Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  There was one young singer on Fantasy who asked, “John, can you give me five thousand dollars? My manager wants to put me on this tour of Europe. They say it’s important, but I don’t have any money. Fantasy said they would support the tour, but then they reneged. When we get home from the tour, I’ll pay you back.” I gave her the money, and then I never heard from her again.

  That’s kind of how it works. People come to your doorstep with bags full of their problems. They ask you for money, you give it to them, they give you their baggage, and then you open that little closet next to your front door, where all the other baggage is kept, and wait for them to come get their baggage and return the money. Because now the problem is yours. You have to wait to get paid back… you might be waiting a long time.

  Saul actually said to me once, “Money doesn’t change you. It unmasks you.” No shit, Saul!

  I played sax on “Travelin’ Band,” the Creedence single that came out in January 1970. Well, I just felt the urge to pay homage to that whole Little Richard sound. I had gone and rented a sax in the early sixties to play a song that Tom had written called “Watusi Lucy.” I had practiced enough to play that little part, which is exactly what I did with “Travelin’ Band.” Of course, what I really should’ve done is get a real horn section. That’s what the Beatles would’ve done, but somehow there’s that thing in my head: “I’ll do it myself.” In a way, that made it sound charming, homemade.

  I love horns, especially when they’re used right. Stax had it down. I thought the horns in Chicago or Blood Sweat and Tears were too big, too much for rock and roll. I guess people feel, “Well, I gotta pay him for the whole time, so I’m gonna use him the whole time.” Horns really ought to play a little bit, and then be quiet!

  The flip side of “Travelin’ Band” was “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” That’s really kind of a protest song, but I imagine a lot of people don’t look at it that way. I was going at it sideways. With “I went down Virginia,” I’m talking about Washington, DC. “I watched the tower grow” is their Tower of Babel. I’m talking about BS, really. Political spin. I think that song was done enough like a fable that you don’t necessarily have to know what it all means or even worry about it. (I remember sitting down and explaining “Who’ll Stop the Rain” to Ronnie Milsap one night in Memphis. This was before he was a big star. He was just a rock and roll guy singing songs like “Ball of Confusion.” I know sometimes for lots of fans a song is a song—that’s all.)

  There’s a lot of drumming on “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” Some would say too much drumming. It’s sort of surprising in the context of Creedence, but I think the mind-set was to sound biblical or historical, like some of the old fables—perhaps Ulysses. I know I had the concept of “folk rock” in mind. The guys insisted on doing the background vocals on that one. This became one of three songs that they sang the background vocals on (the other two being “Porterville” and “Sailor’s Lament”). They didn’t insist with quite the same intensity as they did at the infamous “band meeting” at the end of 1970, but the shit was beginning to hit the fan.

  The more success Creedence Clearwater Revival had, the more the guys started to grumble. For a group that was supposedly on top of the world, there sure were a lot of unhappy people. There was a big argument when I had gotten us a weekend’s worth of concerts on the East Coast. One of the guys was mad because he was planning to take his boat out. I remember thinking to myself, Do you realize we’re in the middle of a whirlwind career here? We’re basically conquering the world.

  Stu complained that we didn’t have limos. Once, very early on, when we were to play the Fillmore East for the first time, we had to leave our hotel rooms and get there on our own. Well, I was pretty unsophisticated. I thought we’d just hail a cab. We ended up having to walk through that neighborhood late at night and saw some things that were fairly upsetting. In hindsight, we should’ve had our own car. At the time, I didn’t know about things like that. I wasn’t the one making those arrangements. To me, having a limo was pretty damn uptown. That’s one of the times that Stu railed at me for being such a stupid leader, manager, whatever. He would come at you like a screwdriver, a knife out of his pocket, bam! So after that, we got limos. Then they weren’t long enough. “So how big a fucking limo do we need, Stu?” I always heard about how his hotel room should be bigger, grander, blah, blah, blah.

  We arrived in London for the first time to play at Royal Albert Hall in April 1970. That was such a big moment for us. We were just four guys from El Cerrito who had never been anywhere, and we’re landing in merry ol’ England, home of the Beatles, the Stones, and everybody else. We flew overnight, a long flight, and Stu’s grumbling and grousing on the plane, complaining about the stewardess. Huh? Then we were getting off the plane, and there were two or three press people with cameras on the runway. And I hear Stu right behind me: “Where’s the limo?! Hey, where’s the limo?” I was thinking, God, he’s gonna wreck this thing. They’re all gonna see this. I was acting like that guy in charge, trying to keep the ship going, because we didn’t have Brian Epstein; we had us.

  There were other problems. We’d be going through an airport, and some kid would walk up and ask for my autograph. Right behind my ears I’d hear grumbling from the guys because the kid didn’t ask for their autograph. He wasn’t trying to throw acid in their face; he was just being a kid. But the guys in my band weren’t big enough or smart enough to realize, “Wow, this is great! We’re being recognized!” No, it was, “This is awful. He’s getting recognized!”

  Tom was such a storm. Before this, he was always the positive guy—mellow, happy-go-lucky. Then he got dark. I think Tom felt intimidated because there was a lot of stuff he couldn’t play. Like “Down on the Corner”—he couldn’t keep up with the rhythm, so we had to overdub it in pieces. He’d get mad. I remember when we rehearsed “Green River” for the first time at Doug’s. I was standing out front with the guys, and Tom said, “You’re getting quite a repertoire.” This wasn’t said cheerfully. He spit out the words with clenched teeth. I thought we should’ve been happy because we had a new, original song—which, by the way, he was getting paid for.

  When we did the album cover shoot for Green River, I was giving direction, telling people where to stand, and Tom went, “Oh, now you’re producing the photo shoots too?” You’ll notice that in most of the posed pictures of Creedence after that I’m standing in the back. I made a conscious effort. I thought, I better make sure I don’t do anything that shows me off as a star, the front man. But really, I was mystified for the longest time: God, why are my own people mad at me all the time?

  All this made it hard to talk about things, fragile things, like the merits of one song over another song. It was less fun. As the negative energy got louder and louder, I would have conversations with myself: “Well, shoot, I wish I was in a band where some guy knew what to do and just did it. I’d be happy to tag along behind and play rhythm guitar or whatever. Man, we’re on top of the world! This is great!”

  In a sense we had outfoxed everybody. Here we were on this tiny label with no budget, no manager, no producer, no publicity. One by one I had assumed all the roles out of necessity. And now we were being called the number one band in the world after the Beatles broke up in 1970. We’re about to play one of the most famous halls in the world, but instead of being happy, everybody is miserable!

  In some ways, the English press was sort of a crotchety bunch, meaning they acted like they weren’t part of the rock and roll world. They were more like the National Enquirer. As much as there was talk about the music, there seemed to be talk about other stuff that I didn’t really care that much about—“Are you all millionaires?” “Do you have a fancy car?” I didn’t want to tell them my MG had died in the middle of San Pablo Avenue.

  We didn’t play an encore at Royal Albert Hall in 1970. Creedence no longer did them. One night somewhere in the States I just decided that Creedence wasn’t going to do an encore after the
show. Or ever again. I seem to remember it was Philadelphia, but my brother Bob says Davenport, Iowa. I’ve read where Doug has said he was so mad about it he smashed a bottle of Pepsi against the wall, knocked me off the table I was sitting on, and then broke off the table legs and threatened me with them. I don’t remember any violence, or a specific confrontation with Doug. I am not and was not afraid of Doug, and the idea that he had me cowering on the ground is a fabrication. Our road manager, Bruce Young, did say to me, “You should’ve warned us beforehand.”

  I guess I did spring it on everyone, but I’d been thinking about it for some time. Doing encores had gotten so expected and predictable. At the Oakland Auditorium, B.B. King would play a twenty-minute set and encores would start after three songs. It started to feel phony, Sinatra in Vegas, you know, showbiz shtick—and we were against that.

  It was also a matter of safety. The concert scene had gotten crazier and crazier towards the end of 1969. I’d begun to see the frenzy at the end of each show when we came back out to play. It was like some kind of switch had been thrown—people who had been behaving themselves now weren’t. There were a few shows where the crowd rushed the stage and grabbed some of our stuff and bolted. I daresay there were other people not doing encores for the same reasons—the Beatles, the Stones, Zeppelin…

  The encore we didn’t play at Royal Albert Hall is our most notorious one. We did our show, fifty-five minutes. And then we were done. (When they play “God Save the Queen,” the show is over. I guess that’s a showbiz tradition.) At the time, it was controversial and left a bad taste in some people’s mouths. But there was a time there when the top echelon of showbiz was not doing encores, ending a show when it ended, and I was not the first to make that call. Of course, things have changed. I now do encores!

  Putting together our next single was another one of those times when I just wanted to keep the music coming, stay fresh on the radio. I had already been working with the band for weeks on the music, but there was no time left, and I had to write the lyrics and, if necessary, rename the song.

  We were leaving for our first European tour the next week. So we would have to go in the studio on Tuesday and do the basic tracks, and then I could come back on Wednesday and do all the vocals, guitars, and rhythm instruments, and then mix both songs. So I went home on a Friday determined to write these two songs: “Run Through the Jungle” and “Up Around the Bend.”

  Through the course of the weekend, I believe that one of the songs actually drifted away from the song title I’d had in mind for a while. In other words, I entertained the idea of changing what the song was about and writing a new, different song. Luckily, I resolved whatever impasse was causing this and came back to the original idea. That’s pretty late in the process to be starting a new song. I worked feverishly through the weekend, staying up most of Friday and Saturday nights, and by Monday morning I had the two songs completed. After that experience, I said to myself, Yep, you can call yourself a songwriter.

  “Up Around the Bend” was inspired by riding my motorcycle. I just remember riding along, and the title phrase came to me. Just the feeling of going. Movement. By now Martha and I had a newer house. I had a room upstairs that became a studio, but at the time it was just an empty room. This might’ve been the first song I wrote there.

  I used to say that there were four ingredients to a great rock and roll record. First, have a distinctive title. Next, the overall sound of the record has to be cool. Almost as if you could take a snapshot of the sound and look at that photo. Picture the difference between “Smoke on the Water” and “My Girl.” Different, but they both sound fantastic! Three, you have to have an exceptional song. And finally, the very, very best ones will have a killer guitar riff. That’s the icing on the cake.

  I think I was playing my Rickenbacker with the humbucking pickups, or maybe the Les Paul, and I was messing around with the guitar intro from “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation)” by Marty Robbins. I may have even played it wrong, because it’s a little bit tamer on Marty’s record. I was just widening the range, you might say. What was really fun at that time was that I had a little late-sixties all-tube Fender Deluxe Reverb amp that I had bought just for songwriting. The Fender Deluxe is one of the best amps ever made. It’s like the Model T of amps. It doesn’t have really high wattage, and turned up, it would distort in a certain way—not quite as good as a Marshall, but it certainly had a funky edge to it. The way that bridge pickup sounded coming out of that amp—especially when I played the lick that became “Up Around the Bend”—was just a nice edgy thing. It was so good that I said, “This isn’t just a practice amp. I gotta make the record with this.” Playing “Up Around the Bend” through that amp with the bridge pickup was a great combination. That sound inspired quite a few songs from me. Eventually, I moved up to a slightly more powerful amp—the Fender Vibrolux—and it’s hard to tell which amp is on which song.

  I’ve seen it written that “Run Through the Jungle” is about Vietnam, but that’s not true. I was speaking about the landscape in America. I had been thinking about the idea ever since 1966, when Charles Whitman had gone on a rampage, killing sixteen and wounding thirty-two others, shooting from the observation tower at the University of Texas. That was the first time in my life I was confronted with the fact that a seemingly normal person can turn not only criminal but into an insane, raging thing that we can’t even understand.

  The song is really about gun control. Now, I’m a hunter. And I’m intrigued, even fascinated, by weaponry through the ages. But I am in favor of gun control. I don’t think machine guns should be allowed—who takes a machine gun to go deer hunting? The Constitution says various things, but it doesn’t mean that you can build a hydrogen bomb in your basement. I think there should be some psychological interrogation for gun buyers. If you can’t get through that, you’re probably not the right guy to have a gun anyway. They shouldn’t make it so easy. And anybody with a gun should get some training—it shouldn’t be, “Hey, I hear a burglar.” Bam! Lord, people shoot themselves or their own kids when they don’t know what they’re doing.

  Remember the 1989 shooting at the elementary school in Stockton, California, that left five kids dead? George Bush had just been in office a little while, and Barbara Bush came right out and said we should ban assault rifles. Whoa—the rest of the Republicans were immediately like, “Shut her up! Don’t ever let her say anything again!” Boom! Gag! She said stuff that made sense, so they didn’t let her talk anymore. We could’ve gone after gun control then, before the countless shootings that came after and still continue to happen. But once again, it boils down to the fact that somebody’s making a big profit, and I daresay those somebodies are rich corporations that are conservative by nature.

  Now there is one more thing I would say about this complicated subject of gun control. The founding fathers thought it was important that us citizens have “the right to bear arms.” Since 9/11 (or perhaps because of it), our government has passed a lot of legislation that further diminishes our rights as ordinary citizens. With the revelations of Edward Snowden, we see the specter of parts of our government spying on its own citizens. Therefore, I think it is important that our citizenry is armed. I believe this acts as a deterrent—whoa! Deterrent? Against what? Let’s just say that the fact that there are millions of armed people ready to defend their homes probably acts as a huge roadblock against those who would try to seize the country for their own ends.

  So guns and gun control were on my mind writing “Run Through the Jungle.”* At the same time, it was all mixed up in the fearmongering of Richard Nixon that had taken hold in our land. “Over on the mountain, thunder magic spoke / Let the people know my wisdom / Fill the land with smoke.” That was my arch inspiration—Mr. Nixon. Mr. “We’ll let them know how powerful I am. We’re gonna crack down on all you bums!”

  With the “storm clouds” that open and close the song, I was trying to go beyond the usual start-stop. I think there�
�s some backwards guitar and piano on that, plus a couple of tambourines. That’s the Rickenbacker into the Kustom. One of the guitar tracks was a pick slide with slapback echo. The overall effect was ominous, spooky. I was getting a lot with just a little. It wasn’t Hugo Winterhalter or Hans Zimmer. I was just a kid in a rock and roll band trying to add some color.

  It’s funny how our cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” came about. One day I was down in Los Angeles, maybe Sunset Boulevard, in a hippie clothing shop where they had a lot of leather, vests, and hats. They had an FM radio on and the speakers were really far apart—one was in the front of the store, another way in the back. I liked Marvin, especially his early stuff, but I really hadn’t paid attention to his recent, very produced recordings, and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” came on. Motown always had all that production and echo covering everything up. Because I was back there near one speaker, I was mostly hearing his voice—clear as a bell, with all his cool gospel inflections. Suddenly I was smiling—I was hearing Marvin really sing. I heard a guy really cutting it, singing his rear end off, and I was knocked out.

  I took it as a challenge, a throwdown—“That’s kind of my territory. I could do that song.” I got the single and just started working on it. I’d play the cool riff. One day I just had one of those epiphanies—“Wow, this could be a guitar song.” I changed the piano riff to guitar and did the tuned-down thing with the vibrato guitar with that low string always droning. Since it was a cover, I thought it would be cool to make a jam out of it, turn it into a fun thing to play. I took it into the swamp. Duane Eddy could’ve done that song. Beat you to it, Duane!

  “Ramble Tamble” just came to me one night when I was lying in bed. The melody, the guitar, the whole vibe of it, from stem to stern. I had no idea what it was about, but I could hear the sound of the guitar and the way the record would sound. That was a true gift—“Here, my son. You might need this. Pay attention.” Every once in a rare while, it works that way.