Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  We’d recorded “Born on the Bayou,” and just as Hank was playing it back, he went “Oh my God!” because he had erased the first piece of Tom’s rhythm guitar—about eight bars, I think. It was really weird that it happened that way. We just decided to leave it. It sounded great as was. I wanted some atmosphere at the start of the song, so I held down an E chord and faded in the volume pedal… breeeeeeoooowwwriiiin.

  Hearing that come over the radio was just the coolest thing. I sure was inspired when I flew back down to L.A. to sing the vocal. There was some magical trickery going on. Hank used a Fairchild limiter on my vocal (and something else we’ve never quite been able to pin down), but it gave that vocal track an unusual, cool quality.

  Long after the song came out, I was standing in a Vegas casino. I had my hat on, incognito, or so I thought. I was playing a slot machine, and out of nowhere, somebody sidled up and whispered, “‘Born on the Bayou’—best recorded vocal of all time.” Then he disappeared. Awesome.

  That two and a half year Creedence period when I was just in the zone had already kicked in. Finding a great-sounding word to sing and doing some kind of sympathetic guitar part—it would all roll around in my head at the same time. The thought behind Bayou Country’s “Bootleg” was, why is it that those things that are really bad for you—candy, ice cream, alcohol—taste so good? Why is it that the things that we can’t have we want even more? That song starts with an acoustic and goes on into electric. Pretty cool. That’s Tom on acoustic guitar. We tuned down a Fender Kingman because it was the only acoustic we had, and I showed him how to do that. Even though it was so new that his hand would still cramp up, Tom could really play by Bayou Country. He had great rhythm—in the same way that Elvis did, if you listen to those early records. Tom was like that. “Susie Q,” “Proud Mary,” “Born on the Bayou”—he always had great rhythm. Solid.

  Another reason Bayou Country jumped out at you was my guitar sound. At around this time, I decided that in order to do songs with the guitar tuned down, and to avoid tuning up in front of the crowd, I had to have another guitar; be ready for the big time. I went to the Sherman Clay music store in San Francisco and bought a Gibson 175 Sunburst, a big jazz box like the one Scotty Moore used. At that point I was making a choice between Fender and Gibson, and Gibson had the big hollow bodies with humbucking pickups. I wanted to get as much of an acoustical thing as I could, but I didn’t want to stick one of those sound hole pickups in the middle of it. When I plugged in the 175, I went, “Oh! I recognize that!” It was that boink boink “Diddley Daddy” sound. That guitar is most notable on songs like “Proud Mary,” “Bootleg,” and “Graveyard Train.” That was a direct result of me seeing Pete Seeger talk about Lead Belly and his D tuning way back when.

  That odd, blurry cover picture for Bayou Country was an unexpected gift. We’d gone up to Mount Tamalpais with a photographer and his assistant, Basul Parik. He took the picture while the zoom lens was moving. Was it an accident? When I was writing the album, I had tried to envision the cover, and that photo captured the mood I was seeing in my head. That was actually taken before we recorded. Saul wanted to call the album Swamp Fever. I thought that was the corniest title of all time. I thought, If the kids see that title I’m gonna be a Golliwog again.

  I was at RCA, working with Hank on overdubbing congas and cowbell for “Born on the Bayou,” when Tom came by. He had come up the stairwell and I believe we were using it for echo. Tom came in and said, “Man, that sure sounds good when the cowbell comes in.” The second Creedence album is a lot better than the first. It’s a huge step up. There’s a maturity, a sonic difference. We really grew. It’s a funny thing with bands, how they evolve. You’re a listener, and there’s this one song you like. Then they put out another album, you hear it, and you go, “Oh man, that’s what they’re aspiring to? That’s what they dare to be?” It’s actually beyond the thing that intrigued you in the first place—and that’s where you hear greatness. I’m sure people did that with Pink Floyd, with the Beatles. Hopefully they did that with Creedence.

  By early 1969, Creedence was on top of the world. That was fast. “Proud Mary” came out in January and went to number two on the charts. By March, we’d gone from daytime college gigs to four consecutive nights at the Fillmore. We did four encores every night. Sixteen encores total. The place was packed to the gills. They were going crazy.

  Working out our fee with Bill Graham was kind of like playing chess. I stuck to my guns over the money, but I really respected him. Bill seemed a bit gruff at first, but he wasn’t demeaning. He was a character, a real showman—“Go out there and give them their money’s worth. Don’t be silly and don’t be stoned.” Meaning we’re professionals here, we’re not stoned slobs or drunken hippies—he was against all that “Hey, I get paid to throw up onstage” stuff. He was the kind of guy that I could appreciate. He said it as much for the guys in the band as for the audience—“We’re all gonna do this together.”

  Even though he’d paid us quite fairly, Bill went and got gold watches for each of us afterward and paid us a whole bunch of extra money. That was the type of guy he was. A guy who deserved loads of respect, because he brought a lot of credibility to rock and roll—when maybe some of the bands didn’t deserve it. Bill Graham really was the best person I met in show business. Years later I’d turn to him for help in trying to settle things with Saul Zaentz.

  The Fillmore was just the start. We flew to New York to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show that March. That was the big time—for me, that meant Elvis, the Beatles, Topo Gigio, and Señor Wences. Ed was very nice. He talked to Tom and me during rehearsal, and one thing he told us was that he had a twin brother. By the way, he was in his undershirt. It was just strange to see Ed so comfortable. Before the show, Ed would sneak off to his favorite restaurant and belt a few—I think it was Campari. The show was live, and every Sunday at six minutes to eight, everybody would be in a panic because he wasn’t there. He’d waltz in at the last minute, all dressed up, and go right into being Ed Sullivan: “Well, tonight we have a reeelly beeg shoe.” (Translation: “really big show.”) The staff went through that ritual every Sunday for twenty-three years. Ed was awesome.

  The first time, we were on with Jerry Lee Lewis and Moms Mabley, who did “Abraham, Martin and John.” The second time was with Norm Crosby—“I resemble that!” We had a lot of fun with Norm. He was just happy to be alive. The second time we were there, we were waiting to go on, and right in front of where I was standing, on the reverse side of one of the backdrops, somebody had scrawled in pencil, “Vietnam is the Edsel of society.” Whoever wrote that was one mighty philosopher…

  “Proud Mary” / “Born on the Bayou” had been out a couple of weeks or so when I started thinking, Better get something ready to go on the radio. I had two new songs, but I wasn’t sure that either of them was as good as “Proud Mary.” I was even telling the band I considered them B sides. But I needed to record the next two songs or there was going to be a vacancy. I had to get us back on the radio.

  “Lodi” was just a title for a long time. The inspiration was those trips with my dad to those small towns in central California, a place that I felt very warm and special about. I had already started to transfer my feelings about that place to the mythical Louisiana swamps I’d been writing about. It was also childhood. I was moving place and moving time, going back to when I felt really special and good and homey. It felt like me.

  Somehow I got the idea of a traveling musician, probably a country guy, but older. A guy whose career is in the rearview mirror. The kicker is, “Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi… again!” That “Oh Lord” tells you how he feels. I was twenty-three writing this song, a very young man who’d just had a million-selling single all over the radio. That has nothing to do with the well you are drawing from when doing your craft.

  One of the people I love is John Steinbeck and the rural world he created, especially The Grapes of Wrath. When you’re a kid, you’re doing what you do;
you don’t say your name in the same breath as those gods. You’re just a punk kid trying to do a new thing. What’s funny is, passing through Salinas I actually wrote down some of the street names in case I ever wanted to touch on all that. I was fascinated with that literary territory, but that research came out not in a specific but in an emotional way—it came out in things like “Lodi.”

  “Bad Moon Rising” was a title in my songwriting book; I believe it was on the first page. Hippies would be walking around asking, “What’s your sign?” It was the lingo of the time—“I’m a Virgo with Libra rising,” all this kind of stuff. And after hearing those things I wrote down, “Bad Moon Rising.” It was a good image. I was up late at night trying to write, and I started thinking about this old movie, The Devil and Daniel Webster, about a farmer who sells his soul to Mr. Scratch—the devil—for good fortune.

  The part that really made an impression on me was when this cyclone comes down and the farmer is cowering in the barn while all hell breaks loose outside. When he wakes up the next morning, all the neighbors have lost their crops to the storm. Thanks to the devil, our hero’s crops are untouched.

  What was important to me was the storm, the devil, and the way this guy had been—at least for the moment—protected. So I started writing about a natural disaster. Pretty unusual thing to write a song about, and what was more unusual was the snappy melody I gave it. Here I am talking about a horrible disaster and the devil taking your life, and it sounded as jaunty as Guy Mitchell doing “Singing the Blues.” I thought the song was foreboding and dark, and it was only much later that people pointed out how happy it sounded. “And besides, what is this ‘bathroom on the right’?” People made a joke out of mishearing the lyric, but I didn’t take offense, like some persnickety language nerd might. It became such a thing over the years that half the time I sing that now.

  I knew “Bad Moon Rising” was good before any singing happened. We were out back at Doug’s, rehearsing, and one of the wives kept saying, “I like the one that goes…,” and she’d hum the chord change. The lick on “Bad Moon Rising” is a big part of the song, and it’s certainly borrowed from the Scotty Moore guitar lick on the Elvis record “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” In places it’s exactly the same. I didn’t make the song out of his lick, but I used it. I wasn’t hiding it—that lick was so great! I was honoring it.

  One of the best things that ever happened to me was in 1986 or so, at one of those awards get-togethers. I was standing there, just looking at a lot of cool people, and somebody comes up behind me, puts his arms around me, and says, “Give me back my licks!” I turn around, and it’s Scotty Moore! I hadn’t really met him before and I just gushed. I told him, “I stole everything I know from you!” What a great memory.

  I was planning on recording these songs with the Gibson 175 that’s so key to the Bayou Country sound, but fate intervened. One day we’d been rehearsing at Doug’s, and afterwards I went over to Fantasy’s office in Oakland. I left my 175—plus a Tremolux amp I’d had since the tenth grade—in the backseat of a new Peugeot I’d bought with some of my first advance money from Fantasy. When I came out, the window glass was broken, my guitar and amp were gone, and there was a brick on the floor of my car. Right in front of my record company. (That should’ve told me something right there.)

  I had to get a new guitar, and fast. I drove straight to Jimmy Luttrell’s music store in Albany, looking for a Les Paul. I’d heard about all these English guitar guys playing Les Pauls, so I walk in and ask Jimmy, “Do you have any Les Pauls?” He points to a guitar up on the wall, but it’s not a sunburst—it’s black. A Les Paul Custom. Kind of high-end, maybe five hundred bucks. They had a Fender Twin amp sitting there. Powerful. I say, “I want to retune this.” Jimmy didn’t quite get it, but he said okay. So I tuned the guitar acoustically—down to D.

  “Let’s hear it,” I say.

  We plug it in and I just hit what would normally be an E chord, but what’s coming out of this guitar now is a low-tuned D chord. And I go brrrrrring. That was the holy grail. Clean, with just a little bit of grit in it. That was it. It’s still it.

  That sound was a revelation. That new Les Paul was all ready to go and I bought that guitar on the spot. If I have done anything unique in rock and roll at all, that sound is it. I figured out how to have a great-sounding guitar. Listen to the opening of “Midnight Special.” When I play that song live, everybody already knows. They sing that chord back to me! It was better than my stolen 175.

  We went back to RCA to cut “Bad Moon Rising” and “Lodi.” I remember flying down to L.A. to sing the vocal for “Lodi” and worrying on the plane because I was sitting next to the jet engine. The rest of the Green River album was cut at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco.* Russ Gary was the engineer who came along with the studio—a good addition to our team. It was Russ who told me that Elvis’s guitar player was Scotty Moore; before that I didn’t even know Scotty’s name. Russ liked that music and understood the vibe. If I said, “Give me a little slapback echo,” he knew what to do. And we would experiment a bit in the studio, especially at mix time.

  The recording process at Heider’s went like this: we’d record two basic instrumental tracks in four hours, and retire for that day. The next day or so, I’d go back alone and overdub lead guitar, cowbell, piano, or whatever was needed. Then I’d do the vocals—background vocals first, and then the lead. After that I’d go from the live studio into the mixing room, where the console was, and mix the songs. Russ and I would rehearse our moves for the faders, and between our four hands the song was mixed in twenty minutes. There was no sitting there going, “Hmm, I think that one syllable needs a bit more brightening.” Nope—this was straight-ahead, get-it-done rock and roll. I had a strong work ethic—Ma Fogerty.

  We’d finish a whole album in a couple of weeks, and on a very tiny budget. The first three albums were made for five thousand dollars total. This was before people started spending months and years in the studio. The first I heard about that was when we were in the studio and somebody mentioned that the producer for the 5th Dimension’s “The Age of Aquarius” had been mixing for eleven hours. I just went, “Whaaa… ?” Little did I know…

  Green River is my favorite Creedence album. I felt like that one hit the bull’s-eye at the center of my soul. It’s not that the other records aren’t me; Green River just seemed to be my favorite place musically.

  “Tombstone Shadow” comes from a story of the very early days of Creedence. We played a show in San Bernardino, and right across the street from our hotel was a fortune-teller. I was hoping I’d walk in and it would be like an old Universal horror film, with Maria Ouspenskaya from The Wolf Man as the gypsy. But it was just some guy in a green bowling shirt with a TV in the background blaring Treasure Hunt with Jan Murray. I gave him my five bucks. First he looked at my palms and said, “That’s bad. You shouldn’t fly in airplanes.” Then he had me cut the cards, and he lifted two cards up: both red, a seven and a six. Thirteen. He says, “You’re gonna have thirteen months of bad luck.” I go, Oh, great. Now he tells me. I’d already signed Saul’s contract!

  There’s a thread in a lot of my songs: I’m kind of ill at ease with what we call civilization. The TV blaring, computers, the fast pace of traffic, iPhones that turn on your porch light from Italy and operate a drone over some town in the Middle East. I’m kind of anti that. I’m seeking some sort of peace—or, to use another word, clarity. Instead of confusion, I’m into having things make sense. “Commotion” is railing against all that confusion.

  “Sinister Purpose” was another title in my songbook. That’s about the concept of the devil—the unspeakable dark force, he who is most evil. That guy. It was an interesting idea to have the devil talking directly to you, not pleading his case so much as handing you his business card. The guy in “Cross-Tie Walker” is from the same town that “Green River” is set in. “Cross-Tie Walker” is a phrase I invented. It’s about hoboes catching t
rains. There was a hobo camp outside Healdsburg, one of the towns where I had a summer resort job. You’d poke around and see cans of beans strewn about, burned-out fires.

  “Wrote a Song for Everyone” was based on a real thing that happened. It was a Sunday afternoon in 1969, and I was hell-bent to keep the music coming. Every day I was writing. There was some urgency in my mind—“Strike while the iron’s hot, because it could all be over in the blink of an eye.” I was home, had my guitar and amp and a little recorder, and I was working away. My wife, Martha, probably had other ideas for the weekend and made some remark like, “Is that all you’re going to do today?” I was a bit aloof, off in my world, and didn’t realize we were in the midst of a discussion. And she said, “Well, I’m going to go see my mother.”

  Just as the door closed behind her, it finally dawned on me that she was angry. And a phrase went right into my head: “I wrote a song for everyone, and I couldn’t even talk to you.” It was specifically true right at that moment! In writing the song, I made it less personal and more general. There were politicians during those days who were older and couldn’t relate to their kids—the generation gap. Maybe his child was arrested for drugs or being drunk, and the public figure’s thinking, What am I gonna do with this kid? I can talk to the masses, but I can’t even talk to my own son. That seemed to be a worthy subject for a song.

  We first recorded that on a day when we recorded four other songs at Wally Heider’s. It wasn’t hanging together, didn’t groove—I didn’t like how the drums felt. Wobbly. So we went back. Musically, on that version the band was tighter. But nobody had guitar tuners in those days, and the effect of the guitar being D-tuned made the strings floppy enough that my guitar’s tuning on that second version really bothers me. I’d love to be able to hear the first version, but I don’t think it exists. Even then, I was afraid that Fantasy would dig up the outtakes and put them out later, and I’d already begun erasing the other versions once we had the keeper down.