| LARRY SCHWARTZ |
| They started out as the Blue Velvets, then became the Golliwogs and, finally, Creedence Clearwater Revival. It was a misnomer, it seems. “When you have a picture of Creedence Clearwater, it went into your brain that way,” says John Fogerty, 53, the man who wrote all the hits, from Proud Mary to Fortunate Son for the most popular American rock band of its time. “But actually that’s John Fogerty. He just didn’t have the correct name. All the imagery, all the sound, the whole world is really something that came out of the heart and soul of John Fogerty. You’ve just been calling it Creedence Clearwater all your life, you know.” Self-aggrandisement this is not. It’s common knowledge that Fogerty was the creative force behind the California quartet that celebrated an imagined American south through his songs. Fogerty reveals obvious misgivings that former bandmates Doug Clifford and Stu Cook are touring as Creedence Revisited. “They play all of John Fogerty’s songs every night but they’ve got this guy that used to be a janitor to sing,” he says. “In their view, all they’ve got to do is get somebody else and he’ll be the singer and that makes it the same. There you go, that’s a very good example of what people will do where they prostitute themselves. There’s a lot of those, especially in politics and show business.” Fogerty would not play his own songs for years after a disagreement with the band’s record label. But after a Grammy-winning album of new material last year, Blue Moon Swamp, he has reclaimed the early material on a live CD and in performance. He looks forward to a reinvigorated career, undaunted by the prospect of creating in the shadow of his own great work. “Those things, of course, have the benefit of 30years’ history behind them, but I’m not cowed by that. I’m not afraid of that at all.” Fogerty is touring Australia with his wife, Julie, whose encouragement, he says, largely inspired his re-emergence. In tow are his 14-year-old daughter and sons aged seven and six. “I have since healed a lot emotionally,” said Fogerty, who reportedly relinquished ownership of his songs in the 1970s to escape a contract that would have forced him to make several more albums for Saul Zaentz’s Fantasy Records. “It doesn’t mean what happened in the past is any better,” he says. “The songs still got stolen from me. I can’t change the history. They still treated me very poorly. But I choose to now think about the future and not dwell on unpleasant things.” In 1990, he made several trips to Mississippi to acquaint himself with the world of the old bluesmen he had long admired. At the burial place of the ill-fated Robert Johnson he found reason to sing them again. “There were no markers or anything,” he says. “At that time, you had to just go there and follow local folklore. And I ended up at this tree under which Robert is buried. It was through a big swamp and a bramble and everything else. But I wanted to touch the tree. That was very important for some reason.” As he stood there, he wondered who benefited financially from the continued sale of Johnson’s songs. “The cynic in me says they probably are owned by some man in a tall building in New York City with a cigar. I was standing there in the blazing hot sun under the tree, thinking about Robert and my heart just obviously says, that’s a million miles away. That doesn’t matter. The songs are Robert’s. He’s the spiritual owner. And that just seemed to open all these doors in my mind. It was quite an overwhelming feeling and I just said, You know, John, they are your songs. You need to get out and start performing them.” The Age, 18-Nov-1998 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 