by John Fogerty
But their case is done for the day. Because the husband can’t go on. I see the attorney look over at the woman and she’s got her arms folded. She’s a tough one. And the husband’s broken down, just blubbering. So the judge goes boom, boom, with the gavel. “We’ll adjourn until two weeks from now.”
We’re all just sitting there, and the clerk comes up to read the next case—this is God’s honest truth. He says, “This is the case of Galen Robert versus Edith Lucile Fogerty. Can we hear the case? Are either of the participants present?” Well, that’s my mom and dad, of course. It had been four or five years and they hadn’t finalized the divorce.
They say the name Fogerty twice, and the judge asks, “Are any of the parties here?” And somebody says, “No, your honor, they’re not here.” And the judge says, “Okay, we’ll continue this at a later date.”
But the damage has been done. I thought, How in the world did that spaceship ever land on me? I gotta be in court and hear that? With my classmates?
So we get back in our vehicles for the trip home and I remember that Sandy, one of the girls, said to me, “The Fogertys they named in court—is that your parents?”
And I said no, tryin’ to act cool. I got real… stiff. Not myself. They had no idea that it was my family. I pulled it off… or maybe I didn’t.
The kids were all jumping up and down in the back of the station wagon and I was acting kind of weird. Not like a kid. Obviously I was in shock. The others thought I was kind of snooty because I wasn’t laughing. And somebody made the comment, “Oh, yeah—he’s too mature for us.” Kids can be so unaware of how much, and how little, they know.
My dad stayed angry ’til the end. Late in his life he lost a leg to diabetes. He was in and out of the hospital, and we were over there to move him out of his apartment. All the brothers got together to help.
There was his old television, from way back in the day, in a metal case made to look like wood grain. And the metal had all these big dents in it, and in some places even perforations. I recognized that from before. When I was a kid my dad would get so pissed trying to make the picture come in he’d give the TV a few whacks.
Back then we had taken a trip to Montana and had rented a trailer and hitched it to the back of our ’56 Buick. A little trailer with a kitchen and a couple of beds. There was a little compartment over each wheel with a door that hung down and locked. This was where they stored a hose for filling the water tank in the trailer and other small essentials. We noticed that the door had several dings on it, almost like it had been hit with a sharp instrument. Well, a week or two later we were deep into our trip, perhaps in the middle of Yellowstone National Park. The car was overheating, so my dad would have to use the hose to siphon water from the trailer into the radiator. He parked the car and we all went back to help. The door was open and the hose was gone. We were screwed! Apparently, the latch on the door was faulty and wouldn’t stay closed. My dad got really angry and started hitting the door with a hatchet. Then it dawned on us kids: those marks we had noticed on the door were the same marks my dad was now making with the hatchet. Apparently, the last poor guy with this trailer had gone through the exact same thing.
Now Dad started to kick the trailer. There were a couple of expletives coming out of his mouth. He may have even had the hatchet in his hand. There’s my dad, just kicking the crap out of this trailer. Most of the time my dad was very thoughtful and peaceful and calm. I was kind of shocked—a kid watching his dad lose it. This was a whole nother guy—a guy that, truth be told, was a lot like me. I’ve had a temper since I was very young. I can remember another kid coming up to me during kickball and saying, “You know, you’re gonna have to learn how to control your temper.” It was noticed by my teachers in grammar school too.
So years later, when we were moving my dad, there’s that old banged-up TV. This was some time after Creedence had broken up, and it wasn’t like I was livin’ on Happy Street. But I looked at that TV and realized that my dad was seventy and he was still that way. I thought to myself, I don’t want to get old and die being so ornery, so angry.*
Being a teenager has to be the toughest time for almost everyone. Especially if there’s anything you perceive as wrong in your world. I felt put-upon, unworthy. Behind the eight ball. Divorce was an immense failure to me. Huge. It just didn’t happen to good families.
There was an overall aloofness that I would have. The fact that our economics really went downhill after the divorce certainly made it worse. I felt that I was at the bottom end of the social totem pole. I sure wasn’t as bad off as some guy living in a shack in Mississippi with no plumbing and no electricity. But somehow I felt poor. Between that and my parents’ divorce it was almost too much to bear.
After I’d been at St. Mary’s for ninth grade and half of tenth, one of the teachers said to my mom, “John seems so sad, reserved. He’s just really quiet. Is there something wrong? Is Johnny okay?” And my mom would try to say, “Oh, no—he’s just thoughtful.” Even I would say it. Most all of the pictures of me as a kid show that thoughtful, pensive side. I’d always have my eyebrows knotted together. Sadness may not be quite the right word, but if that’s not the one I don’t know what is.
I was ashamed of the house we lived in. The furnace never really worked right—it was run-down. This was a middle-class suburban neighborhood, but we had the worst house on the block. Around the seventh or eighth grade, I moved into that concrete basement that flooded every winter. There would be an inch and a half of water on my floor, and I got to laying two-by-fours so I could get from outside my room to my bed without stepping in the water.
I had a clock radio. My first radio had been one of those art deco plastic ones—a funky color, bluish gray, a Philips or an Emerson. Then, with my paper route money, I upgraded and got a clock radio that plugged in and was supposedly going to get me up—it had an alarm. At some point the knobs came off. I liked to take things apart, so I was probably to blame, but now it had no knobs—just metal posts. One morning I was standing in the water and decided to turn on the radio. When I grabbed the metal posts, I got quite a jolt. I’m lucky it didn’t kill me.
I liked to listen to the radio before school, so when the alarm went off, dang it if I didn’t figure out how to propel myself forward from the bed, stand on the little wooden sill on my closet to avoid the cement and water, turn off the alarm, and fall back to bed listening to the music. Every morning that was my little dance. Directly above my bed there was a metal grate for the furnace, so when my mom was leaving for work in the morning, she’d stomp on that grate and go, “Oh, John! Oh, John! Wake up!” Thump, thump, thump.
You know that Brian Wilson song “In My Room”? It’s the truth. Your room is your sanctuary. That basement room was my place to be me—“I’m not hiding, but I’m in my room.” Upstairs with the family was a bit chaotic, challenging, whereas in my room I had Duane Eddy, Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, the Coasters. They were in the windows—literally. We didn’t have window shades for the basement, and if people in the next house were in their garage, they could see right into my room, so I put my record albums up to cover the windows.
Music was my friend. I absolutely loved to listen to it. I surrounded myself with it, thought about it all day. I think my interest only intensified after my parents split. There was joy in music. And for some reason, I don’t know how or why, that joy only confirmed what I’d known since I was small: that it was for me.
CHAPTER 3
My Influences
BY THE TIME I got to the fifth grade, I thought, I need to be able to earn some money. I think my mom was giving me a quarter for an allowance. At that rate, I was never going to get anywhere.
The Oakland Tribune had to be delivered at 4 a.m. on Sunday, but you needed an adult to take you around in a car, and my mom wasn’t going to do that. So I got a paper route at the Berkeley Gazette, the small paper where my dad had worked, and they didn’t deliver on Sundays. The place to pick up the papers was o
nly two blocks from my house, right by the cemetery up at the top of Fairmont Avenue, and my route was just down all the streets across from Harding Grammar School.
My route was only about thirty-five papers. If things were okay, I’d make twenty, twenty-five dollars a month. But it turned out that some people were unscrupulous. I had thirty-five customers, but sometimes I’d get stuck with forty newspapers. Those were called extras, yet you were financially responsible for them. You had to get on it, call the Berkeley Gazette and say, “You’re givin’ me five extra papers. I don’t have forty customers—I only have thirty-five.” I think they did this sort of routinely, because it kept happening to me. This went on for months. They’d stop, and then they’d start again.
Finally I’d had enough. I turned the tables on them. I’d receive thirty-one papers for thirty-five people. Then I’d go right to the front of the Louis store, where they’d have the papers for sale in a little stand. Customers would take a paper, drop their ten cents in the box. Honor system. Well, I’d go over there and take the four I needed and go off and deliver them. I did this until I got my money back, not a cent more.
I was really mad. But my paper route money allowed me to buy things, and the things I liked to buy were records.
Forty-fives were the coin of the realm. If there was a hit song you liked, you bought the single. The very first time I ever bought 45s, it was the Platters’ “The Great Pretender” and “At My Front Door” by the El Dorados. They were Christmas presents for my brothers Jim and Tom. Tom and I shared music even pre–rock and roll. There was a song called “Billy’s Blues” by Billy Stewart. Tom really liked that song. This was before the Internet days, and man, you could not find that record anywhere. So I went to my mom-and-pop record store at the mall, Louis Gordon, and even though it was a year and a half late, I got them to order that record, and I gave it to Tom for his birthday. I knew it was precious, better than a million dollars, because you just couldn’t get it.
I can hear and see the little record player I’d bought with paper route money as if it were yesterday. It was red and white and had three speeds. That was a boon to guitar players, because you could slow down 45s to 33 and try to learn the solos. The record player had a funky speaker. Certain records, like “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, really skipped, so you’d have to put a quarter or a battery on top of the tonearm. I liked to put the first Elvis album on when I took a shower.
I first saw Elvis on the Dorsey Brothers’ TV show in January 1956. He had that whole juvenile delinquent thing that kids love. I was a kid, so I was drawn to the danger of it. I don’t think I was playing guitar yet. After the first or second time I saw him, I was standing there in front of a mirror with a broom, practicing the sneer. I was hypnotized without even realizing why.
It was the other side of “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” that really grabbed me. I was up visiting my dad, and we were in some little grocery store with a jukebox when I heard “My Baby Left Me.” I went, “What is that?” I ran over there to see. “It’s Elvis!” “My Baby Left Me” is one of the greatest rock and roll records ever made. That guitar was just… so… great. Man, it had attitude and attack. It was a big part of what made the record special. Scotty Moore invented rock and roll guitar. Even though I didn’t know his name and I wasn’t a musician yet, I just knew right then: “Whatever that is, that’s what I wanna do.”
I tried to buy the first Elvis album while I was at my dad’s house in Santa Rosa. I had four dollars and fourteen cents. I walked all the way to the mall and they were sold out. I ended up buying Bill Haley’s album Rock Around the Clock. The guitar playing on the song “Rock Around the Clock” was way ahead of everybody else. It was kind of jazzy—Danny Cedrone was older, more advanced than your average rock and roll guy. It’s only been in the last dozen or so years that I can play that solo!
A week later, I got that Elvis album. That and the Bill Haley album I knew backwards and forwards.
I saw Elvis at the Oakland Coliseum in 1970, when he was just speeding through the songs—the whole Vegas thing with the karate moves. Elvis had recorded “Proud Mary,” which, of course, was a tribute and an honor, but it seemed like he hurried through it. I guess if I were more tactful I wouldn’t say that. Yes, it was great to have your idol do your song, but you just wished that he had killed it. I never got to meet Elvis, and I really wish I had. Elvis got crazy, but he just lost his way. And we have all done that, whether a little or a lot.
I took Elvis very personally. Even as a kid, standing there at the record store, paper route money in hand, I was really thinking about value. I thought about buying an Elvis 45, but Elvis was in the “Big Hunk O’ Love” / “Doncha’ Think It’s Time” phase. And I was already thinking, Yeah, but Elvis isn’t really rock and roll now. This was in 1959, still the beginning of Elvis’s career! In my mind I had noticed a kind of softness, a pop ethic in Elvis, and if I’m going to a desert island, I better have rock and roll. So this time I bought “Red River Rock” by Johnny and the Hurricanes instead.
Still, Elvis was Elvis, and in the fifties you had Elvis and you had Pat Boone. Elvis was obviously cool, but Pat Boone just… wasn’t. Now, don’t get me wrong: Pat Boone made records that I actually like. “Bernadine.” “Love Letters in the Sand.” “Moody River” was outstanding. Then there are the really sappy ones, like “April Love.” I used to hear that song in my head at the oddest moments. Much later in life, I’d be hunting up in Oregon, climbing up a long, long ridge uphill, I’m sweating, out of breath, and I’d take that first step onto the flat ground on top, and suddenly there it would be in my head: dumdumdum DUM… “Aaaaaapril love!” I’d go, “Where did that come from?!” Like it had been waiting to happen—my own personal soundtrack.
Pat seemed like a really decent fellow, but he was almost too nice. And so was his music. I sure didn’t want to be sappy, but I didn’t want to be a bad guy either. In those days, it was, “Do you wiggle like Elvis or do you croon like Pat? Which gang are you with?” I struggled with that. Well, not really.
Through Elvis I discovered more Sun records. “Ooby Dooby” by Roy Orbison and “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins. As an eleven-year-old, I had the same exact connection with Carl Perkins that the Beatles did. There were times when I actually thought Carl was way higher up than Elvis, because Carl could play and sing and write songs. That combination made a big impression on me. In baseball, Willie Mays was what they called a five-tool player. To me, Carl was the musical equivalent.
Go back to the “Boppin’ the Blues” / “All Mama’s Children” and “Blue Suede Shoes” / “Honey Don’t” singles, and listen to that twangy thing in Carl’s voice. His singing is killer! Those two singles are still, like… perfection. I bought “Blue Suede Shoes” three or four times because I was wearing them out! I’m still astonished at how great “Blue Suede Shoes” sounds. There’s so much air. And the groove of the band, that country boogie thing—whew. Just untouchable.
I met Carl in Memphis on my 1986 tour. It was like meeting God. He said the nicest thing. Chips Moman, the producer, was with him, and Carl said to Chips, “The way this guy writes, imagine what Sam would’ve done with him if he’d walked into Sun.” Here’s somebody I idolized, Carl Perkins, giving me some cred? Talking about Sam Phillips and Sun Records and me? What a dream. I just ate that up.
Years later I was doing a fund-raiser for Bill Clinton, and out of the blue, Carl showed up. He mentioned that he was making a record with Tom Petty. I wasn’t going to let this opportunity go by. I just looked at him, my face a question mark, and I said, “Well… ?” And he looked at me and said, “Well, John, I’d love it if you’d come and do ‘All Mama’s Children’ with me.” Carl knew that was my favorite.
Our version is not as good as his original—how could it be? But I’m glad I got to do it. Especially because of this memory: While we were recording, I came back from the powder room to find Carl sitting there with a Stratocaster, and he was just rippin’, playi
ng this really mean, nasty stuff. Just vicious guitar. I was taken aback. He was sixty-four, he’d already had some surgery and a heart attack, and I was thinking of him as older, vaguely fragile. And here he was, just slayin’ it, in tone, vibrato, and attitude. For a moment I could not believe it.
Then my mind did this little double take: Well of course Carl can play like that—he’s one of the two or three guys who started it all. He was right there. Why should I be surprised that he sounds that way?
Carl passed in 1998. And to this day, I still have his number in my phone.
I’ve mentioned hearing the blues at age eight. As I was growing up listening to KWBR, it was a flood: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Elmore James, John Lee Hooker. Wolf had a gigantic influence on my singing—“Big wheel keep on toinin’.” But I didn’t realize it at the time. It just seemed natural to me.
Fast-forward to August 1968, and Howlin’ Wolf is opening for Creedence, which mystifies me even now. I stood in the audience and watched Wolf’s whole set. He was a big guy, and he’d point that finger at you. I think he was sitting down most of the time, but this was not some old guy going, “Blah, blah, blah”—this was life and death. Hubert Sumlin was on guitar, a 335 Gibson, and he was badass. He had a youthful look, like Floyd Patterson when he won the heavyweight championship. We got to go in the dressing room, and I felt like a little kid. The Wolf smoked Kools and so did I at the time. We shared a smoke. I’m sure he was amused. He looked at me like he was going to reach down and pat me on the head.