by John Fogerty
Tom sang, Doug played the drums, and I played the piano, not Stu. I don’t think he was on that one, unless he played—brrrrring!—that opening chord on guitar. When I was writing it, I sang it a little harsher than Tom did on the record, with a few more hiccups in the vocal. Tom sang it pure and sweet. It’s still really cool. Mom liked “Have You Ever Been Lonely.” That was a pretty good song. I actually sent away and got that copyrighted and joined BMI.
With hindsight, it’s funny and pretty sad that way back then I somehow knew how to do this at sixteen.
Around the tenth grade I hooked up with Bob DeSousa, who ran a studio called Sierra Sound Laboratories in Berkeley. I just looked it up in the phone book. I called and said, “I want to get into recording.” Bob let me come over, bring my guitar. And experiment. I had to take the bus to get down there, and it became a regular thing. Bob knew how to do slapback echo with a tape machine and he enjoyed trying to come up with sounds. I hung out at the studio quite a bit, got in a lot of hours of experience. A lot of it was fooling around. I’d bang around on the piano, trying to figure out where you mic it so it sounds good. I was Bob’s guinea pig. Bob seemed pretty amazed that I was able to just jump in and add harmony parts to the background vocal parts and even a bit of guitar.
And he let me experiment with the equipment. The Blue Velvets recorded a little Floyd Cramer–type instrumental called “Happy Little Thing” there. I think Doug Clifford named that one. And a guitar instrumental called “Bittersweet.” I also remember a mournful instrumental called “Last Man on Alcatraz”—the idea being that the prison forgot about one of ’em when they closed the place down. Once Bob saw that I could play the piano a little bit, he even hired me for a session or two as a country guy, playing Floyd Cramer licks. I really liked Bob because he didn’t look down his nose at me, all of sixteen years old.
Given how into recording I was, you won’t be surprised to learn that I had been fascinated with tape recorders from an early age. Bob Carleton and I were a little team in grade school. We had started out imitating Stan Freberg records, lip-synching “Christmas Dragnet” for our class, one of us in a trench coat and hat like a cop, the other playing the interviewer. I still remember the words to that. In 1956, Buchanan and Goodman had this comedy record, “The Flying Saucer,” where they told a story intercut with little bits of rock and roll hits. To do some stuff like that, Bob and I used this Wollensak recorder that Tom had brought home. One skit was called “The Daytime Ghost.” The ghost was out of sync with Halloween because he appeared in the daytime. Bob and I wrote the story together and chose the songs. We both knew our records, but I was that kid who knew every line of every song, and I did all the talking.
I got a Sony add-a-track recorder in the tenth grade. It allowed you to overdub onto the original track. I had spent the previous summer babysitting my younger brothers at my dad’s house in Santa Rosa to buy the recorder, which I had seen at Louis Gordon Music. My dad reneged on the deal, and you can bet I was really angry about that. But if he wasn’t going to help, I was going to do it the right way. I think I finally bought it with paper route money.
Les Paul had inspired me with his overdubbing. On his recordings where Mary Ford was the singer, she harmonized with herself. Sometimes she harmonized with a whole vocal group: on “Vaya con Dios” or “How High the Moon.” Mary was the vocal group; Les was the band. They sounded amazing.
The Sony add-a-track was a gray-tweed-and-vinyl-covered thing. It was a revelation for me, since I could now capture what I was hearing in my head. I used it exclusively from then on. All through high school I’d be down in my bedroom recording. I even used the bathroom as an echo chamber. I spent hundreds of hours harmonizing with myself, and then adding guitar tracks. I learned an awful lot about what sounds rock and roll, what sounds true. I guess you could say that was the beginning of my one-man-band deal.
I managed to do a lot of recordings that were very much like the Ventures, with little harmony lead parts. I did folk songs, like “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” I remember being down there in my room recording “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” We had a small house, and you couldn’t do anything without everybody else hearing you. Mom later made a comment: “Gee, what is that you’re doing?” “Oh, that’s an Elvis song.” “That’s wonderful!” It was great to get some feedback.
In 1963, the Blue Velvets were playing a high school reunion for the class of ’53. At some point in the night, we played “Green Onions.” And this fellow comes up, R. B. King. He happens to be a black guy. I only make reference to this because there was a feeling—especially among white kids—that the more soulful stuff came out of black people. And he starts talking to us about “Green Onions”—immediately after we played it, I think. This is only worth mentioning because what he told us was the truth—the truth like a glass of ice water in your face.
For years and years I have said that Booker T. and the MGs were the greatest rock and roll band of all time. Obviously most people are going to say the Beatles, but it’s what R. B. King was talking about: no one ever had it like Booker T. and the MGs. I’m talking about soulfulness, deep feeling, especially in between the beats. How to say a lot with a little: that’s one rule that will always work—in music, on records, on the radio. Was Steve Cropper scaring Chet Atkins? No. But I daresay, between the two, most people would want to be Steve Cropper, and we adopted Booker T. and the MGs as our idols. Even after we were pretty famous and selling millions of records. The solo in “Proud Mary”? That’s me doing my best Steve Cropper.
When R. B. came up, he got right to it and said, “Well y’know, when you’re playin’ that ‘Green Onions,’ there’s somethin’ missing.” He said that phrase two or three times—“somethin’ missing.” I’m thinking, Well… we’re young, we’re just a trio, and of course we don’t play as good as Booker T. and the MGs. He didn’t say, “You white boys suck.” But R. B. King, in his gentle way, was saying, “There’s somethin’ in between the notes.”
Allow me to explain. Compare the Hank Ballard and the Midnighters original first recording of “The Twist” to the Chubby Checker version.* Ballard’s has that feel. Many years later, I sat in with Hank in some New York City club after his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I mentioned to the bandleader how the Blue Velvets could never pull off that rhythm. His face lit up. He said, “Oh—you mean sand and Vaseline.” I thought that was the greatest way to put it. And that’s what R. B. King was trying to tell me in the gentlest way.
Some people can play a shuffle and some people cannot. I hate to say it’s as simple as a cultural or racial thing, but more often than not, it’s the white people who can’t do shuffle. I’ve found there are exceptions: Chris Layton, who was with Stevie Ray Vaughan, is one of the all-time great shuffle players in the world. And I’d like to think I’ve been able to do it pretty good over the years. So later I tried to explain what R. B. King was talking about to Doug and Stu—particularly Doug—and I used that phrase all through the evolution of the Blue Velvets: the shuffle beat. But it’s so much easier to play than to explain.
A few years after the R. B. King incident, the night before I was going on active army duty for six months, we’re playing at a club outside Sacramento—I believe it was the Trophy Room. I’m not in the happiest of moods. I’m fairly nostalgic and down, leaving the next day. Who knows what’s going to happen?
We’re about to do a song, and I turn around to Doug and I say, “Play a shuffle beat.”
And he says, “What’s a shuffle beat?” What’s a shuffle beat? It was like I’d been punched in the gut. You might as well have said, “What’s a guitar?” This was 1967. I had used that phrase—“shuffle beat”—since 1958. I was speechless.
I must say, I avoided shuffle like the plague for years and years and years, as much as I needed it around. I’d be in rehearsal with the Creedence guys, and there it would be again: the shuffle problem. No sand and Vaseline. Sometimes I’d get frust
rated and angry, particularly at Doug. Young musicians tend to rush. If it’s a fast song, they tend to get excited and be a half block ahead of the beat before everybody else. Or they drag, especially on slower, funky things. I could almost see the ghost of R. B. King going, “There’s somethin’ missing here.”
There’s a couple of times when Creedence did play a shuffle beat more or less pretty good. One was our cover of “Before You Accuse Me.” It’s not Bo Diddley, but for some guys from El Cerrito, it’s pretty good. We did this little two-sided narrative for the fans called “45 Revolutions per Minute (Part 2),” and it included a song in the background called “Thank You, Mr. J” that had a shuffle beat, and that was pretty tight.
I was pretty hard on Doug. I still am. Timing. In the eighties I was hunting up in Oregon. This was long after Creedence had broken up. And I had this dream. Our tent was on Miller Creek, and to get across it, you had to step on a path of rocks and logs—otherwise you’d land in the water.
So in my dream the rocks are representing the beats in music. I’m in the woods with Doug Clifford, and I step on all the rocks and get to the other side of Miller Creek. Then here comes Doug, ker-splish, ker-splash, missing the rocks and stepping in the water.
And I’m going, “No, no, no, you step on the rock. On the beat.” And I woke up. My dream was about timing. About being on beat. There was so much of not being on the beat in the early days. What I’m trying to get at is, all was not lost, but it took a ton of effort, a ton of persistence, to get there.
CHAPTER 5
The… Golliwogs?
MY SENIOR YEAR I almost didn’t graduate. My job at the gas station really interfered. Somehow I scraped through. I had been accepted at the University of San Francisco but didn’t have the money to go there. Contra Costa College, a community college, was the only road that looked open—to me, anyway—grade-wise and money-wise. I followed the crowd from El Cerrito High to Contra Costa College, those that weren’t going off to Stanford or Harvard or anywhere else.
At some point in my life, I thought I might somehow pose as a history teacher. I still love history. But I hadn’t even set junior college up to be very good, and it wasn’t. I wasn’t pushing, fighting to be there. When you’re young, you need assistance and advice, a little nudge to get going. You can’t just sit around and stare at the wall. I didn’t really get guidance. I didn’t even have it together enough to get the official dropout W, like you’re supposed to, so it doesn’t count against you. I just stopped going.
That’s why I try so hard now to help my kids. One of my boys is at the University of Southern California, and another is at CalArts. I say that with a lot of pride. They’re succeeding in a world where I didn’t. (Shane has since graduated from USC and Tyler will graduate in the spring.)
When I say things like this, my wife, Julie, grabs my hand and goes, “I think you did okay, John.” But to me? Some big part of me still feels unworthy. Feature that. Wow.
In March 1964, the local PBS station ran this special, produced by the San Francisco Chronicle music critic Ralph J. Gleason, called Anatomy of a Hit. It was about Fantasy Records, a dinky little company in the Bay Area having its first hit record despite having been in business since the forties. It followed the rise of Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” which I loved, and this was a look into all the personalities involved. This TV special was in three installments running a week apart, so there was time to talk and think about it before the next episode. Tom and I considered Fantasy a jazz label and didn’t think it would be a place that we should even knock on the door. But after seeing this program, we talked some more, and I decided, “Well, I’m just gonna go over there.”
San Francisco was always a bit of a mystery to me as far as navigation. I was eighteen years old, and I’d probably gone once or twice by myself and had been there a few times with my mom. That was the big city, and you didn’t just venture over there casually, even though it was only across the bridge from El Cerrito.
Once I found the address on Treat Avenue, I pumped myself up and went over. I pressed the buzzer, went up a little flight of stairs, and there was an office with a counter and some machinery and a typewriter, and somebody standing there talking to one of the guys I’d seen on the TV show, Max Weiss.
I had some manners, so I waited. I listened to the guy talk about all his big songs and all the places he’d been, dropping names like Johnny Mathis and Andy Williams. And Max keeps saying, “All right, Colonel… All right, Bright Eyes.” And I’m thinking, If you know all these people and they’re all into your songs, why are you standing here? It sounded like common show-business puffery.
When the other guy left, I introduced myself. And somewhere in the next ten minutes, Max called me both Colonel and Bright Eyes. He did that for the rest of our relationship. It was his way of treating the high and mighty and the low and full of it equally. Max was the resident hipster. He had a beard and sometimes wore funny Russian hats. I think he even had a fez. I guess I thought of him as a beatnik. Three Weiss brothers owned Fantasy: Max, Sol, and Milton, the bookkeeper. Saul Zaentz was the sales manager then.
Max took me into another office and listened to some of the instrumentals that I had brought. After three or four, he said, “Do you have any songs with words?” I’d been writing songs with words since I was eight. So I said, “Well, sure!” Max said, “Songs with words do a lot better than songs that don’t have words.” And he opened up a copy of Billboard, and the first five songs on the chart were all by the Beatles. (Yes, it was that historic week in April of 1964.) So we made another appointment, and I came back with songs with words.
We started recording songs for Fantasy Records. Later we signed a contract with the label in a very dark and noisy Italian restaurant. I couldn’t read the menu, let alone the contract. I was underage anyway. All of us were, except Tom.
I also worked at Fantasy as a shipping clerk. I had to box up the records and call a delivery service, and a big truck would come and take our three boxes of albums. Maybe three hundred records a week were going out that door. It sure wasn’t a lot. They had a shed with all the album cover stock—people like Mongo Santamaria and Korla Pandit. Fantasy clearly didn’t have a clue about rock and roll. I know we went to lunch with Max a few times on Saturdays, and he’d write down on the check “Vince Guaraldi.” I think it was a tax write-off.
Fantasy had an R & B label called Galaxy, with songs like “Part Time Love” by Little Johnny Taylor. Little Johnny struck me as one of the old-fashioned stars—he’d call Saul Zaentz “Mr. Saul.” Rodger Collins, who had the hit “She’s Looking Good,” was more my friend. Rodger was an entertainer. He’d make a guitar talk like it was asking a question. He played a Strat and had a Fender Super Reverb amp that was big and loud. He was a guy I was watching, because he was further along down the path than I was. I heard his record at the rifle range when I was in the army. To jack everybody up, get them happy about shooting targets with real bullets, they’d put on “She’s Looking Good.”
Fantasy recorded us in this lean-to out back. A big, open room. I think it had been a storage shed in the past and was connected to the main building. The tape recorder was right next door, in the warehouse where they kept the record albums. The doorway between the tape machine and the lean-to was a strange deal. They had cut out a hole in the drywall about the size of a normal door but had left the wooden struts, the frame, in the open space. It was explained to me that they would have to pay higher taxes to have a real door there (I have often thought about that syndrome—either you’re in it or you ain’t…). Because of that cheap-ass attitude, we were forced to squeeze between the two-by-fours with our instruments. There were no windows and you couldn’t see the engineer—you just yelled. We kind of ragged on the whole setup. I remember recording “Fight Fire” when Doug was playing the maracas and hit the microphone right in the middle of the take. Things were just so funky.
By early summer of ’64, we had recorded
some songs. Max, the mad Russian, acted as our mentor and our engineer. We had all just graduated from high school, and Stu wasn’t there for those sessions. I don’t know how many songs we recorded, but we ended up concentrating on two of them: “Don’t Tell Me No Lies” and “Little Girl (Does Your Mamma Know?).” Tom was the singer then. I remember overdubbing some tambourine and some tuned-down guitar that was supposed to sound like bass since we had no bass player.
Tom and I cowrote the songs, like nearly all the songs that came pre-Creedence. We hadn’t joined forces as songwriters until after Lennon and McCartney. Before that, if he wrote a song, it was his song, and if I wrote a song, it was my song. On “Have You Ever Been Lonely,” the writing credit is “Johnny Fogerty.” The Beatles hadn’t happened yet. Then we both got the idea: “Oh yeah—they write together.” Tom’s writing alias was Rann Wild. I really liked the singer Dobie Gray, who had the hit “Look at Me,” and I liked the name Toby, so I became Toby Green. We were Wild and Green—songwriters.
Rock and roll was in a weird place before the Beatles came along. I had gotten so disenchanted, hearing the Singing Nun or the fifteenth rehash of “Can I Get a Witness,” and I’d gotten restless down on the farm. So much so that around Christmastime in ’63, I was down in Oakland, shopping, and I realized, “Oh my God, I’m listening to KSFO!” That was the “easy listening” station: you’d hear John Gary crooning “Once Upon a Time,” and then they’d play Bing Crosby. Early that year, in May—I think it was on KFRC—I heard this song, “Please Please Me,” by the Shields—at least that’s what I thought they had called them. I heard the song every day after school for a week in my senior year, driving to work at the gas station. I thought, Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Then they turned the record over and played “From Me to You”—dahr dahr dahr dahar dar dar. I was gone. I went, God, what is that? That record killed me. Then they disappeared. Nothin’. All gone.