Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

Bo Diddley put on a heck of a show. I felt like a sixteen-year-old seeing the Giants with Willie Mays: he’s older maybe, but he still knocks it out of the park. At some point on the tour, he showed up in a shiny new green Cadillac convertible and drove from city to city in that. Wilbert Harrison—now that was a treat. He had a current hit, “Let’s Work Together.” Wilbert did a one-man-band thing. He’d play guitar and sing, and there was a big bass drum with a hi-hat that he’d play with his feet. It was loaded with shaker stuff so you’d think it was a tambourine. His kick drum said “Mr. Kansas City—WILBERT HARRISON!” It was almost folk art.

  One of my favorite memories from a long career involves that drum. We were in an airport somewhere, waiting for our bags. Suddenly, I start to hear a clattering combined with a low booming sound, and it’s getting louder. Then up from the basement comes that big ol’ bass drum on the conveyor belt. No case. No cover. Up, up, crish, crash, clatter. Slowly, slowly… then over the top and bang! Down to the carousel with the other bags. Boom! Boom! Mr. Kansas City!

  I had noticed Tina Turner early on, long before she and Ike did “Proud Mary.” The Blue Velvets used to do “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.” It was funny and funky and had this cool guitar riff dripping in tremolo. Flash-forward to 1967, and here are these singers getting lots of credit in the underground world, Janis and Grace Slick. I just thought, Man, Tina could sing circles around them. (Or Mavis Staples!) I was overjoyed by Ike and Tina’s version of “Proud Mary.” That was their most commercial mainstream hit up to that point. It felt like a really positive thing, that sense of paying back and honoring your influences. We played some dates together. Ike loved “Fortunate Son.” He’d be up onstage and toss that lick into one of their songs. Can you imagine how that felt?

  We played with them at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, which of course is the spiritual center of Mormonism. I’d go out in the audience to watch Ike and Tina, and this time I noticed all these monitors—older guys in civilian clothes acting like security guards. If anybody got up and started dancing, these guys would tap on their shoulder and lead them back to their chair. Tina went into her version of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” She’d get real suggestive with the microphone, doing pretty much everything you could do with a mic, especially if it represented some guy that you were attracted to.

  Now the elders in the audience were freaking out, just losing their minds, jumping up and down. I don’t know if they thought they were going to stop the show or what. All I remember is Tina taking her sweet time with that mic. I’m loving every second of it. Back then I didn’t know any of the stuff about Ike that we heard later. I’m an honorable guy and I love women—I love and respect my wife completely. We treat each other as equals. Therefore, I don’t have much respect for Ike Turner.

  One of my favorite memories of all time is playing arenas like the Oakland Coliseum with Booker T. and the MGs as our opening act. I’d go stand in the wings and listen. What a sound. You think the records are great? The way that organ spun around that big coliseum was magical to me. In the middle of “Time Is Tight” they hit the big crescendo of the bridge, and God! It certainly inspired my band to be as good as we could be, because those guys were watching us. Somewhere there is footage of Creedence and Booker T. and the MGs jamming together for a TV special. They filmed that show but turned the cameras off before we did “In the Midnight Hour.” That performance was really special. You know why? Because of that thing R. B. King told us back in high school: “There’s somethin’ missing.” Well, with Booker T. and the MGs helping us, it wasn’t missing.

  Willy and the Poor Boys was released in November 1969. The album title came from seeing an ad in the newspaper for a “Winnie-the-Pooh Super-Pooh Package.” I just loved how that sounded, and I wanted to create a cartoonish Winnie-the-Pooh story in song, with a mythical group. I had started writing “Down on the Corner” when we were scheduled to be on The Andy Williams Show. We were staying in a hotel in Universal City, and I was in my room, duty-bound to come up with the next single, and I looked out my window and saw the fellas hanging out by the swimming pool, waiting to be picked up for the taping. Each character I name in the song is basically one of us.

  I’m Willy, the guy in the front playing his harmonica and doing a little dance. Stu is Blinky, meaning somewhat myopic and somewhat nervous. Tom was Poorboy because he’d frequently sound like, “Poor me. I should be doin’ this, I should be doin’ that. This isn’t good enough.” Of course Doug was Rooster, a name that he had earned out on the road by looking for whatever female companionship he could find or pay for. Wilbert Harrison told me that the song was very popular in New York City with the Latin people, that they loved that rhythm, that sound. That made me feel good.

  We shot the cover out in front of Duck Kee Market. I almost cropped its name out. I’m sure glad I didn’t. The photo was taken by Basul Parik, who’d taken our previous two covers, but he showed up with only one roll of film, which un-got him the gig for our next cover. We were actually playing “Poorboy Shuffle” at the time. A bunch of little city kids showed up. That was a happy accident. Some of them ended up on the cover with us. Saul actually wanted to call the album Down on the Corner with Willy and the Poor Boys because he thought that including the lead single in the title would make the distributors, the rack jobbers, happy. I resisted that suggestion.

  I loved the Lead Belly song “Cotton Fields.” Pete Seeger had done it, and so had the folk group the Highwaymen as a B side in 1962. The guy sounded a little like Buddy Holly, there wasn’t a bunch of folk attitude, and the song even had drums. Man, I loved that record. So I knew that at some point I was going to do that song. I wish I’d had a Telecaster back then, but I didn’t. I played my Rickenbacker and used a lot of reverb.

  Then there was Doug. Doug was a rock and roll drummer. It wasn’t finesse, it wasn’t jazz, it wasn’t quiet and subdued—it was kicking you right in the face, which is what I wanted. He had pretty good tone most of the time. That’s important. But it just wasn’t real polished or professional, and sometimes I had a problem with his timing. The drum break on “Lodi” comes to mind.

  On “Cotton Fields” the drums were just… bad. Tempo wasn’t right. After rehearsing that song for probably four weeks, we recorded it at Wally Heider’s in three, maybe four takes. It wasn’t going to get better. I had to say uncle.

  A little while later, when I put the vocals on, I had to confront that track, and it was not acceptable to me. The drumbeats were all late. Now, this was in the days before digital, when it wasn’t easy to fly things around. We’re talking about two-inch analog tape. I said to Russ Gary, “Russ, are you game for this? I want to edit a little bit out of each backbeat so that the beats will hit a little bit sooner.” There were maybe thirty or forty edits. I knew the guitars wouldn’t sound right after that, so I added two tracks of acoustic strumming to try to smooth out the edits. That kind of editing is nerve-racking, like holding nitroglycerin. Screw up and you ruin the master tape.

  But we managed to do it. I sang all the background vocals, the lead vocal, played the acoustic guitars, maybe a tambourine, and mixed it. That was certainly a full day. When we were all done, there was a pile of all those pieces of tape we’d cut out lying on the floor. So I went and got an envelope. Because I was pissed. I put all those pieces of tape—a lot of pieces of tape—in the envelope, drove to Doug’s house, and said, “Here’s your drum track.”

  Years later, in the early eighties, Martha and the kids and I were driving down in Texas near the border, listening to the radio. Creedence was huge in Mexico back in the day, and sure enough, from across the border comes “Cotton Fields.” Even in the middle of nowhere I couldn’t escape that friggin’ drum track! And it’s still late!

  “It Came Out of the Sky” was inspired by two things. As a youngster I read every science fiction book in the El Cerrito library, and I loved all the movies—Invaders from Mars, Them!, It Came from Outer Space. I saw every one.
I was immersed in them. I must’ve seen The Day the Earth Stood Still 250 times. I’m also a fan of that old movie Ace in the Hole. Kirk Douglas plays a reporter, and somebody falls down a hole in a cave, and they figure out a way to milk the thing—to make his rescue take longer than it should. At first it’s just happening out in the middle of nowhere, but soon there’s catering trucks, film crews, and reporters—all the support that goes with people selling a story. That was the direction I wanted to go in with “It Came Out of the Sky.” Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid are in there, big newscasters at the time. And Ronald Reagan—I call him Ronnie the Popular. I was trying to imitate a horn section with the guitar, but the background’s kind of plunky, vaguely Chuck Berry. I wish I could go back and make a better record of it. The song is better than that record.

  In “Don’t Look Now (It Ain’t You or Me)” I was just prodding my generation a bit—“Before we get to feeling holier-than-thou with all our grand ideas, let’s take a look at what’s really going on,” who is really doing the work. I always considered myself right in the middle of my generation, not removed in any way, although I thought the “hippie” label was sort of a Time magazine manifestation. I’ve only ever met one guy who actually called himself a hippie—a fellow in the army who was going to move to the middle of Arizona and let everybody else take care of him, which I thought was immoral. We used to argue over that: “We need a police force! Aren’t you gonna pay taxes?” “No, I’ll just live off the land.” “Well, you’re living off of somebody’s land.”

  Even though new ideas were being vocalized, and there was all this hopefulness and do-gooderness, and we’d accomplished a lot of philosophical things through demonstrations and protests, my generation wasn’t working in the blue-collar mainstream yet, and we weren’t doing the kind of stuff that the pioneers who built our country did. So I was saying, “Don’t look now, but it’s not you or me. Other people are the ones doing that stuff for us.” But I’m not saying I hate hippies. When I said “hippie,” I also meant myself.

  “Effigy” was inspired by Nixon. What a schmuck. Nixon just didn’t have a clue. I think the topper for me was in November 1969, when 250,000 demonstrators camped out near the White House to protest the war. Nixon came out and told them, “Nothing you do here today will have any effect on me”—he was going to go back inside and watch the football game on TV. It was like, “Your people have come to talk to you, King Louis XVI. They’re upset.” And he’s telling them he doesn’t care, he’s going back in the palace to do what royalty does.

  Watching the Watergate hearings on TV a few years later depressed me. I really wrestled with it. I felt so ashamed of America. Finally I came to a realization. I’m American. I love America—I love Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln, and the Grand Canyon. I love my country. But the crooked government—that’s not my country. Every time Nixon’s upper lip was sweating, you knew he was lying. Of course, the older we get, the more our history moves away from our forefathers. George Washington—you just have to admire somebody who turned down being emperor for life. A lot of people haven’t been able to resist.

  “Fortunate Son” wasn’t really inspired by any one event. Julie Nixon was dating David Eisenhower. You’d hear about the son of this senator or that congressman who was given a deferment from the military or a choice position in the military. They seemed privileged, and whether they liked it or not, these people were symbolic in the sense that they weren’t being touched by what their parents were doing. They weren’t being affected like the rest of us. Usually I strive to make my songs more general, but that was one case where, when I said “It ain’t me,” I literally meant me.

  With this kind of song, you’re carrying a weighty, difficult idea. I didn’t want the song to be pulled down into that “Now we’re serious; everybody get quiet” place. If I was going to write a quote unquote protest song, a serious song, I didn’t want it to be a lame song. It’s funny: of all my songs that are more serious and have real intent, “Fortunate Son” took by far the least time to write—like I said, just twenty minutes.

  As I told Dave Grohl once, there’s a lot of genres and styles in rock and roll, but the one that’s absolutely the hardest to do right is a driving, kick-ass rock and roll song. You hear a lot of songs with lame lyrics like, “Rock rock rock! Yeah! Yeah!” But something that’s really valid and leaves you breathless at the end? Those are few and far between.

  Doing “Fortunate Sun” with the Foo Fighters for Wrote a Song for Everyone was like a duck taking to water. It was just, “Man, this is fun.” Really simple. Not complicated. We spent some time kind of twisting up the arrangement a bit, but basically the power of the band just jumped right in and made it really cool. The Foo Fighters have their own studio. When I first got there, I parked my car and came in the back. I opened the door, and it hit me like a big whoosh: “God, there’s a band in here.” I took note of that immediately. Their drummer, Taylor Hawkins, was sitting at the drums by himself, making a heck of a racket. There was a palpable sense of a band. It’s an atmospheric thing. Just a group of fellows locked together, who think as one.

  Made me remember I was in a band. A long, long time ago.

  Creedence was invited to appear on The Johnny Cash Show in the spring of 1969 for an airing in September. We taped it at the old Ryman Auditorium, and Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins were also on the show, so I was in hog heaven backstage. These were people I really admired, and I was hearing fables of a time that I loved. At some point Roy says, “Oh, yeah, I had ‘Ooby Dooby’ out, I was just this kid, I do my show and figure I might end up at this girl’s house, in a room with her.” He said it kind of politely. “Yeah, then I found out Elvis had been there first.” Roy said that like it was a common occurrence. I hope I’m not saying anything that offends anyone all these years later, but it was such a funny picture. Then he talked about recording “Ooby Dooby.” Until then I had no idea that Roy had played lead guitar on the record. I thought it was some young hotshot—well, yeah, it was—Roy! Awesome!

  I met Mother Maybelle and she gave me a big hug. I love that feeling I get now, all these years later, just knowing that my path crossed hers. June Carter Cash came over and sat down next to us, wearing shorts, her hair in a ponytail. God, she was great. And Johnny—“We-e-e-e-l-l-l, I’m Jo-o-o-o-hnny Cash.” He really did talk like that. A little of that Mister Ed vibrato in the voice. When I first met him, I was so dumbfounded that I just blurted out, “I-I-I love you, Johnny Cash.” That’s all I could manage, because I do love him. He gave me a pat on the head and said, “I know, son.”

  In 1992, Johnny Cash got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We were up there onstage for the jam. We played “Big River”—I kind of knew how it went. There are twenty-five rockers onstage, and suddenly Vernon Reid breaks into “Purple Haze.” Johnny Cash was on one side of me and Keith Richards was on the other side—how many times in your life can you say that? Johnny’s got his acoustic guitar, and in the middle of “Purple Haze” he leans down and says to me in that warbly voice, “We-e-e-e-e-l-l-l, I think I met my match.”

  In November 1969, a small band of Native Americans went to Alcatraz Island. They were upset over various injustices and were taking a stand. Nixon’s government pushed back, and the FBI was threatening to come, so it became more of an occupation.

  Quite naturally, I took the Native Americans’ side. It seemed apparent that the government was going to try to starve them out, so I wanted to help. First I talked it up among my bandmates, and they were happy to join me. We were able to purchase food and supplies for them. I was not trying to get any credit for it. I’ve always been really suspicious when a celebrity does something charitable, poses for all the pictures, and then puts out a poster. That wasn’t my motivation. We pretty much tried to do it anonymously, and it was anonymous—until a few weeks later, when the Native Americans named their boat the Clearwater.

  That story only got funnier when Fantasy arranged some sort of gold record pr
esentation party on a cruise boat at around that time. We actually neared Alcatraz, and there was the Clearwater.* I knew what that meant, and so did the band, but the people from Fantasy didn’t: “Hey, look! There’s a boat named Clearwater!” They didn’t have a clue.

  That episode did not necessarily end well, like most things that happened between the Native Americans and the government. But I felt good about doing what I did. When you try to do something for the right reasons, you feel good. I always feel like I’ve done fewer benefits than many musicians—some people have a whole regimen. I do them as they come up, when it feels right to me. I want to be genuine about it. I’ve been given such a huge bounty of success. It’s the right thing to do.

  I felt guilty about my success. I always felt guilty about it. I was kind of sheepish about having money after not having any for so long. I knew inside that I could buy things, but I also had a sense about not being flamboyant or showy. I was still wearing my flannel shirts!

  When the rap guys started having big dollar sign chains and rings that said “money,” I was taken aback. In my generation, if you stood up there and started talking about money, they’d probably have thrown rotten tomatoes at you. But I came to understand that it’s just a different reaction to the same thing—a reaction to not having it.

  One thing I did purchase back then was an MG sports car. I was driving down San Pablo Avenue, the main drag in El Cerrito, and the car just died. A week after I bought it! I literally had to push it off to the side of the road. There’s a lesson to be learned there. I bought myself a fancy sports car, and here I was, being spanked for doing something like that.

  The trouble with having stuff is that everybody else wants it. I was careful not to say anything about it, because people were starting to come up and ask for free money. And since I never had anything as a kid and already felt guilty, I was an easy touch—“Yeah, sure. I have way more than I’ll ever need.”