Fortunate Son

by John Fogerty

  And I stopped smoking. The running thing filled up whatever desire there was in my lungs. And in my head too. I do an awful lot of thinking while I’m running—I’ve had a lot of inspirations for songs, inspirations for things to do with my career and my life. Through a lot of hard years, bad years, the best I ever felt was while running. There were so many things in my life that were out of my control, but running I could do something about. I was in charge. I’ve been running for over forty years now.

  It’s good to have an image in mind, a goal to keep you inspired. I can remember turning a corner on the sidewalk near my office way back around 1974, and I had a picture in my head of the way Jackie Wilson had moved onstage at the Oakland Auditorium. That was perfection, and how I wanted to be. I thought, Yeah, that’s why I’m doing this! Jackie Wilson!

  Hunting wasn’t as much about having an image in my head as it was an escape. Jake Rohrer ran my office, and in 1974 an old friend of his invited him up to Troy, Oregon, for a pack trip, and I came along. I hadn’t been around a dad or an uncle to show me how to hunt, and here I was, getting up to this place right in the middle of nowhere. I brought a fishing pole, met a couple of local characters. We stayed up late the night before, singing songs, drinking beer. Jake and I caught a whole bunch of fish. I enjoyed it so much that before the weekend was over, I had decided to buy some property there.

  First I bought a place in town that was being rented to loggers, which was a mistake. I was really glad when I was able to sell that. The actual day my Asylum album was released, my hands were in a toilet in Troy. I had to fix it all. Then I bought property on the other side of the Grande Ronde River and built a house there. I’d fish in the Wenaha River, the best water in the world. It was a place for my family to vacation, and I went hunting there until 1990. The longest I was in the woods was a month nonstop. Without a shower.

  At this point in my life, I am ambivalent about hunting. I could go either way. If somebody were to say to me, “Oh, how can you kill Bambi?,” I totally get that. Or “Guns are so evil!” I understand that. And when another person says, “Man, you must really enjoy getting out in the woods with the fellas, roughing it and being lucky enough to get an animal,” yeah, I get all that too. In my whole 1950s view of the world and masculinity, there was stuff that was considered part of the package of being a guy. Hunting was a reference point of manhood. And I really enjoyed it.

  I was fortunate to have Harvey Graham as my hunting buddy on these trips. He was a carpenter by trade, and we had met when he did some remodeling work at the Factory. Harvey was twenty years older than me and had served in World War II. He had lived in places like Grand Junction, Colorado, and various small towns in South Dakota, and was an old-school mountain man. Even as a kid, living in rural areas, he was the go-to guy that folks relied on to find people (or livestock) that had gotten lost in the mountains. And he was perfectly able to exist in the wild for extended periods of time.

  I learned a lot out there just by watching Harvey’s example. One big lesson was that we humans can endure much tougher conditions than we think. I would see Harvey, sometimes sick as a dog with the flu, just forcing himself to “keep going”—hiking over the mountains in a blizzard. One time, he stumbled and fell on the side of a mountain and his elbow got lodged in the crook of a tree, dislocating his shoulder. He was alone and in pain, so he reset his own shoulder! I was a city slicker by his standards, but I like to think that some of Harvey rubbed off on me.

  When you go hunting, you’re obviously going to have a gun with you. Although I’ve already mentioned that I’m in favor of gun control, I really like guns. Yes, I acknowledge that a gun is a tool whose whole purpose is to kill. But as a kid, long before I ever thought about hunting, I thought about the Wild West and the Colt Peacemaker, the guns of the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. Historically, it’s part of who we are. And I’m attracted to and fascinated by that. Since I was fourteen, I’ve daydreamed about being part of some sort of landed gentry, or a rich, idle playboy. You’d step into my library and there would be a collection of flintlocks—“Here’s a blunderbuss from the Mayflower.”

  Hunting is just a game where you try to be very stealthy and quiet for hours and days and nothing happens. And then for about three seconds, all hell breaks loose and everybody jumps around for a few minutes. Then it’s over. And we all go back to being stealthy and quiet again. But for the rest of the time, we’re thinking and talking about those three seconds. That’s the absolute truth.

  The hunting is such a tiny part of “hunting.” I think in twenty years of going, I might have been successful getting an animal five or six times. That’s about it. So hunting is the excuse. I’m a hardworking person, and I’d work right up until I left for the trip. After being out in the woods for three days—it was always three days—the same thing would always occur. Something would just click. Suddenly the clock slows down, the mind opens up, and you’re really self-aware. It just sinks in: all the smells, the sounds and the pace, the trees and the stars and the mountains and creatures.… You’re watching the squirrels, owls, all the critters. That’s when I’d find myself saying, “Imagine—they do this every day. Even when I’m not here!” You certainly believe that you are with God.

  You start to become very appreciative of all life, especially your own. Being so introspective gives you a chance to worry about the things you’ve done wrong in life. When you’re in civilization you’re too busy; you don’t worry about the negative scorecard. I think it makes you more soulful. Unfortunately, the situation I was in was unchanging: Fantasy Records and Saul Zaentz. It was good for me to go into the woods. I would come back feeling like tackling things again.

  Those problems didn’t always leave me. One year an elk came right up to me and I shot, but he got away. I was so pissed off—I was stomping through the woods, kicking rocks, yelling, “Fuckin’ lawyers, fuckin’ Fantasy, fuck, fuck, fuck! God, John, you’re such a loser!” By now my heart was thumping. I put my pack down right where the elk had been, took my rifle and went down about a hundred yards, aimed at my pack, bam! I came back, looked at my pack. Nope, I didn’t hit it.*

  Troy was great for me during that time, but of course things change. One day in the early nineties I was starting to get busy with my Blue Moon Swamp album, and I hadn’t been back to Troy in a while. Julie was in my life now, and I mentioned it to her. Kind of matter-of-fact, not with any sort of attitude, she just said, “Well, I don’t want to go to that house. That’s a different life. It’s a sad place to me. You had to escape and get away, and it just hurts me that you felt that way. I don’t want to go there.”

  So after that, I sold the place in Troy. I was looking right at her and I thought, Yeah, right—we’ll create our own new place that’s just for us.

  CHAPTER 13

  Springtime in the Bahamas

  IN 1977 CAME another blow: I lost just about every dime I’d ever made from Creedence. Remember that offshore tax plan that Saul Zaentz led the band into rather than pay us more money or tear up our contract? That “bank,” Castle Bank in the Bahamas, was run by Burt Kanter and a former CIA agent named Paul Helliwell—two lawyers that, I learned while researching this book, had “direct ties to organized crime,” as one author put it. Kanter was involved with mobsters Moe Dalitz and Morris Kleinman; Helliwell had ties to Meyer Lansky and Nixon bagman Bebe Rebozo. (In fact, an IRS investigator claimed that Nixon’s name was on a computer printout of Castle Bank clients, although that’s never been completely verified.) Nefarious dealings at the bank would lead another writer to describe Castle as a “‘dual purpose laundromat’ serving both the CIA and the mob.”*

  I knew none of this then. In fact, I was told at the time that Kanter was an ex–IRS agent, which years later I learned was a complete lie. (And guess what? Kanter just happened to be on the board of Fantasy Records.) At the time, we asked our accountants and lawyers and everybody else I could think of to ask, “Is this thing legal? Is it okay to do this?�
�� All of our advisers assured us that it was. By the latter part of the seventies, when there was more and more evidence that this Castle Bank thing was hokum, it really started to bother me.

  I’m not a big guy for business meetings. It’s not something I was good at in school. My eyes glaze over when people start talking numbers. But even I had started noticing things. Ed Arnold, my accountant, would show me a page that supposedly represented my account, my own personal money in Castle Bank. And on this page I’d see a couple of withdrawals that I hadn’t made—a few thousand here, five thousand dollars there. Over the course of months there were repeated withdrawals. I had thought that once we were in the plan there were no monthly bank fees. It wasn’t like borrowing money, where I had to pay interest—this was my own money.

  I asked, “Who’s making these withdrawals?” Ed kind of fumbled. He said, “It’s just maintenance of the account. It’s normal.” I thought, The money just sits there. Why does it have to be maintained? I couldn’t really have my own money. Say I wanted to buy a car—I had to call Ed. Then some time would pass and it would be okay for me to buy one—but the car had to be owned by the trust. The whole thing was cumbersome and strange.

  Then I saw a report on 60 Minutes on Bahamian trusts and how the U.S. government was taking the position that they weren’t really legal. I don’t think it mentioned Castle Bank specifically, but that’s when I started saying, “It may not be illegal, but it sure feels unethical to me. And immoral.”

  I entered into this whole thing like some Boy Scout. I hadn’t gone into music to escape paying income tax and become shady. I’d heard stories of Elvis sometimes paying taxes when he didn’t have to. He would donate to charity and not take the tax write-off he was entitled to. Elvis felt deeply about giving back. I don’t know if those stories are true, but I’d always go, “Oh, wow, cool.” Now that may sound naive, but that’s how I felt then. I wouldn’t lie to people to make myself look good or to get out of consequences. If my country says I’m supposed to pay this much tax, well, by God, then that’s what I should do. I was very proud of my honesty.

  I didn’t want to be Richard Nixon sobbing to the camera. But this looked like something I was going to have to back up, maybe lie about. And that wasn’t me.

  It all came to a head when I was talking to Joe Smith on the phone one day. He called in 1976, a few days after that meeting where it was decided that Hoodoo wasn’t coming out. He was probably worried that he had totally devastated me, because that was a hard pill to swallow. Not everybody would have followed up. He was a good guy and could tell I was in a bad way. At our meeting, he’d said, “Why don’t you go fix what’s bothering you?” That’s what moved me to get out of that whole Castle Bank thing. I took a stand. I’m the guy who said, “Y’know, this is wrong, and the decision to stand up is going to cost so much of my life and money, but I’m a man. I’m not a wuss.”

  I called a meeting with Ed, my accountant, and my lawyer, Barry Engel. I called it “the Shoe Box Meeting.” I said, “Look, I don’t really know what my finances are. I want to understand this. Creedence sold all these records. Picture a shoe box, an empty shoe box. Take everything I’ve ever earned, put it in the shoe box. And everything I’ve ever spent, take that out of the shoe box. Show me what’s left in the shoe box. What’s the number?” I really pushed it because no one could or would tell me. Every time I would ask, I’d get, “Well, we have to move all of this to this column…” It was like the shell game at the carnival.

  I said I wanted out of the plan. They tried to talk me out of withdrawing. Ed turned to me and said, “If you get out of the plan, you may have to pay one hundred and ten percent of everything you’ve ever earned.”

  I said, “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll be receiving all of your income in one calendar year,” he responded. “And they could penalize you for every single year that you didn’t pay taxes. If they throw the book at you, they’re going to charge you one hundred and ten percent.”

  I’m thinking, Here I am, this kid from El Cerrito who went on to create the number one band in the world, sold millions of records, and now I’m going to owe more money than what that whole journey earned.

  I said, “Okay. I want to do it anyway.”

  I had given a specific directive: “Get me out of the plan.” Nothing happened. Barry Engel, who was also representing the rest of the band, says, “John, if you start doing all this you’re really gonna harm the other three guys.”

  I go, “What do you mean?”

  “If you start telling the government all about the plan, and that you’re taking your royalties out of that plan and paying the taxes on it—well, Uncle Sam is gonna know that the other guys are in this, and you’re gonna hurt their position.” The threat Ed relayed about owing 110 percent wasn’t working on me, so here was another nudge—you should feel sorry for the other guys and consider staying in the plan, because you’re going to hurt everybody else.

  So I did this: I said, “Barry, I won’t talk about it for one year. I won’t say a word to anybody. For one year. After that, whatever anybody has to know about this I’ll have to explain. Because you and I both know this thing looks shaky. I’ll keep quiet one year. And by then you better have something figured out.” The other fellas really didn’t want to get out of the plan. I know some of the guys thought about transferring their money to some Swiss account in Geneva.

  Still nothing was happening! Looking back, I would say they were stalling. A few days went by. I finally had to call another meeting, at which I pointed at my advisers and said to them directly, “Get me out of this plan!” My people contacted the mysterious Castle Bank, telling them, “John wants to withdraw completely from this plan.”

  They got back a telegram. It was February 14, 1977. I know because the attorneys and accountants dubbed this the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre telegram. I didn’t find this out until many legal fees later, when we had to reconstruct the events. They were all having a big laugh on this little point in history. The telegram said that Paul Helliwell, the president of the bank, had died. In a sauna. (The telegram claimed that he died the day before, but it appears that was just a stall tactic. He died on December 24, 1976.) Because of this, the bank was closing until further notice. All assets had been frozen. Access to my money stopped right then.

  I’d seen enough old movies in which the mob traps some guy in the steam room by sticking a broom through the door handles, turns the heat up to four thousand, and he’s cooked like a lobster. I started looking under my cars for wires. Something that looked like it might blow up if I started the car. I was scared. I checked under every car for months. Here I was, the whistle-blower on a shady bank, and all of a sudden, I’m locked in the sauna with my money on the other side.

  Weeks and months were spent searching for my money, pursuing any trails. Finally my office manager, Jake, came to me. “The trail has gone cold,” he said. “In Panama. Your money has disappeared without a trace. There’s no more places to look. It’s gone.”

  I went to my studio to regroup. I told myself, You’re zero. You’ve lost your life savings, everything you’ve earned from being the number one band in the world. All that income from your songs, songwriting, records, concerts—it’s just all gone.

  Now, in my own kind of stumbling way, I kept trying to stay current in music, and I had bought an ARP 2600 synthesizer. It bothered me that you could play only one note at a time on this mono keyboard. Suddenly, right in the middle of this terrible day, I had an epiphany. I should approach the synth like an orchestral composer, blending single notes into chords. It was just like what I was doing as a teenager in my bedroom with that add-a-track tape recorder and my guitar. And I created this delightful—I mean delightful—little piece of music. It sounded like little birdies, little crickets, and all sorts of little animals singing together. Kind of like a Disney cartoon. It was fully formed and realized, right there after I got the news about my savings disappearing. And I name
d this piece of music “Springtime in the Bahamas.” I don’t know where the heck that recording is now. I’d like to hear it.

  Despite the beautiful music, I was pissed off. Completely enraged. And I grew resolute: “They ain’t getting away with it. Whatever it takes.” I decided I needed a symbol. I suppose van Gogh would’ve cut off an ear. In my mind, I pictured myself as a pirate standing on the deck of a ship, fighting overwhelming odds, brandishing my last two swords and one of those little flintlock guns, yelling, “Arrrrgh.”

  A pirate has earrings. So I went to the local mall and got my ear pierced. In 1977 you didn’t see guys walking around wearing earrings. Nobody had an earring then. Nobody. When I came home, Martha and the kids were like, “Ooooh-kay.” Everybody thought that the earring was pretty strange. But I was all by myself going through this. I was doing this alone.

  After my initial action to have my funds withdrawn from Castle Bank and the ensuing anxiety that the money might just go missing, I had been instructing my own attorneys and accountants to take action… to “find the money.” Slowly, it began to dawn on me that I had a bigger problem than just my life savings being missing. The IRS was going to insist that I pay income tax even though the money was missing. And they were probably going to demand taxes on money that had gone (supposedly) straight into Castle Bank—without ever having been in my possession. Yikes!

  I was really worried about the consequences of this plan. If it was not legal, did that mean I would go to prison? What if I didn’t have enough money to pay the taxes? I didn’t have much money at the time—would I have to earn more money in the future to pay taxes on income from the past? I thought about Joe Louis, the former heavyweight champion of the world. Things had gone so bad for Joe that it took an act of Congress to forgive his debts. Was I going to end up like him?