up with ten new name possibilities,
and he'd come up with another ten, and they'd find one that everybody agreed on. As guitarist
Tom Fogerty recalled in the book Bad Moon Rising, some of the suggestions included Muddy Rabbit,
Deep Bottle Blue, and Credence Nuball and the Ruby. His bandmates became obsessed with that
last one, which was inspired by the real name of a friend of Tom's. Then they started surgically
building a title, adding an "e" to turn "Credence" into "Creedence," thereby suggesting a "creed,"
or a deeply held belief. And Clearwater was taken from an ad for Olympia Beer,
which was produced from "cool, clear water."
“Water: the natural element."
Then John Fogerty put those two words together with "Revival," as the band
felt like they were getting a second wind with their record deal, and the rest is history!
Creedence Clearwater Revival wasn't just about that hard and fast dirty rock 'n' roll, as they
also occasionally released pleasant little ditties that made for great singalongs. Case in point:
the joyful and jaunty "Lookin' Out My Back Door." According to CCR drummer Doug Clifford, John
Fogerty wrote the song for his son Josh, who was just three years old at the time of composition.
"Lookin' Out My Back Door" describes in great detail a wacky, circus-like procession
witnessed by the narrator while he, as the title indicates, looks out his back door.
Among the sights to behold are a cartwheeling giant, musician elephants, flying spoons,
and a magician creating illusions. And as it turns out, Fogerty was inspired by a very un-rock 'n'
roll source: Dr. Seuss's 1937 book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. He knew his
son would enjoy hearing his dad's voice coming out of the radio crooning some goofy lyrics.
Despite the kid-friendly source material, the preponderance of weird events and magical
creatures led many at the time to think the song actually celebrated mind-altering drugs. Vice
President Spiro Agnew even publicly called out the psychedelic references that weren't quite there.
In 1970, Creedence Clearwater Revival took the John Fogerty composition "Travelin' Band"
all the way to Number 2 on the pop chart. It was a fast and hard-rocking song with howling
vocals that spoke to the contemporary rise of heavy metal but also felt like a classic 50s
rocker that someone like Little Richard could've recorded. That evocation was likely no accident,
as Fogerty was a big fan of the flamboyant rock 'n' roll pioneer.
All those great early Little Richard songs like "Tutti Frutti" and "Good Golly, Miss Molly" were
recorded and released by Specialty Records, which signed the performer to an exploitative contract.
The terms of that contract initially paid him $50 for the rights to songs with a half-cent
royalty for each copy sold. Specialty controlled "Good Golly, Miss Molly,"
and in October 1971, the company felt that "Travelin' Band" was
such an egregious rip-off of the Little Richard song that it sued Fogerty for
$500,000 for copyright infringement. Ultimately though, the case was eventually dropped.
John Fogerty's older brother Tom was also a member of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Both Fogertys originally had their own separate Northern California rock bands,
and after Tom's group Spider Webb and the Insects flopped,
he joined John in the group that would eventually become CCR. Tom could sing and write songs, but
John quickly emerged as the more dominant frontman and composer. Only one song that Tom wrote,
"Walk on the Water," made it onto CCR's first album. Frustrated by his lack of
creative input as CCR rose to the top of the rock world, Tom left the band in 1971.
Disputes over the control of CCR's music further drove a wedge between the brothers.
John contributed some work to Tom's 1974 album Zephyr National, but they remained distant until
the end. Tom died from complications of AIDS in 1990 at age 48, reportedly contracting the
disease from a blood transfusion he received after a surgical procedure. Years later, John was able
to come to terms with the relationship. In 2019, he told Ultimate Classic Rock,
"At some point, I made a point to myself of forgiving my brother.
I just felt like I had to do that because he wasn't around for me
to get to work it out with him. I tried but he was so not connected to reality."
Soon after Creedence Clearwater Revival disbanded in 1972, John Fogerty released
a couple of solo albums, but neither sold well. Then in 1976, he put together the album Hoodoo,
but its single "You Got the Magic" tanked. Asylum Records opted to shelve the album,
and it's never been officially released. Fogerty had to deal with that personal failure while
still dealing with lingering issues over what he felt were unfair deals with Saul Zaentz and
CCR'S label Fantasy Records. Between 1975 and 1985, he didn't release any albums at all. He
didn't start recording again until 1983, but then he abandoned an entire album because he
thought it was subpar. Then in 1985, he unleashed Centerfield, in which he worked out some demons.
The songs "Mr. Greed" and "Zanz Kant Danz" were both about Zaentz,
although a slander lawsuit forced him to change the title of the latter to "Vanz Kant Danz".
Nevertheless, the bitterness persisted. Fogerty didn't start playing his CCR songs live until
2004. A year later, he signed a new contract with, ironically enough, Fantasy Records.
Zaentz was out of the picture by this point, as the label had been sold to Concord Music Group.
Creedence Clearwater Revival's fifth album, Cosmo's Factory,
released in 1970, is full of some classic songs, but its title speaks to simmering band turmoil.
CCR used to practice in a Berkeley, California warehouse, and the atmosphere there,
along with how Fogerty made drummer Doug "Cosmo" Clifford relentlessly rehearse,
made it feel like a factory. Fogerty was not only the leader of CCR's musical direction, he
was also the manager, which may not have been the ideal situation. As Clifford told Louder Sound,
"John was brilliant at all the musical things, but he had no experience at managing, particularly at
the level we were involved at. It was a critical mistake, and ultimately it broke up the band."
After CCR split, Fogerty thought that his bandmates betrayed him because they'd sold
their right to vote on band decisions, and thus control of the band, to Saul Zaentz.
While Fogerty and his former bandmates remained distant over the years, their lawyers didn't.
In the 90s, Clifford and bassist Stu Cook toured as Creedence Clearwater Revisited.
Fogerty sued in 1996, as he controlled the CCR name. The parties reached an agreement
in 2001 wherein Clifford and Cook paid Fogerty a royalty for billing themselves by the new name.
They stopped paying that fee in 2011 when Fogerty disparaged Revisited in interviews,
which was a violation of the legal agreement that led to even more lawsuits.
Fogerty came back in a big way with his chart-topping 1985 release Centerfield.
The album's title track is a nostalgic tune about baseball that soon became a standard
played over the loudspeakers at major and minor league ballparks. The song was
inspired by stories that Fogerty's father and older brothers told him about legendary ball
players like Joe DiMaggio and Babe Ruth. As Fogerty recalled to MLB.com in 2010,
"When I was a little kid, there were no teams on the West Coast, so the idea of a Major League
team was really mythical to me. The players were heroes to me as long as I can remember."
Because the San Francisco-born DiMaggio played centerfield, Fogerty came to believe that that
position in Yankee Stadium was, quote, "the most hallowed place in all of the universe." In 2010,
Fogerty was recognized for his unique contribution to the national pastime, as the National Baseball
Hall of Fame honored "Centerfield" on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. Fogerty played live
at the induction ceremony and also donated his custom bat-shaped guitar to the museum.
"When I originally wrote this song, it was basically
an eight-year-old boy saying "thank you" to baseball for all the joy and inspiration."
Not only did John Fogerty resent Fantasy Records boss Saul Zaentz,
he also resented his former Creedence Clearwater Revival bandmates, Stu Cook and Doug Clifford.
That deep, long-standing animosity has prevented CCR from ever reuniting since their 1972 split.
In fact, all four band members have played together again just once,
in 1980 at Tom Fogerty's wedding. In 1993, John Fogerty was given a chance to let
bygones be bygones when incoming president Bill Clinton asked CCR to play at his inauguration,
but Fogerty passed on the gig. As he recalled in his memoir Fortunate Son,
"I said, 'I'm not playing as a band with Creedence. I don't play with those guys.
We will never play as a band again.'"
John Fogerty is a man of his word, and CCR still hasn't played music together, though the
surviving original members did all share a stage in 1993 when they were inducted into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame. But when it came time for the customary performance for the newly inducted act,
Fogerty played with rock legends Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson instead,
as he'd prevented Cook and Clifford from taking the stage.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite musicians are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.