John Fogerty

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 13th of January 2023, John Fogerty announced on Twitter that he now owned the rights to the entire global catalog of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Getting there had taken a 50-year legal fight. Fogerty, born in 1945, was the lead singer, lead guitarist and main songwriter of the swamp rock band he started with his brother Tom and two friends from school. Between 1968 and 1972, the band landed nine singles in the Top 10 and earned eight gold albums. Then the group collapsed, and the man who wrote its hits spent decades struggling over who controlled them. How does a songwriter lose his own songs? What did that struggle cost him, including his bond with his own brother? And what kept him writing and performing through years of silence, lawsuits and grief?

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• 2. Berkeley Boyhood

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  John Fogerty was born in Berkeley, California, and raised in nearby El Cerrito as the third of five boys. His father, Galen, worked as a Linotype operator for the Berkeley Gazette, and his mother, Lucile, taught second grade. Fogerty is of Irish descent.

  His first school was the School of the Madeleine, a Catholic school in Berkeley. In his memoir, Fortunate Son, he recalls it harshly. He says he was refused permission to use the bathroom, often wet himself, and was made to sit in the soiled clothing. After a year he moved to Harding Grammar School. He also writes that both of his parents were alcoholics and that they divorced when he was in the third or fourth grade.

  Summers meant Putah Creek, near Winters, California. Those vacations later became the subject of the Creedence song "Green River".

  He went on to St. Mary's High School, then transferred to El Cerrito High School. There he met the future members of his band and took guitar lessons from Barry Olivier, the creator and producer of the Berkeley Folk Festival. His older brother Tom already played guitar in the group that would eventually become Creedence.

  The band began in 1959, when Fogerty was in junior high. He formed a cover group with bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford and called it the Blue Velvets. Little Richard and Bo Diddley were their models, and Tom joined later. In 1964 the group signed with Fantasy Records, which renamed them The Golliwogs without asking. Seven singles followed, and none sold well. Then, in 1966, Fogerty's draft notice arrived.

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• 3. The Draft Notice

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  In 1966, John Fogerty received a draft notice for the Vietnam War. The same day, he walked into a local United States Army Reserve recruiter's office. The recruiter signed him up immediately for training as a supply clerk. Fogerty believes the recruiter backdated the paperwork so it took effect before the draft letter arrived.

  His training took him to Fort Bragg, Fort Knox and Fort Lee. He finished six months of active duty in July 1967. But the reserve commitment still had four to five years to run, and he did not want them.

  So Fogerty set out to make himself unfit to serve. He fasted strictly to look emaciated. He smoked marijuana before an Army psychological evaluation. He committed petty crimes and planted a syringe among his belongings.

  The scheme worked. He received an early discharge from the Army Reserve in mid-1968, just as his band was about to become something much bigger than the Golliwogs.

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• 4. Creedence Years

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  In 1968, the Golliwogs became Creedence Clearwater Revival, and John Fogerty took his brother Tom's place as lead singer. The band released its self-titled debut album and scored its first hit single with "Susie Q". Then came "Proud Mary" and the album Bayou Country, followed by a long run of hit singles and albums.

  As the writer, lead singer and lead guitarist, Fogerty believed his musical judgment should outweigh everyone else's. His approach was exacting. A passage quoted from his memoir shows how he ran the band: "Not in my band. You dare not be stoned playing music around me.... When you're working, you're supposed to be working." He drilled his bandmates through rehearsal after rehearsal until the songs came out his way.

  The cost was resentment. Tom felt taken for granted, and in January 1971 he left the group. Cook and Clifford now wanted more say in the band's future. To hold things together, John insisted that they share equal songwriting and singing time on the final album, Mardi Gras.

  It came out in April 1972, with the 1971 hit "Sweet Hitch-Hiker" and "Someday Never Comes", which reached the Billboard Top 20. Reviews were poor, yet the album peaked at number 12 and went gold. The group disbanded shortly afterward.

  All four original members never shared a stage again, apart from one occasion at Tom's wedding in 1980. Fogerty, Clifford and Cook did play a 45-minute set at their 20th high school class reunion in 1983. Fogerty and Clifford played another brief set at the 25th. After the breakup, though, Fogerty's next project was a band with only one member.

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• 5. The Blue Ridge Rangers

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  The Blue Ridge Rangers released an album in 1973, and the band had exactly one member. As Creedence was ending, Fogerty began a solo record of country and western covers. He produced it, arranged it and played every instrument himself. Even so, he put the name of an imaginary group on the cover.

  The album produced a top-20 hit with "Jambalaya" and a smaller one with "Hearts of Stone". Next came a self-written rock-and-roll single, "You Don't Owe Me", backed with "Back in the Hills". It failed to reach the US Billboard Hot 100, though it climbed to No. 79 in Canada. Fogerty then dropped the Rangers name for good. In early 1974 he released "Comin' Down the Road", backed with an instrumental called "Ricochet".

  His first official solo album, John Fogerty, arrived in 1975. Sales were slim, and legal problems delayed what should have followed. The album still gave him "Rockin' All Over the World", which reached No. 27 in the United States. In 1977 the British band Status Quo recorded the song and took it to No. 3 in the UK, with Top 20 showings in several other countries. Status Quo played it as the opening number at Live Aid in 1985.

  Then came a record that never reached the public. In 1976, Fogerty finished an album called Hoodoo. A single, "You Got the Magic" backed with "Evil Thing", did poorly. Asylum Records rejected the album a few weeks before its release date, after the covers had been printed. Fogerty agreed it fell short of his usual standard, and sometime in the 1980s he told Asylum to destroy the master tapes.

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• 6. Lawsuits and Silence

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  Centerfield, Fogerty's 1985 album for Warner Bros. Records, went to the top of the charts. Warner had taken co-ownership of his Asylum contract. The album included a Top 10 hit, "The Old Man Down the Road", and a title track that classic rock radio and baseball stadiums still play.

  It also brought lawsuits. Two tracks, "Zanz Kant Danz" and "Mr. Greed", were widely read as attacks on Saul Zaentz, Fogerty's former boss at Fantasy Records. The first described a pig who cannot dance but would "steal your money". When Zaentz sued, Fogerty reissued the song as "Vanz Kant Danz", renaming the pig.

  A second suit, Fantasy, Inc. v. Fogerty, claimed that "The Old Man Down the Road" copied the chorus of "Run Through the Jungle", a Creedence song whose publishing rights Fantasy still held. Fogerty won by showing the songs were different compositions, and that sounding like himself was not plagiarism. He then sued for his attorney fees in Fogerty v. Fantasy. He lost at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals but won in the US Supreme Court, which ruled that a trial court may award fees to winning defendants as well as plaintiffs.

  On the 31st of May 1985, he also filmed a one-hour Showtime special called John Fogerty's All-Stars, with Albert Lee, Booker T. Jones, Duck Dunn, Steve Douglas and Prairie Prince in the band.

  The follow-up, Eye of the Zombie, came in 1986 and sold far less. Its mood was darker, with songs about a troubled society, terrorism and pop stars selling out. Fogerty toured behind it but refused to play any Creedence songs. For more than 20 years after that tour ended, he also refused to play the album's own songs. "Change in the Weather" finally returned to his 2009 setlist.

  His silence about Creedence ended on the 4th of July 1987, at a Washington, D.C., concert for Vietnam veterans that aired on HBO. In 1989 he played a Creedence set at the Concert Against AIDS in Oakland, backed by Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir on guitars. A grimmer subject was waiting for him in 1990.

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• 7. Brother and Ghosts

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  In 1990, Tom Fogerty died at the age of 48, survived by his second wife and six children. He had contracted HIV from blood transfusions during surgery for a back ailment, and he died from a tuberculosis infection.

  John has named two darkest moments in his life. One was when Tom sided with the record company in the royalties dispute. The other was that the brothers were barely speaking when Tom died. In their final conversation, Tom called Saul Zaentz his "best friend". By John's account, Zaentz had swindled the band out of millions of dollars and had just tried to sue him, so reconciling became painfully hard. At the funeral, John said in his eulogy: "We wanted to grow up and be musicians. I guess we achieved half of that, becoming rock 'n roll stars. We didn't necessarily grow up."

  That same year, Fogerty traveled to Mississippi looking for inspiration and visited the grave of the blues legend Robert Johnson. There he decided that Johnson was the true spiritual owner of his songs, whichever businessman held the rights. Fogerty resolved to make a new album and to perform his Creedence songs regularly again. At the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church cemetery he met Skip Henderson, a New Jersey vintage guitar dealer. Henderson had formed a nonprofit, the Mount Zion Memorial Fund, to honor Johnson with a memorial marker. Fogerty went on to pay for headstones for Charlie Patton, James "Son" Thomas, Mississippi Joe Callicott, Eugene Powell and Lonnie Pitchford. He helped with the finances for many more.

  In 1993, Creedence Clearwater Revival entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the old wounds reopened. Citing the Zaentz lawsuit, Fogerty refused to perform with Cook and Clifford. He hired session musicians on drums and bass, and Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson joined him for "Who'll Stop the Rain", "Born on the Bayou" and "Green River".

  Tom's widow, Tricia, had expected a reunion and brought the urn holding her husband's ashes. Cook and Clifford, seated with their families across the room, walked out as the performance began. Each later wrote to the Hall of Fame's board that it was "hurtful" and "insulting" to let the set go on without them.

  In the induction speech, Springsteen described Fogerty as "an Old Testament, shaggy-haired prophet, a fatalist. Funny, too." He added that Fogerty "was severe, he was precise, he said what he had to say and he got out of there."

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• 8. A Long Second Act

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  Blue Moon Swamp, released in 1997, ended a gap longer than the one between his mid-1970s and mid-1980s albums. It won the Grammy for best rock album that year. A live album from the tour, Premonition, followed in 1998 to similar acclaim. On the 1st of October 1998, Fogerty received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7000 Hollywood Blvd. A song from the album, "Blue Moon Nights", later appeared in the 2002 film The Rookie.

  In 2004 he put out Deja Vu All Over Again, which packed ten songs into only 34 minutes. Rolling Stone described the title track as his indictment of the Iraq War as another Vietnam. That year, Concord Records bought Fantasy Records, ending a 30-year estrangement between Fogerty and his old label. The new owners moved to restore royalty rights he had surrendered in the mid-1970s to leave his Fantasy contract. By September 2005 he was back at Fantasy, and The Long Road Home, a mix of Creedence hits and solo material, came out that November.

  The touring picked up. In October 2004, Fogerty played seven Vote for Change concerts in swing states. On the 29th of June 2006, he headlined in Britain at the Hammersmith Apollo, his first headline show there since 1972. In Sundsvall, Sweden, 25,000 people filled the town square. At Glastonbury on the 23rd of June 2007, he played 17 songs, mostly Creedence classics. He told the crowd he had not played "Who'll Stop the Rain" at Woodstock, as rumored, but wrote it after the festival.

  Revival followed on the 2nd of October 2007, debuting at No. 14 on the Billboard 200 with about 65,000 copies sold in its first week. It earned a Grammy nomination but lost to the Foo Fighters. In 2009 he opened the new Yankee Stadium by playing "Centerfield" from center field. He also released The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again on his own label, Fortunate Son Records, with Bruce Springsteen as a duet partner. In 2015 he published his autobiography, Fortunate Son, through Little, Brown & Co. In 2017 he signed with BMG Rights Management.

  Fogerty describes himself as a lifelong liberal Democrat, and his lyrics have lampooned Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Yet his fans have included George W. Bush, Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh. During Trump's 2020 reelection campaign, the campaign often played "Fortunate Son", and Fogerty sent a cease-and-desist letter.

  His family has become part of the act. He married Julie in Elkhart, Indiana, on the 20th of April 1991, and they live in Thousand Oaks, California. Their sons Shane and Tyler have played in his touring band since 2007. In 2023 he bought a Hidden Hills estate from Sylvester Stallone for $17million.

  When the pandemic locked down early 2020, Fogerty, Shane, Tyler and daughter Kelsey began posting performance videos under the name Fogerty's Factory. The family appeared remotely on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts. A seven-song EP appeared on the 28th of May 2020, his 75th birthday, and a 12-track album followed on the 20th of November.

  In January 2021 he released "Weeping in the Promised Land", a gospel-styled single touching on Black Lives Matter, the pandemic and Trump. On the 22nd of August 2025, he issued Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years, an album of re-recorded Creedence songs. On the 16th of January 2026, he returned to NPR's Tiny Desk with his band.

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