Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  Some people put us down because we had hit records, but I didn’t give a whit about that. Why? Everybody I ever loved was a Top 40 band. The Beatles, Elvis Presley—Top 40. I just never worried about it. But my band certainly did. I thought, Aren’t you smart enough to realize they’re jealous? Not everybody can do this, y’know! The Grateful Dead can’t do this. Even Led Zeppelin couldn’t do it. Great band, but they were only on underground radio. I knew all that then.*

  But the guys in the band were paranoid. They wanted more respect. And they also wanted to be seen as hip. They really worried about it—“Oh man, we’re not hip enough!” I remember we went to a radio station, and Stu had to say very loudly as he was drinking his Coca-Cola, “I’ll have another hit!” They wanted to appear more relevant, cool, dope smokers. The guys wanted to hire somebody to create that image for us to tell the world how hip we were.

  Tom wanted to hire Colonel Parker—Elvis’s manager. I thought getting the Colonel would ruin us. Up until then, we’d been pretty down-home, handmade, homemade… and we were number one. The guys wanted to go the slick Hollywood route. Some of their complaints were probably well-founded, but I do think it was also a case of, “Take that away from John. Don’t have John do that.” They just wanted to dilute my position. And so, at their insistence, we hired Rogers and Cowan, a big publicity firm, and had a big press event with a listening party for Pendulum and a showing of a Creedence TV special. We flew in rock critics from all over the country. I don’t remember the final tally, but it was costly.

  I didn’t say much that night. I was pretty uptight. I sat in a corner and didn’t do much interviewing. The guys sure did. “Everybody has the most fucking respect for the Beatles,” Doug cried to Rolling Stone. “Well, we’re the biggest American group.… We shouldn’t be taken lightly.” They talked about their new plans to sing and write their own songs—that sort of thing. John’s tyranny is over! Stu said, “We’re tired of that riff about John Fogerty’s backup band.… We all contribute now.”* (Years later it would always bother me when the guys would say I forced them to sing and write their own songs for our next album, Mardi Gras—“This was all John’s idea. We never wanted all those things.” I thought, Well, gee, we had a big party and you told the world that was what you were gonna do!)

  The press people I talked to that night were confused by it all. As one of them told me, “We’re just surprised that you’re doing this now, after two years of enormous success. This is how you announce a brand-new band.” I just muttered, “Yeah.” They were wondering what all this hoopla was about, since we’d already released five hugely successful albums!

  Maybe the lowest point of the night was when our publicity person Bobbi Cowan asked me to stand up and make a speech thanking Saul. That really stuck in my craw, but being a good soldier, I did it. I got up and said the only thing I could think of: “Thank you, Saul, for buying my Kustom amp.”

  Which of course later came out of our royalties.

  A few weeks after the Night of the Generals, Tom did a remarkable thing. He left the band. I was stunned. I had given the guys everything they’d said they wanted. And now, Tom just quit. We never talked about it directly. Tom was in a bad mood. He was real tense about it. There was a whole long interaction with Bruce Young acting as a go-between—Bruce was our tour manager, and a guy we had known from the very beginning. Tom would tell Bruce something, and Bruce would come and tell me what Tom had said, and I’d tell Bruce to go back and tell Tom something.

  Bruce was saying, “Tom wants to leave the band. He just wants to leave.” I’d say stuff like, “Well, he got everything he wanted. I agreed.” I remember telling Bruce, “Look, tell Tom the band can just stop. We can take a break! Tom can make a record on his own. We can all just do other things for a while—it doesn’t have to be Creedence. Tell Tom it’s okay. The band doesn’t have to break up.”

  Bruce came back with, “No, Tom’s gonna leave the band. He wants a clean break, wants to be on his own.” Truthfully? I think Tom was being more honest than Stu or Doug at that point. Tom was so overwhelmed with the prospect of writing, singing, and arranging that he left the band. He thought, Oh my God, what do I do now? Because I had said yes, you can do it, instead of saying no, like all the other times.

  There’s a quote Tom gave in 1971 to Rolling Stone. I didn’t see it until I was working on this book. He said, “Here I was, John’s older brother, yet not really leading.” That kind of says it all, doesn’t it? You read that, and you understand what Tom’s point of view was. His motivation. I didn’t understand that until much later. Had it simply been that I had been the older one, maybe it would’ve been different—I don’t know. He also said later, “I didn’t want to just be the guy standing there playing rhythm guitar.” I thought his playing was solid, often great, and that it was the coolest thing in the world that we were in this band together. I may have been trying to include him in the music way back when, but we were in this now. I didn’t understand that Tom was jealous of me until Julie pointed it out.

  I couldn’t figure out any of it at the time. I really couldn’t. I was a very mixed-up guy. I didn’t know how I was supposed to act towards Tom, y’know? He was still my brother, I’m going to see him here or there, but he was taking a big dump on our band. We were the jilted ones, right? The ones left at the altar.

  Losing Tom—that was tough. I didn’t like that. The divorce of a well-known band is a really, really public thing. You might say that was a fatal blow to Creedence Clearwater Revival. Bam! to the solar plexus.

  CHAPTER 11

  Three-Legged Stool

  TOM LEAVING THE band took the wind out of my sails. That was early 1971, and outside of one single, there were no plans to record until a year later. We had been putting out three albums in one year, so a year without making any records felt like a lifetime.

  What did I do in that time off? I moved out of my house and lived in Denmark. With a girl named Lucy. We were just two people who happened to meet each other.

  Martha and I separated. I was very serious about moving in with Lucy. I thought this was going to be my life. In my heart I was gone for good. Lucy was a deejay in a discotheque, working all night. Lucy was a wonderful person, energetic and positive in the time that I knew her. Social, outgoing, gregarious, full of life. I found that very intriguing and wanted to be in that energy. She had a very different personality from my wife, Martha, who was kind of introverted. Lucy’s energy was something that I needed in my life at the time. There wasn’t much happiness or love at home between Martha and me. So this was an escape from reality.

  Over the course of the time I was in Denmark, I began to realize that what I had been so attracted to there was probably not real life. In other words, it was unsustainable. At some point you have to settle down. You can’t be going out every night having a party 24/7. You begin to long for some sort of stability again. At least I did.

  And it seemed like the more time that went by in that relationship, the more problems we would have. Fights, squabbles, disagreements. Besides all the happy fireworks, there were fireworks of conflict. I can’t quite put my finger on why. It’s all kind of trivial now. And I’m assuming as much responsibility for it as anybody else. Perhaps I was not really being a grown-up. I’m not trying to protect myself: my behavior certainly isn’t textbook perfect in all of this. Hopefully I’m perceived as a person trying to do good, although maybe not always doing the best job of it.

  But the arguments with Lucy would happen more and more. And I’d find myself not understanding the squabbles. There would be times when I’d literally feel like I didn’t know what language I was speaking. That suddenly the normal laws of physics weren’t working. The furniture just wasn’t sitting the way I’d always thought. My frame of reference was just really upset, and eventually it became too much.

  The relationship lasted a year or so. Even though I look back on that relationship very fondly, not with any blame or faultfinding, there were part
s that were just unworkable. As I’ve told Julie, in the years after I left Lucy, I thought about a relationship with energy like that in a longing kind of way. But where everything between us was good.

  There’s a line in the song “Rocky Top” that I always remember, because back then I would wish I had it. And the line is, “Wild as a mink, sweet as soda pop.” You can name all the great thinkers who have said wonderful things about humanity—and to me that line by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant is as good as it gets. I’d hear that lyric and remember something I’d experienced once, but that had gone wrong. And when I met Julie, when things calmed down and I really, really got to know her, that’s exactly what I found: “Wild as a mink, sweet as soda pop.” Julie’s my dream girl. Dream woman.

  While I was in Denmark I had a dream. I saw my infant child, Laurie, who was just a few months old, and I was filled with guilt. Absolutely filled with guilt. I was having the emotions of a man who felt that he should be taking care of his family. So I went back. Came home, got back together with Martha, and stayed for another fourteen years or so. But after that, she didn’t want to hear anything about music. Or touring. She just really didn’t. Who could blame her?

  In other words, I had ruined it. The truth is, you can never go back. At the time, I did the best that I could to try and care for my family. Martha and I have three wonderful children together: Joshua, Laurie, and Sean. But I was a terrible father—terrible. Just inept. It’s a shame for those kids, because they had a dad who was loving but wasn’t very nurturing, in the sense of realizing what my role was. I was not a very involved dad. I was just sort of existing, if that makes any sense. Being. I really didn’t understand the responsibility, the things you’re supposed to do. I didn’t do any of that kind of thinking, as far as I know. I pretty much wasn’t aware of it.

  I’m not trying to excuse myself or anything like that, but it’s pretty clear to me, looking back, that I didn’t know anything about living back then. I couldn’t even take care of myself, let alone a wife and children. I didn’t know who I was. I was just doing the thing that I loved, which was music, but in my personal life—I don’t know how to say it—I just had a big lack of understanding about everything. I didn’t feel a sense of being in control of my life outside of my songs. I spent so much of my life being noncommunicative.

  I really didn’t want to have my family suffer through a divorce. But Martha and I were the wrong two people to be in a long-term relationship together. It was what you’d call a dysfunctional relationship. I hung in there trying to make it work. But it just couldn’t.

  When we finally divorced, I took it badly—beat myself up, especially over the kids. I hated the whole thing. But I think there is some truth when kids tell their parents, “Yeah, we were really glad when you finally resolved it. Life got a lot more peaceful, less stressful.” I remember that my daughter Laurie wrote a paper for school when she was quite young and mentioned, “My dad is always angry.” When I read that, it just opened my eyes. I’m sure it’s the truth. It’s a shame to put your kids through that. A lot of it had to do with my career and Fantasy—and a lot of it just had to do with being in an unhappy place.

  I wandered around all of 1971 thinking over the future of Creedence. We’d recorded a single in the spring, “Sweet Hitch-Hiker.” The B side was a song written and sung by Stu, “Door to Door”—really the first true labor of Creedence’s “democracy”—and the results were, to put it mildly, underwhelming.

  I remember getting out of my car in Emeryville and walking around an estuary, watching the speedboats and water-skiers. I just needed to think. I was arguing with myself because I was hurt and angry about the whole situation and not sure I wanted to get back together with Doug and Stu. I was in turmoil. I thought about blowing Creedence up: “Forget it—I quit!” But this band was my dream. One side of me said, “No, no, no! Don’t let ’em do that. Just take over and be the way you always were.” Then the other guy in my head was arguing, “Yeah, but you already said you’d stop being like that and let them have a chance.” The phrase that kept playing over and over in my mind was, “I guess they deserve a shot.”

  I’ve never told anybody this, but Elvis had something to do with this decision. When Elvis hit the big time, his manager, the Colonel, picked him out of the little group he was in with D. J. Fontana, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black. That was his original, classic band. And Elvis went off and left them. It was a big deal to me when Elvis turned his back on the other guys, went on without them. I thought it was against the stars in the heavens, against the laws of nature. I just felt he screwed his band, and I didn’t want to do that.

  The Elvis situation was in my head when I made my decision—“Okay, we’re gonna do this.”

  After the guys and I hadn’t communicated for a long time, we had a meeting. I said, “Look, we’re gonna record again, but this is how it’s gonna be: you guys are going to sing and write your own songs. That’s what I agreed to—and that’s what the world is waiting for, because you told everybody that’s what we’re gonna do. Stu, you’ll write, sing, and produce three songs. Doug, you’ll write, sing, and produce three songs. And I’ll write, sing, and produce three songs. The deal is we’re gonna do it now. Right now.”

  I relinquished being the guy in charge of the music in exchange for being just one part of the music—“Okay, I’m in charge of my part. Here’s my three feet of space. Don’t invade it. You guys do your part.” And that’s exactly how Mardi Gras was made.

  Doug and Stu were happy with this arrangement, but on my Mardi Gras songs, there’s a certain melancholy, a kind of resignation. Listen to the way the album opens: “Lookin’ for a Reason.” The writer Robert Hilburn busted me during an interview at that time—“Is this about the band breaking up?” “No, no.” I didn’t put up a very good facade. I think he knew. I referenced that honky-tonk style in the song because the words seemed to sound good that way. I had a little Sho-Bud Maverick steel guitar that I was painfully learning how to play.

  I wrote “Someday Never Comes” when I left Martha. It was written right out of my gut, for better or for worse. I was really pining over our children. I was seeing the unhappy thread. I had been in a family where the parents had divorced and I really took that hard. Now here I was, a grown man, doing the same thing to my children. That just seemed really sad. If you want to say ironic, I guess so, but I wasn’t comfortable enough with it to look at it that way. It was more just seeing the pain of, “Wow, here it is again.” For a long time I tried to hide and not really talk about how painful that is—and painful for those kids from that marriage. I’m trying to just face everything and be as honest as I can.

  I think Lucy was there when I was recording it, yet I was on my own with that pain. That’s kind of… revealing. No matter what’s going on all around, each of the partners breaking up is doing it alone. Obviously you’re not calling your ex and asking, “Oh, how do you feel? Don’t feel bad.” Somehow we don’t do that. We wish that some older and wiser person would call and help us out. Breaking up relationships is one of the sadder things we do, and putting children through that is just about the saddest thing we can do.

  I’m a little angry in the song. Bitter. The record doesn’t really have the force I would’ve loved it to have, because the band couldn’t do that, especially as a trio. When I get to the part that goes, “I’m here to tell you now each and every mother’s son / You better learn it fast and you better learn it young / ’Cause someday never comes,” there’s supposed to be fifteen Marshalls on eleven in the background going r-r-r-r-r, just angry as hell. Then it should come down, down, down into the pathos of the chorus. We weren’t quite good enough to do that, on an album where we were not really talking to each other much. I felt very sad about that situation too.

  I think the version I cut with Dawes on Wrote a Song for Everyone actually surpasses the Creedence track. It’s much closer to the original vision that I had of the song forty years ago. You feel that Dawes is pis
sed off, as young people are. It’s the disillusionment we all feel when we come of age. When you’re four years old, you think the adults have everything in hand. Then you start to inherit the world and realize that the generation before you kind of screwed up—“Why the hell didn’t you guys do a better job?” Don’t worry, folks, the same will be said by your kids about you, and on down the line.

  When we were in the studio doing Mardi Gras, Stu and Doug’s material was sounding like… well, what it sounded like. I remember that Doug would always be walking around singing some song he was working on—“Eco-nomics! Eco-nomics!” Doug and Stu thought their stuff was really great. They weren’t sitting there at rehearsals or in the studio going, “Oh God, this is awful. We’re terrible! John’s forcing us. We’re not going to do this!” They were saying, “Man, this is really cool—listen to that!” They were high-fiving each other in the studio.

  I’d play on Doug and Stu’s songs, and when it came to the guitar solo, I’d give it my best shot. But at some point Stu perceived a problem with one of his songs. This wasn’t a great situation for me in the first place, and now Stu was coming to me and saying, “Here’s my song, John. But will you fix it like you did before with Creedence? Make it better?” Now, you can take a really lackluster song and orchestrate an arrangement and have it sound, at least on first blush, pretty good—ever heard “Fly, Robin, Fly” by Silver Convention?