The unease I've felt all these years is now at peace… I'm going to kick butt, says John Fogerty ahead of Glastonbury
WHEN John Fogerty walks out on to Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage tomorrow, he will be taking care of unfinished business – in more ways than one.
After a struggle dating back more than 50 years, he finally owns the publishing rights to the much-loved songs he wrote as Creedence Clearwater Revival's chief creative force.
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'For most of my life, I've been angry, hurt and frustrated,' Fogerty tells me.
'Not owning the songs meant that I didn't control their destiny. I didn't get to say what movie they'd be in or whether they could be used in a commercial.
'But the unease I've felt all these years is now at peace.'
It means he can belt out Proud Mary, Born On The Bayou, Bad Moon Rising and Up Around The Bend with unbridled joy rather than lingering bitterness.
Should the heavens open on Worthy Farm, he will have the perfect response with Who'll Stop The Rain.
If it stays dry, as is forecast, he can unleash Have You Ever Seen The Rain?
Isn't that great for an artist who couldn't bear to sing Creedence songs for the first 25 years of his fight to reclaim his legacy?
As he heads to the Somerset countryside, another motivating factor for Fogerty is that his last visit to Glastonbury, 18 years ago, was less than satisfactory.
Now he says: 'I want to go there and kick butt!' A month's worth of rain fell during festival weekend in 2007, making it the wettest Glastonbury on record and reducing the huge site to a quagmire.
'It rained like a son of a gun,' reports the rock legend who turned 80 in May.
'It was so muddy, and somewhat chaotic, with all these people wearing rubber boots.'
Fogerty recalls playing 'very, very well' despite challenging conditions. 'But we were almost fighting for survival just to stay above water and put on a good show.'
He continues: 'We went on way after our start time and, near the end of our set, a big commotion was going on.
'People were shouting, 'You have to come off!' Proud Mary was meant to be our last song but they pulled the power. That didn't leave a good taste!'
He compares his experience to the festival which took place in August, 1969 — the daddy of them all, Woodstock.
Creedence were one of the headline acts for '3 Days Of Peace & Music' on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in upstate New York, attended by half a million people.
The band were at the peak of their powers, selling more records that year than any other act in the world, INCLUDING The Beatles.
'The rain and mud very much figured into everything at Woodstock,' he says.
When Creedence finally appeared in the early hours of Sunday morning, at least the deluge had subsided.
But Fogerty adds: 'My frustration with Woodstock was that we went on very late.
'The Grateful Dead had been on for well over an hour, a lot of that time with no music coming from the stage. Half the audience was asleep!'
Fifty-six years later, I'm speaking to Fogerty as he puts past disappointments aside to ensure that his appearance at Sir Michael Eavis's dairy farm is a rock 'n' rolling success.
'I want to be great and I'm looking forward to it,' he says, 'especially as I'm playing with my sons [Shane and Tyler].'
I'm meeting Fogerty in the dimly lit basement bar of a hotel in the heart of London's Soho.
The trademark checked flannel shirt is present and correct. He still sports a full head of hair, though perhaps not as impressive as the fulsome mop seen during his early years in the limelight.
Unafraid to be outspoken — just what you'd expect of a rock elder statesman — he soon lights up the room.
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Fogerty is marking the end of his fight to get his songs back with an album called Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years.
As with his live shows, it was made in the company of his sons and it summons all the old fire and brimstone.
He says: 'It was absolutely wonderful to be making this record with Shane and Tyler — in keeping with the tradition of a father passing on his work to his sons.'
Each track comes with the words John's Version in brackets after the title, echoing the Taylor's Version re-recordings by the world's biggest singing star.
At a time when Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Sting have been selling off their back catalogues for vast sums, Fogerty and a certain Ms Swift have 'done the opposite'.
'I even lobbied to call mine Taylor's Version,' he laughs. 'That would have been good marketing.'
On a more serious note, Fogerty says he understands why those other legends have sold their rights.
'Miraculously, they owned their stuff from a young age. They had better representation,' he says.
'A lifelong quest'
'But it's been a quest all my life to gain the ownership I never had.'
It all came about because the head of his small record label Fantasy, the late Saul Zaentz, acquired the rights before Creedence Clearwater Revival hit the big time — and wouldn't let go.
'It was awful,' admits Fogerty. 'If it had been RCA or EMI, some huge conglomerate, and we were a little rock band, you might expect that sort of relationship.
'But this became very personal. I knew Saul Zaentz and he was a nothing, like I was a nothing before I started writing those songs.
"A song like Run Through The Jungle hadn't even been written but it was already owned by Saul because of a piece of paper — the contract I signed.
'So, I had a lot of ill will towards him because he treated me so meanly. He was arrogant and dismissive.'
After years of legal proceedings and despair, Fogerty credits a very special person in his life for helping to get his songs back.
'My dear wife Julie fought for this and made it happen,' he says. 'It has changed my life. It has changed everything.'
Now it's time for a quick Creedence recap.
The four members, Fogerty (lead vocals and guitar), his brother Tom (rhythm guitar), Stu Cook (bass) and Doug Clifford (drums) first got together in 1959.
They met at high school in El Cerrito, a city in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.
As The Blue Velvets, they enjoyed little success and had to endure their name being changed by a record company executive to The Golly***s, which they hated.
Only when they became Creedence Clearwater Revival in January, 1968, did everything start falling into place — creatively if not contractually, that is.
Their self-titled debut album featured their first hit, a cover of Dale Hawkins' Suzie Q, and Fogerty's most significant early composition, Porterville.
He says: 'I wrote Porterville while on active duty in the military, marching around in unbearable heat and going into a hallucinating mental state.
'Everything was coming to life in my mind and that was pretty new for me. The song is a bit autobiographical, especially about my father/son situation. It captured my feelings in those times.'
Porterville is the oldest Fogerty song to get a stirring 2025 reboot on his new album.
Many of the other songs first appeared during his golden year of 1969 when inspiration came thick and fast — and THREE top ten albums were released.
He says: 'The wonderful thing was that it was all organic and created by the band — not some publicity machine or a record label.
'We didn't have a manager, we didn't have a publisher, we weren't on a big label, so I thought I'd just have to do it with music.
'My bandmates became resistant to all this work but I was the one staying up every night, usually until 4am, writing songs.
'I took it on because, in my mind, I was really the only one of us who could do it.
'I kept kicking myself in the butt instead of going on a vacation or acquiring a bunch of material things. It felt like a matter of life and death.'
The first of the three albums, Bayou Country, served notice of Californian Fogerty's infatuation with America's Deep South.
I ask him why he relocated, in his mind at least, to the Mississippi Delta and wrote such songs as Proud Mary and Born On The Bayou.
Fogerty says: 'I was doing that intuitively. Starting with Susie Q, the way I played the guitar seemed to have a Southern feel.
'As for the musical stars I loved, the spookier the better. People like Bo Diddley, Howlin' Wolf and Slim Harpo.
'Spookier the better'
'There was something so mysterious about what they were doing, almost untouchable, but I wanted to go in there and let it resonate.'
He adds with a wry smile: 'I realise this sounds a little strange for a white, middle- class boy but my writing comes from deep inside.'
Fogerty recalls movies set in the South having a big impact — Swamp Water with Dana Andrews and Walter Brennan, The Defiant Ones with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis.
He affirms: 'At later times in my life, after the band broke up and through all kinds of trends, I've always thought that bluesy, supernatural place is where I'm at my best.'
I invite Fogerty to explain how his most famous song, Proud Mary, came into being.
He describes the 'happy confluence' of things going on in his life that 'miraculously came out in that song'.
'I'd just got my honourable discharge from the army. I was very happy about it,' he says.
'Most of us didn't want to go into the jungle [in Vietnam] without knowing why and have to fight an unseen person, perhaps die doing it.'
Fogerty remembers the euphoric moment he arrived home: 'I immediately went into the house and started playing chords on my little guitar that were slightly reminiscent of Beethoven's 5th.
'With that happy feeling, I got to a place where I was 'rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river'. I thought, 'Oh, I like that but what am I writing about?''
He dived into the songbook he'd been keeping and saw the words 'Proud Mary' at the top of the first page.
At the bottom of the page, which yielded Bad Moon Rising and Sinister Purpose as well, was the word 'riverboat'.
Cue a lightbulb moment for Fogerty. 'I thought, 'Proud Mary, oh, that's the name of a boat!'
'There is so much Americana in that idea. Hopes and dreams connected to this boat, which is connected to the Mississippi, which is connected to hundreds of years of folklore.
'I didn't try to make it happen but it converged right there in the perfect way.'
I was a team player but the idea of relinquishing and letting the others write the songs seemed like career suicide.
John Fogerty
Did Fogerty like the Ike & Tina Turner version of Proud Mary which hit No4 in the US singles chart in 1971?
'I loved it,' he replies. 'The first time I heard it, I was in the car. It was dark, somewhere around seven o'clock, so it must have been winter, and it came on the radio.
'I'd been a Tina fan for years. In fact, since hearing It's Gonna Work Out Fine at a club [in 1961], I was always pulling for her.'
Proud Mary took pride of place on Bayou Country and the hits kept on rolling through the next four Creedence LPs — Green River (1969), Willy And The Poor Boys (1969), Cosmo's Factory (1970) and Pendulum (1970).
One of Fogerty's best songs was searing Fortunate Son which took aim at rich families paying for their children to avoid the draft while poor kids went off to fight.
By way of explanation, he says: 'I grew up in a lower- middle-class situation — not at poverty level but many times it felt like it.
My parents divorced and my mom had five boys to raise. There was certainly an element of us being behind the eight ball.
'We had a basement that flooded every time it rained. It felt like a semi-prison at times.
'The funny thing is, I've earned millions of dollars in my life, right? But I still feel like that kid in that room.'
By the time of 1972's disastrous Mardi Gras album, which shared songwriting duties rather than rely solely on Fogerty, irreparable cracks appeared — and Creedence split in circumstances that he likens to a bitter divorce.
'I was pretty sure that none of the other fellas could come up with anything like I was doing,' he says. 'Before a rehearsal, I'd say, 'Does anybody have anything?' They would look at their toes, so I just kept going.
'I was a team player but the idea of relinquishing and letting the others write the songs seemed like career suicide.'
Things came to a head at a band meeting in late 1970 when Fogerty's brother Tom said he wouldn't be in the band 'if it stays the way it is'.
'I had to relent because I realised there would be no band otherwise. So, I gave everybody what they wanted, then it fell apart anyway.'
Tom Fogerty was first to leave and sadly died aged just 48, never reconciling with his younger brother.
John says: 'When Tom left, it broke my heart.
'He was clearly disliking me and even said publicly that Saul Zaentz was his best friend. That hurt me and drove my anger.
'When Tom passed away, we had not come to grips with the situation but, years later, I made a point in my heart and my mind to forgive him.
'I realise we both messed up but I expect to meet Tom in the afterlife, and that everything will be joyful.'
Speaking of joyful, it's the perfect word to describe John Fogerty's return to Glastonbury.
Festival-goers will be surprised at how many of his songs they can sing along to.
Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'
JOHN FOGERTY
★★★★☆
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