Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  We were all listening to KMPX, the cool underground FM station. It was counterculture, really outside the mainstream, but more and more people were gravitating toward it. Tom Donahue was the main deejay. They played the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver—all the happening San Francisco bands, but we’d also noticed that these guys were playing some songs that weren’t actual released records. Unreleased tapes like Janis Joplin’s “Hesitation Blues,” and I think a tape by Kaleidoscope. There were a few of them. The deejays would play them and talk about them—on KMPX, that was as valid as hearing “Mustang Sally” or “Nights in White Satin.” Instead of doing a whole album and going through a record company—I think we still weren’t so sure about Fantasy Records anyway, and whether we’d ever break out of that recording shack—covering a classic song seemed like the quickest way to go.

  I loved the 1958 Dale Hawkins record “Susie Q.” Tom did too. I remember hearing it in my mom’s car and just bangin’ away on the dashboard. It has a great riff. Great. You’ll notice that James Burton’s name is not among the names of the people credited with writing “Susie Q.” That’s a crime. At least half of the song is that lick. It was somewhere during the Monkey Inn period that I sat down and said, “Y’know, I have to actually learn how this really goes. What’s James doin’ here?” His unique hybrid guitar picking was far ahead of its time, especially ahead of the Telecaster country pickers. James used a flat pick plus one metal finger pick. It gave “Susie Q” an edge. I thought, I gotta figure out a way I can do that, but still use my regular flat pick so I don’t have to change anything. I’m not Elmore James or Grandpa Jones—I’m a rock and roll guy. I came up with a way of using two fingers and a pick. It was a cool thing. Nowadays they call it hybrid picking.

  I’d been playing that song forever—with the Blue Velvets and at the Monkey Inn. We’d do the song every once in a while, and once we did it at some club, we’d play it for a couple of nights, and then stop. We were playing up somewhere in the Sacramento area in the beginning of 1968. Some club, people just milling about, and we could experiment and no one would care. I’m thinking about “Susie Q,” and I turn to Doug and say, “Let’s try somethin’ a little different.” I wanted it to have a gospel feel, but I didn’t dare say to him “shuffle beat.”

  I said, “Try to get this feel: doom chick, doom doom chick.” Doug starts imitating that. I go, “Right,” and start playing the “Susie Q” riff. But I say, “Let’s don’t change—let’s jam. We’re not gonna play the song. Just stay in E.” Stu’s going, “Well, what should I play?” “Just stay in E, no pattern.” That was the start of it. It was by no means what it became, but it was the format. At that time you had British Invasion, psychedelic music, folk rock. “Susie Q” stood out as a gutbucket, country blues thing. And people liked it.

  “Susie Q” is a pretty simple song. After Sgt. Pepper, rock and roll grew up and everybody got all brainy and highfalutin and introspective and impotent—I mean important. Some people looked down on what made rock and roll what it is in the first place: fun. Loud, in-your-face, rebellious. Full of attitude. Definitely not “I have a dissertation that I must explain.” I’m a guy who admires “Wooly Bully” as much as “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”

  We spent weeks preparing for the recording. We rehearsed the song out at the Shire, making it longer and longer in the solos. I remember saying to the other guys that it sometimes felt like I had an out-of-body experience playing “Susie Q.” I’d actually forget where I was. When the song was over, I’d look around and realize, “Oh.” And then we’d look at each other and play it again. There was a lot of playing that basic song as a four-piece band. But I was also making them settle down, instead of just jamming like at the Monkey Inn.

  There were no defined musical parts yet. That was my job, because I could see what was missing. Clear as a bell. From “Susie Q” on, I realized that my job was to arrange everything, period. I’d been doing it somewhat before, arranging Golliwogs singles to sound vaguely like the Beatles, the Stones—and they did. With “Susie Q,” I was going into new territory.

  I had seen an old movie on the late show, The Glenn Miller Story. Miller’s band has been struggling to find their identity, and they’re rehearsing a make-it-or-break-it gig. The trumpet player busts his lip on his music stand, and all is lost. Miller stays up all night rewriting the lead for clarinet, and it changes the music. Everything falls into place—“That’s the sound!” Having the right individual parts blended together. This made a big impression on me, and that’s how I approached arranging.

  In the sixties, everyone thought rock was free-form noodling. But look at the Beatles. Or more so the Ventures—it’s even more obvious with them because their records are so bare. It’s textbook how to play rock and roll. Listen to those records: it’s very clear what each guy’s role is. With the Ventures, you have a lead guitar, a rhythm guitar, a bass, and a drummer—there’s not even a singer. Everything is planned out to sound a certain way together. Everybody is playing arranged, specific parts.

  The idea of jamming was cool to me—challenging—but the point was that it had to be great, not one-note meandering, and none of that nobody-knows-what’s-gonna-happen-next philosophy. I could not let that happen in my band. Be it “Susie Q,” “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Commotion,” or “Keep On Chooglin’,” there was a structure. It was organized. There were parameters for how far out the song could go. I had to know darn sure what was going to happen, because I didn’t want people falling asleep—the audience or the band. The difference between our jams and, say, the Dead’s? In my band, there was an arrangement.

  I’d tell the band, “Just try stuff. It’s okay. When it’s good, I’ll smile.” All through Creedence it was me either smiling yes or saying no. Even if they didn’t know the parameters, I did, and if they got outside that, I would let them know. I always tried to explain why. I didn’t just mysteriously say, “Here’s your notes. Play them.” Really, it was a friendly thing. But what you hear on the records is what I controlled.

  I’d say, “When doing the drum fill, Doug, it should be this type, this style.” I’d be right there working on a backbeat. Each instrument had a role to play, so the rhythm guitar had to be in a specific place, the bass in another. Or I’d be thinking to myself, What’s the bass part gonna be? I know it’s gotta be that feel. I would literally do it on the guitar, or in my mind. As Stu was playing it, I’d go, “No, no, no—lose that note.” Whatever bass part the Dale Hawkins band was playing on the original “Susie Q” had to be changed to fit KMPX, a place where they played the Dead.

  That was how I approached the jams. If we were learning a two and a half minute single, frankly, it was, “Here’s how it goes and this is what you play.” In Creedence, the learning curve was there each and every new song. By the time “Susie Q” was recorded, we would play it live, and it sounded pretty good. Then I’d start to show them a brand-new song, like “Born on the Bayou,” and we’d sound like amateurs again! I’m not saying that as any kind of slam. It was just a weird phenomenon: the stuff we did out on tour was manly, authoritative, and then we’d go in to learn a new song, and it sounded like the Mickey Mouse Club.

  Most of the time, when I rehearsed the band I didn’t sing. I’d work out all the music ahead of time and then teach it to the band as an instrumental. It had to have a musical hook without any singing. And the guys learned the song without hearing me sing it. Because I didn’t want to sing in front of them. I was a little shy about that. I still get a little funny when I’m going to show my band a song, even now. But especially then.

  On the music side, I developed a formula: I would choose two songs for the singles and we would rehearse those two for six weeks. Of course, those six weeks started with just a snippet of a rhythm idea, trying many variations of chord structure and drum patterns. In this way, I could test-drive many different approaches of presenting the song until I felt I had arrived at the absolute best arrangemen
t. There were dozens of little musical intersections along the way where you had to make a choice about which beat or note was best for that particular song. That’s how you refine an arrangement and make it great. That is also how you get the musicians used to performing the music, so that after six weeks they are playing the thing like it’s second nature.

  Along the way, we’d work on the album cuts. So when we went into the studio to do “Up Around the Bend,” “Run Through the Jungle,” all the singles, take one would be awesome. It was, “Well, all right—maybe we can beat that.” And certainly take three was about it. That was all you needed. Done! There was no point in doing any more. We had rehearsed it and we were ready.

  I’ve heard Stu take credit for making “Susie Q” a “psychedelic” jam. No way. In spite of what Stu says, it is not a psychedelic jam. That recording was all planned out on paper. I did it by myself on the kitchen table. I don’t know how to read music, so I sat down and taped pieces of binder paper together with Scotch tape because no one piece of paper was long enough, and I made a road map of the song showing what would happen here, and here, and here… all the way through. I turned music into pictures—that’s how I took “Susie Q” from here… to there. It was, “I’m gonna take a journey with this song.”

  To me, a record is a presentation. It is not cinema verité, and all that other artsy crap that people were doing in the early seventies. No: a recording is a presentation. You’ve thought all about it, the arrangement, the mix—that’s why you can hear the singer a little louder than the drum or the bass. You’ve prepared this. You need to have the music be a bed for your song, so it can present your song. One of the huge secrets of Creedence was that this music was brain-numbingly simple, but it’s the right simple. I always said, “There’s only one right way.”

  I feel like I was given the gift of having a very clear understanding of what to do. That might’ve been the greatest gift of all. You have to have a leader, and in that band, as in all bands, you need a purveyor of taste. If I was not the sole judge, I was certainly the final judge—“Now it’s ready.” Then we went and recorded it.

  Call me a perfectionist? Guilty. I haven’t been as anal about that process since Creedence—where I had that level of intensity with an arrangement and kept developing it before we recorded. “Susie Q” was the first time we ever worked on something that way. And that was the way it stayed—until the mutiny at the end of 1970.

  We didn’t record “Susie Q” in Fantasy’s lean-to—I took us back to Coast Recorders and Walt Payne, the same guy who had engineered James Powell’s “Beverly Angel” when I was fourteen. After we set up, it was our practice to jam and get comfortable, play some blues. Then we counted off “Susie Q” and recorded it—first take, boom. There was no take two. I had to go back another day and sing the vocal. When I got there, Walt said, “Well, Bing Crosby was here this morning singing through that mic, so I figured that would probably be all right for you.” My mom loved Bing, and so did I. “Wow—yessir!” In the mix, part of my vocal was put through this thing that Walt called “the telephone box,” which they would use on radio dramas when someone called on the phone.

  There’s a lot of little tricks going on in “Susie Q.” I knew the song would start with the drums fading in. I tried other things. If you listen to the rhythm, there’s something going shhhhusha shusha—that’s me. It turned out Doug really couldn’t keep that beat going on the sand blocks, so I played them. It’s a big addition to the groove. It’s a pretty cool beat, almost that sand and Vaseline thing. There’s some backwards guitars, some tambourine backbeat, and an open piano where I held down the sustain pedal, dissonant notes, sort of a disturbing ambient sound but nestled pretty far back in the track. And the backing vocals—“fine”/“mine,” “moon”/“June.” We sat in a circle with a mic dropped between us, and I would strum a chord really quietly and we’d go “fiiiiiiiiiine… miiiiiiiiine.” We did that all by itself and then I inserted it into the mix. I knew what I wanted to do with it. I was kind of poking fun at Tin Pan Alley, how they’d use all these simple words that rhymed.

  I distinctly remember being in the studio with the whole band the day we were preparing all the tracks for “Susie Q.” They were sitting in front of the console down below, where the window out to the studio is. I’ve got this thing that I’ve mapped out. I’ve worked on this for weeks—it’s my baby. I’m putting the different pieces together, the “fine/mine/moon/June” stuff, and I hear Stu: “That’ll never work!” I was getting more and more annoyed. Some guys never recover from negativity like that. They’re not strong enough to go, “Y’know what? Screw you!” I was trying to mix this. I knew what I was doing—I had a map! Even though my actions may have looked selfish at times, I was doing this for my band, what I thought presented us in the best way possible. My heart was in Creedence, and it stayed that way for a long, long, long time. Trying to be protective of the band, sometimes maybe in spite of itself. After “Susie Q,” I never allowed them to be in the studio again when I was mixing. I didn’t need that distraction.

  People told me later that “Susie Q” was cool because it had so much guitar. I had another guitar and amp by then. While I was away in the army, Tom had taken my Mustang and maybe my Supro and traded them in. Those two were worth one short-scale Rickenbacker 325. That’s the kind John Lennon played, and there seemed to be a trend in getting that kind of acoustic-electric sound. I also had a new Kustom K200 amp. Saul advanced the money for that: $1,200. We’d asked for money to get an old van and an amp. He would only give us money for the amp. Of course, I ended up paying for that amp out of royalties.

  The Kustom was solid-state, with transistors. Everybody prefers tube amps, including me. I learned to pull everything I could out of that Kustom. God, I got a great sound out of that amp. “Susie Q” was practically a demo of what that amp could do. It has to be the right guitar with that amp. The Kustom was really, really loud, and it had a great, clean guitar sound—you can hear that on “Bad Moon Rising.” Not perfectly clean, the way other transistor amps were—there’s a little bit of grit, warmth—but it’s not out of control. That amp had the killer vibrato of all time—listen to “Born on the Bayou,” which came a bit later.

  At Coast, they had one knob that we could pan from left to right. I remember Walt explaining that to me during the mixing of “Susie Q,” and I thought that was the coolest thing. It’s sort of irritating for me now, the way the drums are and how one guitar’s way over here and the other guitar’s way over there. Everything is on the left or the right; nothing sits in the middle. It’s not real stereo.

  I didn’t know what stereo was then. I had never heard it. I didn’t have a stereo radio, didn’t have any stereo records, didn’t have a stereo player. Then I got to Wally Heider Studios, and they had all kinds of knobs! Like, eight of ’em! I found out why. “Oh… they call that stereo.”

  When I was working with the guys on “Susie Q,” one of them actually said, “Well, John’s got an eight-track recorder built into his head.” I already seemed very familiar with the whole recording situation. It was a compliment, but they were also talking about something they didn’t have.

  Despite all that, with “Susie Q” I really felt that we had hit the mark. I remember coming back after that session to play it for Saul in the old Fantasy offices on Treat Avenue. I said, “That’s great.” Saul goes, “Well… it’s very good.” I said, “No—that’s great.” In my heart, I knew that we had transcended to another level. The other song we recorded at that first session was Bo Diddley’s “Before You Accuse Me,” and the arrangement was not great. I call that the Jefferson Airplane version because it was kind of like “Somebody to Love.” After it was done, I thought to myself, Nah, I’d rather do it more like Bo’s version. Who needs this? We later rerecorded it. (That first version actually stayed undiscovered until Fantasy decided they wanted to put out everything, down to me picking my nose.)

  I knew that “Susie Q” was it, and whe
n we took the tape to KMPX, they loved it. They started playing it a lot. I would hear it at least three or four times every day. Awesome. We split the song into two parts for the actual single, and it became a Top 40 radio hit. I think we all knew this was really it.

  A funny thing happened. We played a week at a place called Mousy’s, in Davis, typical small college-town bar. “Susie Q” was new, still just a tape and not on the radio in Davis. We were jamming on it. I thought we’d played a pretty good version—we were really getting into it. As we neared the big finish, some guy from the audience laid a piece of paper at Tom’s feet. It said, “Hey, you hippies—you’re trying too hard!” Like, “That’s not a normal song. You played the guitar too long. Knock it off!” We all got a big chuckle out of that.

  Creedence had gotten a steady gig in San Francisco at a club called Dino and Carlo’s—another residency like the Monkey Inn, but with an older, more professional crowd. One thing that happened there I’ll never forget. At the time, I was broke, living with a wife and baby on literally twenty dollars a week. That was my allowance from Tom. We trusted him to dispense the money: he was the older person with a job. The rest came from whatever few dollars we got from playing somewhere. We managed one credit card, which we always maxed out. It was a kind of socialism—we had this much money, and each of us got what he needed. I got twenty bucks a week, which covered food and diapers. Plus I smoked Kools with filters. One time I walked into a Safeway and looked longingly at a newspaper and a candy bar. I remember thinking that the mark of a successful career would be, “I can afford a Hershey bar.”

  There weren’t a lot of groceries at home. Late one night, I found a can of kidney beans and put them in a saucepan. The aroma woke Martha up. I was caught sneaking beans! I felt like the guy on the lost ship who’s secretly hoarding all the food.