Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  The next January, suddenly they’re playing the Shields all over the radio. They’re gonna be on Ed Sullivan. It’s not Elvis: it’s a group, a whole band, and by now I know what they’re really called. And girls are screaming for a… band? I was eighteen when that happened. I thought, Man, this is the coolest, and went down to the store and bought every record with “Beatles” on it. They were seamlessly going from this music to that: Arthur Alexander, Carl Perkins. People forget that part. They were coming from the heart of rock and roll.

  I can tell you I didn’t feel jealous—“Hey, they’re taking our music!” We needed a shot in the arm in the USA, and they were shaking things up. That whole burst of energy. All of a sudden there’s all these people who are really, really good. One after another: the Stones, Kinks, Searchers, Billy J. Kramer, Gerry and the Pacemakers. Remember: two months before January of 1964, Kennedy had been assassinated. When JFK died, it really punched me in the gut. I loved the Kennedys—all of ’em. For all their very human failings, it seems to me that they wore their wealth and their position of power in a much different way than almost anybody else that’s ever been powerful and political. They had ideas that were very much for the good of the common man, and for the good of America as a society. And it cost them all very dearly. I was in the lunchroom at Contra Costa College when they announced Kennedy’s assassination. I was stunned, in shock. Then here comes the Beatles. Thank God for the Beatles.

  Put it this way: there were some little shows I did—with my band or just with pickup guys at a party—where I’d actually wear a Beatles wig and do three or four of their songs. I remember some older person saying, “Tell John he doesn’t need to do that,” as if I was going to be an Elvis impersonator for the rest of my life. It was fun, because they were fun. Quick, instant, like sea monkeys—put the wig on and “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” We knew all their songs, and songs they never did, because you could kind of do ’em like the Beatles. I was, as you’d say, totally down with it.

  A lot of things happened while we waited for our Fantasy single to come out. At this point, the band was not really meeting all that often other than for recording. I don’t know how many times I played with Doug and Stu in our high school senior year—once, maybe twice. It wasn’t a lot. At some point, Doug and I did a spate of frat parties. That was just for fun—half the time I’m sure the music wasn’t very good because Doug and I were drunker than skunks.

  When we got to the frat house to set up, the frat president would always say, “Hey, we wanna hustle the chicks, so you guys keep it slow. You just keep playin’ slow songs.”

  “Oh, you mean like ‘In the Still of the Night’?”

  “Yeah, perfect! Like that!”

  Right. Then we’d start, and maybe in the first half hour we’d play one slow number. After that, no more slow songs. Nobody really wanted that. We’d play “Wooly Bully,” “Wipe Out,” “Louie Louie,” “Money,” and “Twist and Shout” over and over. That’s what they really wanted—a big, drunken howl. Doug and I had a running joke at those shows. As one of us was coming back from a pee break, we’d surprise each other with the house fire extinguisher. Blam! It would be all over me. I’d look like a flocked Christmas tree.

  That summer of ’64 I went up to Portland, Oregon, with Mike Burns and Tom Fanning, who were both in architecture school at UC Berkeley, and stayed there for about a month. I had met these two earlier that year, and I believe we had played a couple of parties together. They were great guys and good musicians, but I think they were on a career path to design buildings. Mike had the idea for us to go up to Oregon, audition a couple of local musicians, and get a job playing music for the summer. We ended up getting a gig at a club called the Town Mart. Mike named that band the Apostles. He had these beige shirts made that had big puffy sleeves—vaguely British Invasion–looking—and we had longish hair. In fact, when we got to Portland that summer, we walked into a diner and it was like we were terrorists. We were just going to sit down at the counter, get some pancakes and bacon. Except for the jukebox, you could have heard a pin drop. Then the jukebox stopped, and you could hear people saying, “Oh, they think they’re the Beatles. Look at those juvenile delinquents!”

  Mike played Farfisa organ. That was my first experience being in a band with one of those cool things. I was a real fan of that cheesy organ. “She’s About a Mover,” “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” “96 Tears” by Question Mark and the Mysterians. That song is one of those oddities—it’s really awful and it’s really cool. It held both positions! What an awesome song. Mike and Tom were really fun to be around—really good guys.

  Portland was just an adventure. I liked the Northwest bands. The Sonics I loved. “The Witch”? I’m still going to do that song one of these days. Hell, yeah! We saw Paul Revere and the Raiders—they were still up there, not big stars. One night we were driving down the street in the dark, drinking beer, and saw the Kingsmen loading their gear. We shoulda stopped. Somebody in the car went, “The Kingsmen, man,” and I went, “Wow.”

  Mike sang a few of the songs, like “Louie Louie.” He was also tone-deaf. Mike literally had to count “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four” in his head to make the chord changes. That’s what he told me, anyway. I was determined to work on my singing and evolved into being the main singer of that little band. I took the add-a-track recorder on that Portland trip. I could record a whole set on one side of tape at the slow speed. We played from nine maybe until two, and then went back to the house where we were staying and spent another three hours drinking beer and listening to ourselves on tape. I was concentrating on my vocal, really going to school on that, because I desired not to be lame. And y’know, what I heard so far sounded kind of lame.

  I’d sung in different situations but never thought I was killer. I did “Hully Gully” once at a dance for KYA at the El Cerrito armory. I had a little harshness in my voice, and people said, “Oh man, that was really cool,” but that was only two minutes and thirty seconds. Maybe I had to get away from home to be free enough to do it. I knew in my head what I thought I should sound like, but what came out of my mouth didn’t match that. I wanted to have a tougher sound, like the guys who really had an edge: James Brown; Wilson Pickett—“I Found a Love”; the Contours—“Do You Love Me”; Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford—“I Need Your Lovin’”; the Sevilles—“Charlena”; and, of course, Little Richard, the best singer in rock and roll.

  That’s where I was trying to go. Have that alpha thing. So after listening to the tape, I’d go back the next night and try to make my voice sound a little harder, a little more rock and roll. I’d say words funny, in my own style. I’d try to do a scream going into the solo.

  Portland was also the first place where I played harmonica. We were going to do a number—“Louie Louie,” I think—and Mike was going to play the harmonica. Remember: this is the guy who’s tone-deaf. A moment came where I just said, “Gimme that thing! No, I can’t play it, but God, it’s got to be better than that.” I was never Little Walter, that’s for sure. But it was rock and roll. It fit the occasion.

  When we came back from Portland, Mike Burns called with a gig at this place in Berkeley, the Monkey Inn. Since the drummer we had used in Portland stayed back, I convinced Mike to use Doug. It was a typical college crowd, mostly UC Berkeley students. They had shuffleboard, and sawdust and peanut shells all over the floor. Peanuts and a pitcher of beer—for five dollars you could have one heck of a night. And that’s all I was being paid, anyway. I think we got twenty bucks—for the band, not apiece—and all the beer we could drink. So you know what we leaned heavy on.

  Tom Fanning and I played guitar, Mike was on Farfisa, and Doug was on drums. That lasted for a few months, and then it just kind of dissolved. I convinced the Monkey Inn’s owner that I knew some other guys who could play. This would’ve been about 1966. We were making our records, but we still weren’t really hanging together. Stu was busy at college or busy at frat parties down in San Jose, and he didn
’t come up that often, or he’d show up late in our set. This is when my brother Tom came in.

  We had started out the other way: with Tom playing piano or singing with that beautiful voice. But now I was trying to include my brother in this new musical thing—my thing. I had to broach it to Doug and Stu. The first thing one of them said was, “Well, Tom can’t sing.” In fact, they had both said that way back at Dick Vance studios, which might’ve been the first time we were all at a recording studio. I was sticking up for my brother. (What’s so funny about this is that later they went the opposite way. They would make it me versus Tom, with both of them on Tom’s side.)

  This was the fragile way our quartet started. Slowly we were evolving into the template for a rock and roll band as laid down first by the Crickets, and then by the Beatles: two guitars, bass, and drums.* There’s no odd man out, no singer that doesn’t do anything but sing and play tambourine. In a band, four is perfect. It’s an even square, a beautiful shape in geometry. It’s not six and a half people, which is too many, or three, which is too small.

  With the British Invasion, I was beginning to see that those bands had certain instruments, and it had to be a certain way. The Beatles, the Stones, and the Kinks had all arrived fully formed, with a bass player. They looked professional, and we just weren’t. It’s not going to be rock and roll if you go out there with a tambourine and a triangle and a fiddle. To be a real band, we needed a bass player. Up until then, Stu was playing piano. One night I said, “Look, I want you to get a bass. Just get a cheap bass”—I think he got a St. George—“and we’ll grow up learning this thing together. I’ll show you what to do, and when you master that, I’ll give you more bass lines to play, and we’ll get there eventually.”

  Once Tom was in, he started just playing tambourine. Besides Stu learning bass, Tom was learning guitar—he literally couldn’t play a bar chord, so it all had to be cowboy chords. It doesn’t take forever to learn how to play rhythm guitar in a rock and roll band. Later we could really laugh about it. At one of the early Monkey Inn gigs, this drunk guy was standing in front of the stage, and he looked up at Tom and his tambourine and screamed, “You’re useless!” It was drunken affirmation, a badge of honor that Tom could stand up there and be useless.

  There was a lot of beer drinking at the Monkey Inn. In the back of the bar there was a partial wall, and over the top of it you could see the people playing shuffleboard. And whenever we played “Blue Suede Shoes,” a fight would break out. You’d see the light over the shuffleboard swinging back and forth. Then the bartender would have to run back there and get everybody calmed down. Until we played “Blue Suede Shoes” again. We did it for our own amusement.

  Talk about formative places. There’s a habit I developed at the Monkey Inn that I had for the longest time: singing to the side, away from the audience. I had this cheap little mic plugged into my guitar amp, so I could use it for my PA as well as for my guitar. Sometimes watching the people would make me crack up, so I would look over and stare at the wall, singing sideways into the mic. Even in Creedence, I’d go up to the mic and sing sideways like that. It took me a long time to break that habit.

  I played my cheap Supro guitar at the Monkey Inn. I didn’t have a very good guitar or amp. My equipment was not professional. But somehow I sensed that this little gig at a dumpy little bar was a great opportunity for the future. Rather than just enduring the time spent there or using it as an excuse to party, I saw it as a way to gain experience for myself—and more importantly, a way to transform my little group of musical tourists into a band.

  Throughout my two or three years at the Monkey Inn, I was learning an awful lot about how to play in front of a live audience. How to talk to a crowd. How the music affects the mood and energy of the audience. If you played the wrong song, it could really deflate the atmosphere. But if you chose the right songs, it would make the place soar, and the feeling could be magical. I learned to string songs together, to “take a journey with the music.” Ah, man, the power of rock and roll!

  During my growth as a guitar player and while thinking about style, I began to wonder about what Lead Belly had done with a twelve-string tuned down to D. That was so amazing. It was just… the sound. Rock and roll guys learn to play the E chord pretty quickly. A lot of great songs have been in that key. The Lead Belly sound is a whole step lower than that. You didn’t hear it very often. And still don’t! And the key to that basically was a guitar tuned low.

  In about the ninth grade, I bought a cheap twelve-string guitar and tuned it that way. An acoustic guitar—I think it was a Harmony. It wasn’t amplified, so I got a special sound hole pickup—I think it was a DeArmond—a big fat thing, and I’d play maybe one song. I can’t recall what, but I’ll bet it was closer to Lead Belly than the Orlons.

  By the time of the Monkey Inn, I was using that guitar as a feedback thing. I had a volume pedal. Sometimes it had a separate amp, and sometimes it was the same amp my guitar was plugged into, the idea being that I could step on the volume pedal and activate the twelve-string, which is just sitting there tuned to a D chord, or maybe just tuned normally but down a whole step. And it would start to feed back instantly, because there’s a drum beating and all this resonant stuff going on. The volume pedal cranked it louder—AooOOOooOOO! It was in that rock and roll tradition: a hellacious cacophony of sound. Where people go, “What is that?”

  It had that kind of effect, like in a Little Richard song where Richard lets out a “WAAAAAAAH!” just before the sax comes in. “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” one of my favorite records, did that. There’s a break and the drummer just screams “WAAAAAAA!” Much later, I learned that when Owen Bradley recorded that song, the band was making such a racket that they moved the drummer farther and farther away, and finally he was in the doorway, but they could still hear him screaming. Owen Bradley turns to the engineer and says, “Why does he have to do that?!” The answer: “Because he’s fifteen years old!” And Bradley let it be that way. That’s the thing in rock and roll: it’s wacky, but it makes sense. Feedback was my way to plug into that.

  I also invented my own fuzz tone with a set of World War II army surplus headphones. There were two earpieces, and each one could function either as a speaker or a microphone. So I stuck the two earpieces together, wrapping them in duct tape, tin foil, and a piece of my old flannel pajamas, and put this inside a small coffee can. I wired one to an “input” jack and the other to an “output” jack mounted on the can.

  To make this work, I would plug my guitar into an amplifier with the output of the amp going to the “input” on the coffee can. As I turned up the amp, that headphone would distort like crazy. The other earpiece would act like a microphone, sending that distorted sound to the “output” on the can. I could then plug that sound into a normal guitar amp, and voilà: distorted fuzz tone guitar. I had that for three or four years. Nowadays you just plug into a box to get that sound, but back then it was a revelation (although I listened to “Walk on the Water” recently, and if that’s what I used, it’s pretty awful and shrill—I had nothing to compare it to then).

  There was nothing like the Monkey Inn for experimentation. We could develop as a band and there wasn’t a lot of pressure yet. We just had to present fun. They were having a fight back there anyway. I still chuckle when I hear “Blue Suede Shoes.”

  For the longest time, the single we recorded for Fantasy just didn’t come out. It was a lifetime to us kids. Finally, in November of 1964, Max told Tom, “Come on over. We have your record.” At that time we were still the Blue Velvets. Either Max didn’t like “Blue Velvets” or, now that we were a quartet, he wanted a new group name. So we called ourselves the Visions, right? Which to me always sounded like that guy in “Earth Angel” who sang “da vision.” As in math. So for, like, five minutes we were the Visions.

  Tom, Doug, and I drive over to San Francisco. “Where’s our record? Where’s our record?” Max gives us a box of twenty-five singles. Now, we’re expecting our
new name to be on the label: the Visions. But we pop open the box and the label says… the Golliwogs. We say, “Oh man, somebody really screwed up here!”

  Max tells us he didn’t like our new name, the Visions. It wasn’t interesting enough. So in a stealth, surreptitious move of intrigue, he had named us the Golliwogs. “We’re trying to have you guys be like the British Invasion here. So we wanted to give you a hip-sounding name. Mod. It’s mod.”

  “Yeah, Max, mod. Okay. But what is a golliwog?”

  “Well, way back during a war that England had with some other country during the colonial British Empire days—”

  “Yeah, Max. What’s that got to do with us?”

  “Well, the British soldiers would interact with the people of the country that they were actually trying to conquer. So the people in that country made these little dolls that had fuzzy hair and black faces—kind of like a voodoo doll.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “The British soldiers got to calling these dolls wogs. Like a golliwog. And sometimes they even called the people golliwogs or wogs. So this little voodoo doll is a really important thing in British history. See, we want you guys to seem like you’re British—part of the hip, British musical invasion!”

  “But Max—we come from El Cerrito.”

  So we went home very disgruntled. And dozens of times later, we would find ourselves reenacting this rationale as we had heard it in Max Weiss’s office.

  “John?”

  “Yes, Mom?”

  “I thought you guys were the Blue Velvets?”

  “Yeah, see, Mom, they named us after this doll…”

  For the rest of the time that we were the Golliwogs, we had to explain the name to every single person that ever heard our music. And everybody’s telling you, “Well, that’s dumb!” So you might say it was a very self-limiting—and perhaps self-fulfilling—prophecy. If you have to explain a marketing device, then you’re barking up the wrong tree. Kind of like Edsel.