John Fogerty

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is the one and only John Cob. John.
Good to have you on the program, but it's great
to be here, Thanks Bob. So you've been on the
road since last summer. Have you had any problems with
COVID and touring? Of course, a lot of it being

(00:30):
you're taking all the precautions, wearing a mask everywhere. Once
in a while, a member of your crew or a
member in the place where you're playing, or you know,
COVID is around and that person has to then disappear
and go isolate for ten days, two weeks, or whatever
the rule we're under at the time. UM. But yeah,

(00:56):
I mean it's it's always present, just behind the screen,
behind the curtain, I guess. And it still was, you know,
hasn't gone away yet. Have you gotten COVID or anybody
in the band? I believe I've gotten COVID twice. The
first time was right at the beginning of when we

(01:18):
were just beginning to hear that this new thing was coming.
He was in the January early February, UM, and I
got mainly at night I would be copying, trying to
sleep and you know, a lot of symptoms like that.
I felt kind of strange, but I didn't really know that.

(01:38):
I went to my doctor and just tried to get antibiotics.
In fact, I went through his first run of him
and the second run of them, uh, and still wasn't
any better. And in the midst of the second run,
he said, why would you continue the same medicine if
it wasn't working. But I'm not a doctor. I don't

(02:01):
think like that. I just said, well, I'll take this
some more. Um. But looking back, I'm pretty sure that
was COVID. Then went through the whole you know, that
horrible year when there was no protection, no vaccine. Um,
I ran down. You know, I was first on my
block to run down when the vaccine became available, or

(02:24):
at least uh, I was right there at the beginning.
So then I ended up getting the first and second shot,
and then after my booster shot, which is the third shot.
About three weeks after that, three to a month, UM,
that old symptom of the cough came back at night,

(02:47):
and I think my wife was away on a trip
or something, and I was telling her I was having
a heck of a time. She said, you gotta test yourself.
Sure enough, I was positive even after all those vaccines.
But of course, as we all know, with the vaccine,
the consequences were not dire. It was I had a

(03:07):
little bit of that cough, but it was that same cough,
but nothing else was wrong. I didn't really even feel tired.
I was still going running, you know, in all the
normal things. I tested again, and maybe three days or so,
you know, immediately started staying away from people. But um,

(03:27):
I've still had it. And after ten days I tested
it again and still had it. It took about two
weeks for it to you know, where I finally wasn't positive.
Have you had to cancel any dates because of COVID.
Right at the beginning, we were literally going. We played
a show in at a casino in Laughlin, Nevada, and
which I really by then I didn't want to do this.

(03:50):
And then uh, and this I believe was late February
early March of and there was another show the next night. Nice.
I just really didn't want to go through with it,
but we were sort of obligated. But finding the governor
of Nevada got wise to the thing and just shut
people down. And so like five minutes before I would

(04:12):
have gone on stage, they canceled the show. We ended up,
of course, it was postponed, not canceled. A year and
a half later we played that show, but yeah, we
we lost some of those. So you mentioned your wife
in the press. You've always said positive things about your wife.
How long you've been married to your wife now? Well,
officially thirty one years. Our anniversary was about a month ago, congratulations,

(04:37):
thank you very much. And how many years before the
official probably four years before that, three something like that.
So how did your meter? We met in UM six
in Indianapolis. I was on tour and uh after the show,
a bunch of the fellas in the band said, Hey,

(04:57):
there's this club right around the corner of our hotel.
We're all going down there, and uh so I showed
up probably twenty minutes later and kind of walked around
the whole place, and you know, I decided I was
going to leave, and just as I had kind of
made up my mind to leave, the sort of the

(05:19):
people parted. Uh you know, these shadowy figures in the dark,
and suddenly I'm staring at this beautiful girl in a
red dress, and I literally said to myself that's the
most beautiful girl I've ever seen. And my world stopped

(05:39):
in its tracks right there. Um, that's how we met. Okay,
continue the story. You see her in the waves part
like in a movie. Do you approach er? What do
you say? Literally, she came walking towards me and because
she was Yeah, I found all this out later she
was with a group of people, and most she was

(06:00):
with her sister and helping her sister move across Indiana
to a new location. But they had just stopped in
at this club and they were only going to be
there an hour, said they. You know, the the whole
idea I think for my wife was if I'm gonna
go down to where you are and bring you back
up to where I am, and it's gonna be a

(06:21):
six hour slept, maybe we can have a little bit
of fun in between. And that was sort of their
motive at the time. Um. And then you know, they
had just met other people and she was talking to
them and one of them noticed who I was, so
sort of on a dare, my wife said I'm going
to go up and talk to him, and she comes up,

(06:44):
you know, kind of like that old scene in the
commercial where the couple is in slow motion walking, you know.
I see her walking really slowly towards me, and she
sticks out her hand and says, can I shake your hand?
Mr foger They so all the thoughts in my head
that were, let's say, not all above board were suddenly

(07:08):
just throwing out the window with that Mr Fogerty. I
kind of, oh my goodness. Um. But we talked a
while and ended up talking the whole night. They until
they closed the place. You know, just sat at a
table sort of. This place had a dance floor, by
the way, I literally got up and danced with this
girl for one dance. Do you normally dance or was

(07:32):
this an exception? I don't dance. I do not dance,
but I felt like dancing. We always joked. The song
was Sledgehammer. You know. We went back and sat out
and talked some more. I just she was so well,
I was just taken with her, smitten. Uh, and it's
a wonderful feeling. You know. It went totally away from

(07:52):
that other characterization that I was sort of just being
a typical musician on the road. Uh. All of that
kind of changed into sort of a boy scout talking
to somebody who was charming and cute and funny, and
you know, I just became this other I was in

(08:16):
this other mood and she was certainly somebody I really
wanted to spend more time with. But needles to say,
she's an Indianapolis and you're on the road, So how
do you maintain the relationship. Well, a few days later,
I mean it might have been a couple of weeks. Really, Um,
I got word that she was going to be at
a show that was It was really not that far

(08:38):
away as the crow Flags. I think it was in Maryville,
and the place it was it was a concert venue,
and also the hotel where I was staying. Um and uh,
our head road guy guy named Slice, got the message.
She came walking up to him in the afternoon and said, know,

(09:00):
she knew I was playing there, and she said, can
I if I could you a message? Can you give
it to John? And he said sure, And so she
either gave him a little note or a you know,
a verbal message, and he came and told me, and
I was delighted. I said, well, yeah, see, you're telling
But it was really easy because the hotel and the

(09:22):
bar and all that stuff was right in that same building,
and you know, you didn't have to drive down a
dark road somewhere. I said, I'll meet her after the show.
I would be great, because by then I was probably
in sound check. Um. And by then, by the way, uh,
you know, I came and met her in the bar.
But I was a teetotaler. I had actually had some

(09:47):
well publicized problems with alcohol, and now I was not
drinking at all. And she was shocked at the difference
in my appearance and demeanor, you know, the guys she
saw before the first time, she said it was it
was like walking up to Willie Nelson, you know, which

(10:08):
I think I take as a compliment, but I think
she met I looked a little haggard to kind a phrase,
and this time, you know, I was all cleaned up.
I looked probably healthier, gained a few pounds, you know,
my hair was called um. And I was not drinking.
Her and her girlfriend were, but I was not. And

(10:29):
I just sat there and talked until you know, they
retired and had to go home. Okay, then what well,
I really wanted to get to see her again, so
I said, gosh, you gotta give me your phone number.
And so, sitting right at the table. It's kind of
a booth actually in this uh little uh I would
call it a bar and a holiday inn. But you know,

(10:51):
so you get the picture and there's a little uh
matchbooks there with the name of the place on the
match So she grabbed the match book, gets a pen
and writes down what I think is her phone number.
Her name is uh to her her name is anyway,

(11:11):
her name is Julie Lebzinski. And I don't know if
she wrote down Lebezynski or her uh earlier name, which
was Kramer. But anyway, um, I, you know, dutifully okay,
And I took that and put in my shirt pocket
and I was all smiles. And they had to leave
and you know, drive back to South Bend where she's from.

(11:34):
And uh, next day, I'm sitting on the bus, said, wow,
I want to I want to look at her number.
And I pull out the matchbook and it's kind of
like that scene with Steve Allen in the Jerk where
he's sitting in the bathtub. And I opened the matchbooks
to see Julie's information and it says love love, lovel love.

(11:57):
It's all scribbled that it it I can't read it.
And now I'm heartbroken. Well, by God, I'm gonna call
every Julie in the South Bend phone book until I
find there. I didn't quite have to do that. A
few weeks later she came and found me. A very
few weeks, it might have been even two. I was

(12:19):
playing out in California at Universal. So she came out
and found you, and then you were off to the
races or to take how long until you were actually
together living in the same place. Well, if you really
want me to finish the story, I will. Uh you know,
this is my favorite thing to talk about in the world. Okay,

(12:39):
keep going. Okay, So I'm playing at Universal, I think
two nights and so, which is a venue in southern
California in l A and So I'm staying in the hotel.
There's there's two of them there and and ones a Sherton,
and the other is something else and I can't remember
it might have been called Universal It anyway, she gets

(13:01):
out there to Southern California. She's staying with her aunt
and uncle, I believe, and she sees in the paper
I'm playing at Universal now I have given the hotel
strict um because I'm registered under my own name, because
how can I say it's a a compt room because

(13:24):
it goes with playing at the venue, right, So it's
under my name. But I've given them strict orders do
not put any calls through to my room or they're
asking for John Pokery because I'll be getting calls at
three am. You know, I need my rest. Um. Well,
you know, on the other side of reality. There, she

(13:45):
looks in the paper, sees I'm playing at the Universal,
says wow, I'm just gonna call him up. And so
she you know, looks in the phone book or somehow
figures he's at that hotel there. So she calls up
the hotel says yes, can I please talk to John
Pogotty and they put her right through. Well, if you

(14:06):
know my girl, Julie, I've been with her for thirty
five years or so, this is absolutely on Q. She
is the man manifesto of the universe and she can
make anything happen and and obviously always does. So there
she is on my phone. I pick up the phone

(14:29):
and she has HI, John, It's Julie. Now I was,
at that same moment in time, a very mournful, sorrowful person. Um,
I had my first marriage was breaking up. I was
feeling like the tour was coming to an end. My

(14:52):
career seem, I don't know, stalled, you know, for all
those reasons that a person can get themselves into a
sor of a place, I just I literally felt like
I was standing on the dock with one end of
a rope tight around my ankle and the other end
around a big rock, and I was just about to

(15:13):
throw the rock in the water. Anyway, I pick up
the bones. She says, Hi, John, this is Julie. And
the next thing that happened was I started laughing. I'm
laughing so so fully and completely that I'm laying on
the floor in my room. She says, what's the matter
with you? And I tell her the story about the

(15:34):
dock and the rock and the rope. I said, Honey,
I I don't know how life can go from one
swing from one end to another in fifteen seconds, but
it just did, you know? I said, hello, how are you?
I've been looking for you? Uh, And turned out she
was staying down in Hollywood at a hotel, and uh,

(15:55):
you know, we talked, and I think the next day
I finally got to see her. So you saw her
how long until she moved from Indianapolis to where you were?
We stayed about a year apart. I know that. Uh,
let's see what we were together during that time. That
week or so, I was in at the Universal. Uh.

(16:17):
And then she had to go back to her home. UM.
But around New Year's I wanted to go. I was
just compelled to come see her. And then I had
to go back to California. I mean, you know, I
don't know why we do those things, but something said, well, yeah,
well that's where you're staying, and so you're supposed to

(16:37):
go back there. So I went back, and you know,
it turned out that every couple of weeks I would
fly to South Bend. I remember one time we were
walking in the airport um parking lot, you know, to
where the planes were whatever the determinal, and she stomped
her foot. She just she stopped her foot down on

(16:58):
the asphalt and I looked at her. It was just
the cutest thing, you know, motion I've seen guys do it,
but I've really never seen a girl do that. And
I said, well, what's the matter, and she said, you're leaving?
And it was my idea really, or or inclination I

(17:20):
after a couple three times, flying back to South Bend
every second week or so to spend a few days
with her, I began to realize I was really in love. Um,
but I was terrified that she would be you know,
I tend to get tumatic too dramatic sometimes in life.

(17:42):
I was terrified that she would be that entity that
we some call it sometimes called the rebound. And so
a guy will break up with his wife and then
he'll meet, you know, somebody in a bar and they're
together for six months, but that's all, and then he
shakes him self thoroughly and drives out and then starts

(18:04):
planning his real life. And so susie Q kind of
goes away along with all those other things he just
went through. I didn't want that to be my reality,
and so I kind of kept it as it. Well,
I'll come and see you, but I think we should
stay apart. And I had this idea that it would
last a year. I you know, don't ask me why now.

(18:24):
It seems silly, um, but I guess there was some
wisdom in that, because once we got together, you know,
we've been together for thirty five years and without ever
a hiccup I mean, it's just it's been wonderful. There's
it's the deepest relationship I've ever had, and and and

(18:46):
there's just no question ever you know about who is
your soul mate and who you want to be with,
who you run to with, what you're excited about, or
with your problems. You know, Um, if you have such
a thing, Bob, then you know exactly what I'm talking about, right,
Just to get the landscape you were married before. How
old were you when you got married the first time?

(19:08):
I got married at twenty and there ought to be
a law. What was your motivation for getting married at twenty? Well,
you know, I thought I was in love at the time,
but I think you're at that age pretty young to
to actually really know what you're talking about. I mean,
you know, I was not insincere about my feelings, but

(19:29):
also there was a large dose of um my mom
was pushing me out of the house. You know, I
was still living at home with my mother, and it
was all I think at one point she you know,
I was almost the last kid at home. I think, yeah,
I think my brother Bob was still at home, But

(19:52):
how can I say it? I was acting like a
foot loose, twenty year old, you know, coming in with
Remember I'm still twenty, not even one, uh coming in
late night, making a bunch of noise, I'm sure. I know.
One time I went to give her a ride somewhere
in the car and there was a six pack of
beer sitting on the floor of the front seat that

(20:13):
I had forgotten about as I put her in the
Let's just kind of looked at that, you know, and
I kind of to myself and oops, you know, so
I was being kind of tossed out or else i'd
have to pay rent. I think that's how she put it,
And it was kind of her, you know, her way
of saying, gee, I'm kind of tired of this re

(20:35):
this situation. Let's change it, which I totally understand now,
of course. But uh So, there was some of that
I was kind of I don't know, there was there
was a bit of coercion or pressure on me that
I didn't understand, and that may have been some of

(20:56):
the impetus toward getting married the first time. How did
you meet your first wife? I worked in a gas station,
and so I met her and her sister and that
sister's boyfriend. All at the same time at the place
I used to pump gas. They would come in rather late,
and probably that happened two or three times. Okay, So

(21:16):
you had kids with your first marriage, Yes, three kids.
Three kids? What are they up to today? I'm not
in a real close contact, but uh, you know these
are people. These are all adults in their fifties. Now. Okay,
So were you eager to have children with Julie or
did you say, hey, you know, I've already had children.
How do you decide to have children again? Well, Julie

(21:38):
already had a daughter, Lindsay, who was about two and
a half when we met. I know this because I
have changed a diaper or two, um. And I think
when that happened, she might have looked over and said, oh,
that's a keeper, you know, because I was. I hadn't
done it in a while, but I certainly knew I

(22:00):
was doing um. And then I think I think we
both put it this way. We would talk rather vaguely
about marriage at first. I think she'd been in a
marriage that had not worked out, And of course I've

(22:21):
been married for twenty years, um with less than spectacular results. Um.
And so I think we were both very skittish about
that idea. It's bob, it's the weirdest thing. I mean,
you're in love with someone and yet another part of
your brain is sort of clanging against the metal walls

(22:42):
with a ball peen hammer, going no, no, no, no
marriage no. You know. So uh, I think things just
sort of evolved naturally. And UM, at some point we decided,
all right, we're going, we're gonna. I know how it happened.

(23:04):
I finally came to my senses. She she was back
in um South Bend, and I was with her, and
I had an epiphany. I realized that she didn't she
would talk about me to her girlfriends, and by then
I was getting to know everybody, her mom, you know, sisters. Um.

(23:28):
It had been a few years, and I don't know
that anyone talked about marriage openly. You know. I think
that's that's a subject. How do you talk about that
in front of the two people That might get awkward? Right? Um,
But I had an epiphany. I I was I was
I'm a runner, so I was out running, and a

(23:51):
lot of times when you're running, my your head well
just clear. It seems like it's a good place for
to think, you know, all the other instant pressures of
you know, I'm hungry or it's raining or all that
goes away, and you just sort of go into a
how the zone, I guess you call it. And I
had an epiphany about what why she's seeing all her

(24:14):
friends and you know, her girlfriend. I could really see that,
not so much that her family, but her girlfriends the
one she wants to talk to intimately, and she doesn't
have a ring to show them. I mean, I could
really I could feel her position, what her heart must
be like, it's wow, that's awful. She's telling them about

(24:35):
this guy, you know, and we're committed to each other.
But I just had my picture of I guess from
the movies, see and they hold up their hand and
there's a little beautiful, uh one carrot sweet little uh
engagement ring, you know, and that's sort of that's sort
of to a guy, that would be a contract, you know,

(24:56):
like a book, you know, but to a girl, it's
it's sort of established with that thing on her finger.
It's a it's a very momentous part of telling the tale.
And I just really could feel that, so literally I
finished my run. My run went down to a local
mall and bought a one carrot engagement you know, and

(25:19):
paid way too much money. I think they saw me
coming with you know, stars in my eyes. Oh man,
look at this roube. Wow, he's in love. We'll get him. Um.
Because even though you know, because I'm a rock and
roller and and I have a pretty good career going
and all that, some people, especially nowadays since Twitter and

(25:42):
TikTok and uh certain famous family that's on the internet
all the time, people think that an engagement ring is
a career move, you know, a statement of your place
in your stature in life. But I didn't. To me, Uh,
I was relating to when I was, you know, fifteen

(26:04):
and going to the movie. So I bought her this
sweet little maall engagement ring and literally uh went to
a rest a restaurant. It's famous in South Bend called
Tippy Canoe because it uh used to be the student
Baker mansion. But also uh maybe that political candidate from

(26:28):
a hundred and fifty years ago may have stayed there,
owned it or whatever. Uh. And I talked with the
people the waiter and said, look, I'm gonna bring my
beautiful wife or my beautiful girlfriend down here and have dinner.
And I'm going to give her this ring, but I
want you to put this in the glass of wine
that we're gonna order. Okay, okay, you know, and so

(26:52):
the the jinks was in, you know, the fix was in. Anyway,
So later that day we come to dinner Robbily's and
and I go around everything, okay, you know, yeah, because
I knew there wouldn't be time to arrange that at night.
And of course, well, honey, have some of your wine,
you know. She takes a little sip of it, and

(27:13):
uh yeah, and I can clearly see the ring in
the bottom of that glass of wine from where I'm sitting.
I see that, Well, how do you have another sip
of that wine? And probably you know, after the second
or third, you know, she finds these looks, Hey, what's
going on here? You know? Anyway, then the story was out.
You know. That was the best feeling in the whole

(27:35):
wide world. I gotta tell you. Okay, So what waves
has your wife changed your life or helped you make
decisions in your life? Everything? Bob. I think that's probably
the only reason you allowed me to go on with

(27:57):
this rather biblical story. Um is you've probably had an
inkling Um, Julie has been there to be my sounding board, UM,
my counsel when I needed to figure something out or
a lot of times. Is what happens more often than

(28:18):
not now is she actually thinks about stuff, especially UM
career kind of stuff more than I ever do, and
figures it out or at least gets a plan of
how to approach it and and maybe how to make
it come to pass, which is why I call her

(28:39):
the manifesto. Uh. You know, a lot of times, I
how can I say if there's things I just have accepted,
You might say, I'm I'm just very happy that I'm happy.
I think you probably know that I've had a lot
of really bad, uh show biz crap happened to me
that I wouldn't wish on even my worst enemy, who

(29:01):
happens to be one of the reasons. And um, you know, uh,
and I've gotten through all that, and it was a
really hard time that was not pleasant, and life was
not pleasant and in the years, I mean, I'll just
take a shortcut here and tell you that I'm a
really happy person, very happy and looking forward to life

(29:25):
and looking forward to every morning getting up and the
possibilities that I have getting to work on, you know, music,
and also getting the see the members of my family
and just enjoy that I have this life. I mean,
that's really where I'm living, and I'm smart enough to
realize that's a good thing and it's probably the best

(29:48):
you could ever hope for. Uh far more. I do
know this to my soul that that is far more
meaningful than any career thing, or any materi aerial thing,
or any career thing you could try to go after
and accomplished, because just having the right person with you

(30:10):
is all of it is the whole meaning of life. Okay,
you talk about that moment at the Universal Hotel we
were at the end of the dock before you met Julie.
Do you tend towards depression or you a glass half
empty or glass half full kind of gone? I would
say that. I mean, looking back over my life, I

(30:32):
think I I have had to have been depressed at
several different times. Um. You know, sometimes I've actually wondered
if I might be bipolar or not. I mean, I've
seen other people who are literally I think we just
call that manic depressive, and you know, at one point

(30:53):
they'd be bouncing off the walls they're so happy, and
then at other points to be laying on the you know,
I'm talking spiritually laying on the floor, they're so unhappy.
And I don't think I'm like that. I'm always functioning,
But I do know that during the very dark days
of still being owned by Fantasy Records, which is where

(31:17):
the label that Credence at first had success with UM,
getting through that whole quagmire was very depressing to me.
I mean, there were there were times I could not
get that evil person out of my mind, and whenever,
sometimes just seeing the word Fantasy could spoil my day.

(31:39):
So I think you would call that depressed. And it
was hard, and it was really hard for someone to
tell me, come come to talk to me and just
say something light and have me react. How can I
say in an unbiased fashion, like the way we expect
normal people to to have interplay with each other, you know,

(32:02):
I would be so tilted towards a um bad mood
and and can't you see this ugly thing that's happening
to me, you know, that sort of mood um, which
I wouldn't wish on anyone. I mean, that's a horrible place,
you know. I I'm a lot lighter. But I do
see that from time to time. I mean, I'm not

(32:23):
a perfect saint by any means, don't get me wrong, um,
but I'm not captured anymore. That stuff doesn't own me.
And I realized now that it's really quirky too, because
I do it in my life. I'll walk up to
someone and start to talk and not here uh interplay

(32:45):
you know, a response, and you know they're in a
bad mood. I'll just let them have their space, you know,
And it can happen, I mean to someone you know,
or even if you go into a store and there's
a salesman and you know and supposed to help you,
but he's not helpful. And you, the older, you get

(33:05):
that you know time and shorter bob Um, I'm pretty
aware about time, and I'm much more uh, much more
wanting to use my time in positive uh endeavors and
not waste time stuck in things that are you know,

(33:25):
a waste or going to drag you down or give
you a bad mood. To what degree was duly influential
in getting you to play the Creeden songs again? Oh,
she was huge, hugely influential. I believe that it was
because I was. The way I put it is as
I fell more and more deeply in love with Julie.

(33:48):
And by the way, I think, forty years ago, I
couldn't even talk like this as a grown man. I
couldn't talk about love as a real thing and not
be embarrassed or awkward about it. It just, you know,
it seemed like something you didn't talk about polite company. Um.

(34:13):
You know, I was very strange and clunky trying to
even say the word oh love. So later, as I
had fallen so deeply in love with Julie, I think
my motive is I talk about it all the time
because I know what it is and I'm really happy

(34:34):
about it, and I also sort of say it out loud.
I guess I'm a happy that it happened for me.
But also when I see other people that they know
what I'm talking about and that it that it obviously resonates. Uh,
you know, I just feel good for them because that's

(34:55):
where life should that's where we should all be as
human beings know. And it could be love with your sweetheart.
It could be God's love, which is how some people
have it. It could be love in the situation you
know your family members and all that, but certainly it's
a that feeling of love is probably to say it

(35:18):
a little religious or spiritually would be that's what God
had intended for all of us. Um anyhow, to be
in that state is where I was, uh, even though
I was not playing my songs again. But you may
have heard about my trips to Mississippi. Um. There there

(35:42):
was a time when I came to Julie. I was
had been feeling this this urge, this urgency that I
didn't even quite understand what. But it finally took shape
as almost a feeling or a voice. You have to
go to Mississippi. But here's how that. Then it finally

(36:05):
got so strong I had to do something about it.
And it was a morning time and I walked up
to Julie, probably in the kitchen. I said, honey, um,
I gotta tell you something. And she said, okay. I said, well,
I have to go to Mississippi. She just stops for
a minute and her eyes get big and she says,

(36:25):
okay when and I said, now, uh, okay, okay, it's
all right. I said, you know, honey, oh And then
she says why And I said, I don't know which
was literally the truth. I mean, the only thing I
could think of was I was interested in the blues tree,

(36:49):
kind of the family tree of the blues, because that's
literally all I knew about Mississippi. I believe that I
literally had not set foot in Mrs Hippy in my
entire life. As much as I've been around music and
had toured the South with credence, I know I've been
in Arkansas and Louisiana, but I don't think I've ever

(37:12):
been in Mississippi and trying to make it, you know,
done and hop over this. Uh. I didn't really know
why I was going there, but I certainly was interested
in the blues, and I vague knew that a couple
of the people I had grown up, I mean it
started when I was seven eight years old that I

(37:33):
had heard about. I vaguely knew some names from Mississippi.
I love the blues, but I experienced the blues as
a current thing, not in a library. I and I
was old enough or born at the right time. I
heard Howling Wolf on the radio and Muddy Waters on

(37:55):
the radio. They were having hit records on the Rhythm
and Blues station out of Oakland, whose letters then where
kW br um and so I knew these musicians and
had read a little bit about jazz and blues, you know,
and it was sort of a vague thing to me,

(38:15):
and so I just thought, I'm gonna go to Mississippi,
um poke around, kind of learn more about the you know.
I was not much of a plan, tell you the truth,
But I was very lucky in a lot of ways.
First of all, that Julie was so open to letting
me go, because I know that when you know you're

(38:37):
it's a partnership, but between you and your spouse, and
there can be times when your spouse is just not
happy about something, and one spouse or the other can
make the person do something they don't want to do,
just when they feel very strongly. I've you know, met
many men and women to say, well, Joe was never
gonna let me do that, or Free is never gonna

(39:00):
let me do that. And it's a strange power, but
we give our spouse that power because we love them.
But yet here in this instance, which was so much
on the flim flam, it seems she said yeah, okay,
it's all right, and uh, you know, went down the
first time and kind of poked around, and uh, I

(39:23):
didn't have much of a plan. I had heard about
Robert Johnson, but I'm not sure that I knew he
was from Mississippi. Of course, of course grew up with
Jimmy Reid, but had no idea that Jimmy Reid was Mississippi.
And so there, you know, and as I uh ended
up taking several trips two, three, four or five I'm

(39:44):
not quite sure, um, but any time I would stay
five days or so. The first in fact, the first
time I went, I think I flew to New Orleans
and went across that way, which is I totally missed
the delta myself. I mean I didn't know. I had
heard of delta, but I didn't know what. I didn't

(40:05):
know anything. I didn't even know how Mississippi related to Memphis.
You know, what geography there was, all these things. Of
course I knew about all this, and Tupelo um the
same thing. And so that was the way I went
the first time. The second time I went to Memphis
and drove down. Um, it's just sort of a it

(40:26):
was important to me. I mean, this was this was
really when I say it was important, I felt it important.
But also in the long run in what was important
to my life. It was important that way, and I
believe it was probably the second time where um, I
had read enough that I got some instruction in the

(40:49):
in the kind of blues books I was reading that
there was a person in I think more Head City,
Uh it might have been more Head. Um it was
a postmaster who knew where Robert Johnson was buried. And
then this was a mystery. I now realized it because
I liked Robert Johnson. By the way. Um. At first

(41:12):
I was buying UM cassettes and putting them on. Excuse me,
at first, I was buying LP records and putting them on,
making my own cassettes and taking the cassette with me
on my trip. Right that was I think I started
doing that the second trip. But after that I thought, well,

(41:34):
you know what, I'm going to get a c D.
I think it was Big Bill Bruns. I wanted to hear.
So I went to uh, uh, you know, a federated
or best Buyer, one of those kind of big box places,
and I bought a boom box and then I bought
a CD of Big Bill Bruns. I had a couple
of them, and I put it in on the front

(41:56):
seat of my rented card. I started driving down the road.
But the boom box is going, well we got this morning,
Well got the plan. You know it's I'm going this
is the stupidest thing I ever out. I can't play
my CD, but I wanted the world to know that
John Fogerty finally bought a CD was in the the
new high tech world because of a blue song and

(42:18):
a blues guy. Uh, and I'll always remember that. Of
course CDs are now dinosaurs. Um where were they going
with all that? Anyway, I ended up, uh going down
the road finding this more Head place, which was, you know,
sort of a speck on the map, opening the door

(42:38):
to the finding the post office. You know, parked the car,
opened the door, and the man is sitting there looking
at me. He's at a table. As I opened the door,
he's at a table directly like he's waiting for me, right,
I mean it was. And I said, oh, you know,
I thought there would be like one of those little
cages with a you know, a guy be a little

(42:59):
post answer with those hats and all that kind of thing,
the little green hat. I think, Um, I said, well,
this is a strange question, But I've heard that you
know where Robert Johnson is buried. He says, oh, yeah, sure,
And he tells me to drive up to this the
road there and turn right, and there's a certain church
and I can't quite remember the name, but I knew it.

(43:21):
Then he said, go into that churchyard, to go into
the back where there's a little cemetery. And there's a
great big tree there, and I can't I've heard that
it's called a pecan tree, but in my mind's eye
now it was a great big tree um to me
more like an oak tree. But anyhow, he says, and
Robert's buried right under that tree. He said, there's no marker,

(43:44):
so you just have to know he's buried there. Okay,
So I go up and I did what he said,
end up at the little graveyard. But it had rained
like a son of a gun for the week before
I got there. In fact, you would all that hurricane probably,
so there was about a foot of water, uh in

(44:05):
this cemetery, and certainly out by the tree, it was
a swamp and there was a bunch of I mean
it was surrounded with brush or bramble bushes or whatever,
and so I see the graveyard and I see the stuff,
and uh, I you know, started to walk away. You know,

(44:26):
it's like a lake out there where that tree is,
and I'm walking away, and then I go, wait a minute.
I came all this way because I want to know
where Robert Johnson's you know, it had become more and
more important because I I had heard about Robert Johnson,
by the way, because the the box set had been released,

(44:46):
the CD box set. Okay, So I turned around. I
looked at that big tree and said, my god, I'm
gonna touch that tree. At least I don't know where
the place on the ground is. So I wade out
through the water. I'm an experienced spishermen, and I fished
that way. I always get wet up to my knees,
so I wasn't um. I didn't have any misgivings about

(45:07):
getting wet, but still it was kind of swampy, you know,
mosquito water whatever. And I made my way through all
those bushes and touched that tree and felt like I
had kind of component comp what's that word I'm looking for,
calm and sit now consummated my trip. Yeah, by touching

(45:30):
the tree, it felt like you know, there was closure there,
um and this was my my the first time being
there at Robert's gravesite. I didn't have a camera with me, right,
But anyway, I walked back and kind of look around
the other parts of the little churchyard, and it was

(45:54):
really hot, even though there's water deep water like that
on the ground. I get back up where its kind
of dry, you know. I mean, so it's hundred ten
degrees and probably ninety five percent humidity, really sweltering. And
so now I'm kind of taken with the whole Robert Johnson,
you know. I mean, I'm just sort of in one

(46:15):
frame of mind about Robert as again, the fact that
he's got a CD out. I'm thinking, Wow, you know,
I wonder, I wonder who owns those songs. And then,
you know, because it's been all these years and all that,
it couldn't be whoever did it way back when it's like, yeah,

(46:35):
they probably passed through. You know, this the normal stuff
that unfortunately so many Blues Guy's legacy has traveled. And
I said wow, I said, wow, you know, it's probab
some stinking lawyers some wise guy in a tall building
in the big cities probably had a big fat cigar,

(46:56):
and it doesn't. He don't care at all about Robert Johnson.
He just owns that property. You know. I'm saying it
to myself in the most disgusting way because I'm really
sickened by how that always happens, you know, And and
I finally, I'm so disgusted, and I'm wet up to
my knees, and go it. It doesn't matter. I'm I'm

(47:19):
I'm sure I'm semi delirious because of the heat and all,
and I'm you know, it just doesn't Robert. I'm speaking
actually personally now to that fellow over there under that tree, Robert.
It doesn't matter. The whole world knows those are your songs, Robert.
Those are your songs, and everybody knows it. And of course,

(47:40):
since I'm the only one around, there's a deafening silence
after I say it. The whole world knows it. I stopped,
and I realized what I have just said. I mean,
I don't think in any other instance the deafening silence
would have led me to this thought process. But because

(48:03):
I said that about somebody that was so important, it
was still ringing in my own ears. As I said
everybody knows those are your songs. And I've heard that
said to me a couple of times. Boynette said that
to me, Chubby Checker said that to me, um, And
I think it was that that that I said that,

(48:26):
you know that hearing those voices all ringing in that
deafening silence in my eyes, I'm sure got real big
as I chewed on this thought, and I went, wow,
oh my good, John, you gotta start singing your songs
before you're sitting there in the ground like Robert. I mean,
I literally had that thought. And that was the first time,

(48:49):
and I don't know how many years that my heart
was actually happy about the idea that I was gonna
sing my songs again, because I don't know, if you
know this thing. I had made a pact with myself
not to do the songs because of certainly because of
Saul's aunts and Fantasy records, because it was so personal.

(49:11):
One man owned my songs and owned those records. And
you know, it wasn't like he owned some other artists
and all that, but none of them were like Credence.
It was it was just one on one and he
was very evil. So that I had made a very
strong pact with myself to never sing those songs again

(49:33):
because it would bring him such riches, right that that
to do so was just playing into his hands. And
so I have been, of course very unhappy about that
whole situation. Gordian's not You might say that I could
not solve the puzzle, and so that moment in Robert

(49:54):
Johnson's um Grave area, Uh overcome by this that story,
And I guess you might say the unfairness. But yet
the inescapable logic that I had said to myself, I
realized I could now do it. I wasn't whimping out

(50:18):
or going back on, you know, my word or all.
You know, if somehow the not had become open and free,
and you know, without me changing my values, you might say,
I guess, because that's what I literally happened. You know,
I suppose a negative, a cynical person would twisted some
other way. But I'm not listening. You know. I had

(50:41):
this epiphany that said, you can sing your songs now,
and that's what happened. But okay, but of course I
wasn't touring, I wasn't out in the world. What I
was doing it was, I was trying to write new
songs and make a record, so you know, and I
made several more trips down to Mississippi actually before I

(51:05):
stopped doing that and went on to something else, mostly
trying to write songs and taken up the dough bro.
But um, as time went on, I finally wrote some songs,
painfully got them recorded, and then finally happily got them
recorded and Blue Moon Swamp became the album. This was

(51:28):
now seven years later, and I had kind of forgotten
all about what got me here. I was just happy
that I had some songs and a new album, and
I went into the record company to do what you
might call, um make a press kit. And you know
what they got to get together for releasing a record,

(51:51):
and part of that was to, you know, to tell
my story to someone that's going to write it down
and make a bio a short story of your situation
that they can stand out with the new record, and
that pressed people can have, as I guess, materials that
helped publicize the record. And at some point, remember this

(52:16):
is now I'm telling my story. And then I I
some somehow come up come up telling the story of
I begin telling the story of Mississippi and Robert Johnson.
I said, hey, you know, I made some trips down there.
I was pretty fascinated. And one day I was standing,
uh in front of the grave of Robert Johnson, and

(52:39):
you know, I didn't really know why I was going
to Mississippi, but I finally decided, you know, back then,
it must be so I can look up all the
old blues people. And I ended up, you know, having
a little conversation about Barbert Johnson with myself and realizing
his songs belonged to him and the world knew that.

(53:00):
And I said, and then I realized my songs belong
to me, and I should start recording my songs again.
And I stopped, and I looked at the fella, and
I said, oh my god, that was why I was
supposed to go to Mississippi. That's what this whole thing was.
Seven years later, you know, I was my brain exploded.

(53:21):
I mean, because I did not realize it at the time.
I realized that seven years later, what was the purpose
of that trip? To me? That's still that weird stuff
we uh all have happened to us, that where you
realize somebody's paying attention. Okay, let's go back to fantasy.

(53:42):
You talked about seven years that you didn't go on
the road. You're making this record at this late date.
People know most of the money is in the publishing
and you sold those rights. How did you survive financially
all these years? Good question. We got hey, we got
married enough fever. Um. I know we got paid as

(54:04):
credence um, haltingly. You know, in fits and spurts. We
always had to audit and sometimes got I mean it
was begrudgingly. Did we ever get paid? But I tried
to save as I tried to live frugally. You might say, um,

(54:28):
and so I had money in the bank, but we're
talking in the hundreds of thousands, not living like a
king in a mansion. But I mean I was living
frugally at the time. I mean there was a there
was one point you may remember this story in the
middle eighties where I was sued for sounding like myself.

(54:50):
Without going into that whole story, at that moment in time,
Fantasy not only stopped paying me for that one song,
they stopped paying me for. Their issue was we're not
gonna pay you for any of the songs. And that's
what they did. I mean, that's outrageous. They had fifties
songs of mine or something on Credence albums, you know,

(55:11):
probably Mary uh Um, Bad Moon, Rising, Green River, Commotion,
Born on the Buyou Down on the Corner, and Fortunates.
You know, they had all of them, all the album
songs they've written, and they weren't paying a time for
any of them until we after I won the trial.
That was quite a few years. And even my own

(55:32):
lawyer said, man, how did you manage to stay afloat
without even getting paid? Well? I was living frugally, you know.
I didn't go out and buy a bunch of stuff
that that I really couldn't afford, and then you know,
buy it on time with the idea of future royalties
what not when you're on Fantasy. Um, So that was

(55:53):
That's basically how I was able to get by. But yeah,
for years and years I was not paid ya, Just
so we get the history straight. When you sold to Fantasy,
they already owned the recordings, they therefore owned the songs,

(56:16):
but they still played you writer's royalties. What exactly was
the deal? Yes, and by the way, we did not
sell in my mind anyway. You know, their lawyers speak
in a whole language of gobblygook, and anybody that's lived
longer than twenty years starts to learn that they're basically

(56:38):
charge some multiple of a certain number by how many
words they write or speak. It's so, yeah, it might
be several thousand dollars per word, but it's the more
words they can cram into any document, the higher they
get paid. It's as simple as that. And don't you
try to tell me it's something else, because it's not true. Um.

(57:01):
And so they just jam all these words in there
that no human being can understand. And I believe that's
why when you get all done with this contract that
you've sunk your life into and placed your faith in,
five years later, some other lawyer comes along and says, well, actually,
those words don't mean that that those words mean, and

(57:23):
you're screwed anyway, even though you paid a lot of money.
And by the way, does that first lawyer give you
the money back? Does it didn't work? No? So uh,
at the beginning of the beginning, when the first when
that record contract was signed, in the same contract, they
already own a future song that I will write. I

(57:44):
did not have a song and walk in there and
then some man says Hey, John, that sounds pretty good.
I'll give you three dollars for that song. You know.
It wasn't like that. I knew better than that. But
we had already signed our rights away. Actually before I
actually started writing the majority of the songs, we were

(58:05):
already under a contract that said Saul owns your songs
that you write for the next several years. Okay, but
the legend is that the three other members of the
band talked to some professional and that a certain asset
was sold to Fantasy for a million dollars or something.

(58:27):
It's that ring a bell. No, I'm not sure I
even know what that means. All I know is we
were all under contract for recording, and we were all
also under contract for songwriting. It's just that the other
three didn't write any songs until after that contract had expired.

(58:49):
The only one that had songs written that Saul's ants
owned was me. Um. He might say I served the
time for that. Um. You know, had had it been
a situation where Tom wrote songs or Doug Clifford wrote
songs during that time, Saul would have owned those songs. Um.

(59:13):
At the time. After the credence broke up in seventy two.
Tom left the band at the end of nineteen seventy,
but Credence kind of soldiered on as a trio, but
officially broke up in seventy two, at which point, even

(59:33):
though we were all under contracts yeah for a fleeting
amount of time, I thought that meant, well, the group
is no more now I'm free. Didn't happen that way.
I was not free, but Fantasy almost immediately sent three
letters to the other three members of Credence and said,
you are now not under contract to Fantasy. Therefore, we

(59:58):
will not pay for any albums you go out and
record or any of the rest of it, because they
didn't want them to spend any money because I'm sure
I didn't see much future in what they would record.
But they didn't let me go. I was still under
contract as a recording artist until finally I sold my

(01:00:20):
rights to two artists royalties back to them in so
that I would no longer owe them future recordings. That
was at the end near the Was that a significant amount.
Here's the way I looked at it, Bob, Since you

(01:00:41):
guys are screwing me out of my artist royalties, you know,
every other week, and I have to go get a
lawyer and literally, as we speak, auditing you for two
different periods of time that you have not paid me, right, uh,
And these were times after the initial couple three years.
These were times from maybe seventy five to seventy seven

(01:01:04):
and then seventies seven to eighty or something like that.
And since you're screwing me out of so much money,
I mean, the way I had to tell myself, even
though there would be a long future, you know, years
into the future that I could hope to get paid
artists royalties, it was I had to tell myself, it's
gonna be so minimal. And remember, I'm one quarter of

(01:01:28):
a band, right and we were getting paid pennies, and
then that had to be I got one quarter of that. Um.
I just looked at it as my next three albums
are gonna be great records, and I don't want them
to own an album way into the future. And to
tell you how meaningful that was, if I had not

(01:01:51):
done that in Night, they would have owned Blue Moon
Swamp in and that's the name of that story. Well, okay,
so ultimately Fantasy was bought by Concorde. What is the
status of your ownership and royalty situation in all those records. Today,
I get paid artists royalties such as it was at

(01:02:14):
the time Credence existed by Concord Records on the Concorde
on the records that Concord distributes that were Credence records. UM.
And I've managed to get myself a little bit of
a bump upward by um signing on with Concord for

(01:02:41):
UM there at various times, like I made a record
for Concord in uh believe it was two thousand seven
something like that. I know that when Fantasy was finally
sold by and saw I didn't own it anymore, that
seemed like a pretty positive thing to me and Julie

(01:03:02):
and I went back and tried to ingratiate ourselves with
the new owners and it's sort of worked, and it
sort of did. I don't want to get into all
the stuff, but um, you know, record companies end up
acting like record companies, and it unfortunately, UM, it is
a business, I'll just say it that way. And for

(01:03:24):
a for an artist and for a person who's personal
value system and belief system is sort of an artistic system,
it's just really hard and difficult when people see only
the business side, and everything is bottom line, and you
know I will never listen to I want to hold

(01:03:45):
your hand and sit here and think about what the
bottom line must look like. That's not how I relate
to the musical world, nor how I relate to John
Lennon and McCartney and the Beatles, and or Otis reading
or book or team the MGS, or even Elvis, who
you know certainly got involved in a lot of whose

(01:04:07):
business became well known. Let's say, I mean all that
music that stirred my soul. Um, you know, I still
relate to it that way, and thankfully so, and I
hope it stays that way un till the day I die.
Just to put a bow on it. You're sophisticated, Maybe
not everybody. The audience is. There's a hundred cents in

(01:04:27):
the dollar publishing. Traditionally, if someone else owns the publishing,
they get fifty cents and the writer gets fifty cents.
How is your publishing split up today, just the same way,
as far as I know, it is right, Um, the
the the whole context of that is, somebody actually owns

(01:04:52):
Proud Mary or any other song that has copyright. Someone
actually has ownership and having the ownership of the song
means you get to determine the destiny of that song,
in other words, how it's used. Um. And so as

(01:05:13):
you said, there's a hundred, there's a hundred pennies. And
if the publishing or if the ownership is to make
it simpler, if the ownership is split fifty fifty, the
person that is the publisher is getting fifty cents and
the person that is the songwriter is getting fifty cents.
And that's the most fair way that that should be.

(01:05:35):
But the owner, who is also probably that publisher that
I just named, he's getting to the side how that
song is used. For instance, if Proud Mary gets used
as an underarm deodorant and the poor guy that wrote
the song takes offense at that doesn't want to see

(01:05:56):
some lumberjack's hairy armpit connect did with his song, um um,
proud Mary or Send in the Clowns or love as
a mini splendid thing, you know, I mean, But the
writer probably does not get to control that destiny. The

(01:06:17):
publisher or the owner does. And that's where you hear
song Usually songwriters hawking about how things get used. Certainly
this songwriter anyway, so how's royalty revenue these days? For you?
I don't pay as much attention to that as you
would hope a guy like you just called me sophisticated. Thanks,

(01:06:38):
I resemble that. Um, you know, it kind of never
really works out. I mean, all the years that I
was on Fantasy, I always suspected that, um, you know,
that there were other pressing plants somewhere and making pressing
records and selling them that I never even saw any

(01:07:00):
kind of report about. And you'll never you'll never convince
me that didn't happen, because every other thing that saw
Zance did was so crooked. Um, it's just hard to
believe that he avoided that very easy thing for him,
that in fact, he's the guy that told me about
such situations in the first place. And I always I

(01:07:24):
know that one time, think this was the early days
of credent success and um you know, ah g, we've
John's writing all these songs. And I was actually visiting
Saul in his office at the at one of the
earlier locations, which was the place in Oakland that Fantasy

(01:07:46):
had for it was almost temporary, only one block from
the famous Ducky Market. It's the front cover of Willie
and the Poor Boys. But anyway, I was down there visiting,
and there was a man from being my which is
the uh uh songwriters Performance Association that keeps track of

(01:08:08):
how many times records are played so that the songwriter
usually the publisher too. But it's a it's a way
that the creator of the song can be paid for
all those uh times that the songs played on the
radio or even in movies and other things. So this
guy from it is called Broadcast Music Incorporated b m I.

(01:08:31):
Any songwriter will tell you. So there was happen to
be a guy there in the office where I'm visiting.
You know, we're all flushed with this new success and
Saul sitting there and this fella from b m I,
and so I kind of just innocently said, well, um, well,
how does b m I spit split the relationship between

(01:08:52):
the publisher and the songwriter? You know? Is it fifty
cents for each? And saw suddenly face turns bright. It
I mean, smoke is coming out of his ears and
he's you know, and this fella herb um, and I
won't go any further than that. He says, well, I
think it's paid a little more for the publisher than

(01:09:16):
the songwriter. And that was the first inkling I had that, Oh,
there's stuff back there behind that curtain that I'm not
supposed to pay attention to, and uh wow, I better
not bring it up here today because I'm about to
be lanced, you know. But obviously I had, and quite
innocently I wasn't. I I thought we were all friends here.

(01:09:39):
I thought we were so happy that I can hope,
against hope, we're having actually having hit records, because none
of us had ever experienced that before. But you know,
like that those scenes in Treasure of the Sierra Madre
where the poor fellas actually discover a gold mine and
then things go really bad. Um, that's kind of what

(01:10:01):
happened forgetting all the business shenan against the contracts. Just
talking about what's coming into your bank account. Is that
a good amount of money today? Yeah? Sure, by any stretch. Um,
that's makes me happy. It's far less than what it
used to be. UM. And the simple answer, of course,

(01:10:22):
is that because of the online streaming, an actual physical
record doesn't get sold very much anymore. You know, a
CD or whatever physical um thing holds an album, and
so most of the music gets listened to by streaming

(01:10:43):
off the internet and so the way and people can
buy those, um, I suppose from iTunes or Spotify or
there must be other places. Um, but you are paid
pennies on the dollar for what uh what it used
to be. I know, the cost of an album is

(01:11:05):
far less that way. And also the record companies all
it's like that clam at the bottom, the giant clam
that grabbed the pearl diver in the song leah Uh,
they snap shut. When streaming was invented, he said, okay,
we have a new um, what do you call new technology?

(01:11:27):
And now you know we used to pay you, um,
eight dollars or whatever it was on an album or
four dollar or whatever it was. Then we're now going
to pay you far less, you know, some percentage because
there's no physical actual property and they could be the same,
but there they don't. I mean, they could pay you

(01:11:48):
the same percentage. Let's say it was percent of retail
or something like that, but they don't. They'll pay you
for eight percent ever, you know, it's some a ridiculous number. Again,
you end up, if you're a successful artist, you're making
into the millions of dollars. So trust me, Bob, I'm

(01:12:10):
not sitting here crying in my beer. Um. I'm just
trying to explain that it's now far less than it
used to be because of that situation. Okay, you talk
about all this traveling to Mississippi, going into the post office,
is going to visit Julian, Indiana. The people recognize you everywhere.
What's it like being John Fogerty once you leave your house? Well,

(01:12:33):
you know, the pen the pandemic has been wonderful. I'm
walking around with a mask on, you know, the one
that says Johnpoverty across the frame. And you know, I'm
just like everybody else. I'll take it back a few years.
Let me click back, Um, when people would stop me,
you know a lot of times, you know, excuse me.

(01:12:55):
When I when I was first getting to know Julie,
her daughter Lindsay was two and a half three, Like
I said, you know, we finally we're cohabiting and a family. Um.
Lenzy was getting to be four years old and quite
a little um manifesto herself. And one day she actually

(01:13:17):
said to Julie and I, John, how come people always
come up to you and say, aren't you John Bogoty.
You know, she's a kid and she's wondering why that
would happen, and I mean, it was an interesting phenomenon
to a child. And I I told her, you know,
we both kind of Saturday and said, well, you know,

(01:13:38):
John is a famous musician and people like his music.
So when they see him, you know, and they actually
really like, oh, that's him. You know at the supermarket,
the ones that are let's say a little less shy
will come up and talk. And what the reason I
bring this up is I always approach those moments in
the most sweet way because it's a blessing, you know.

(01:14:01):
Number one, It's solidified to me in my mind the
way I felt about Julie and lindsay, this was happening
to us together and it was kind of it was
really sweet. I wasn't like a horde of people like
in the Beatle movies or something, you know. I was
used a man and wife, maybe a man and wife
with one child. And it was always low key because

(01:14:22):
in those days I wasn't touring there. There wasn't new
music out yet. You know, later on as music came
out and I was on tour, or certainly if I
was anywhere near a place I was performing, there would
be an obvious connection, and it got a little more hectic,
but I tried to deal with it the best I could,

(01:14:44):
and I was I was very naive about this. UM
started touring after Blue Moon Swamp, and of course you're
flying to towns that aren't within driving distance that means
almost every place, and and at an airport, and there
would suddenly be these strangers that had um sheets of

(01:15:05):
paper and uh, sometimes guitars and sometimes drumheads, and they
want you to sign this stuff, or even pictures or albums,
and I would sign them all. Okay, you know, I
started signing them, and you know just I mean, that
went on for several years. And I remember around in
that time seeing Mark McGuire, the famous baseball player, who

(01:15:28):
was talking about how he came to not sign things anymore.
He said, he'd be in a motel, you know, the
A's or whatever team he's with, was on the road,
and a man came knock on his motel door. You know,
it was signed my baseball bat or whatever, and he
started to get a little grumpy because he realized they

(01:15:49):
were running off and selling these things. He said, so
then they started knocking on the door and they'd have
the little kid stand there and Daddy wasn't anywhere in sight.
But Mark knew that how does this kid managed to
come to where I am? You know? And they put
a little b in my bonnet at least. But still
I was signing all the people that came to see me.

(01:16:12):
Finally I got it in my head that these people
were just turning around and selling everything on eBay. They
weren't necessarily pains. I mean, when a guy walks up
to you has got a briefcase full of everything connected
to you, but he's also got other briefcases. You know.
That particularly would happen um in airports where there was

(01:16:35):
like a festival, and so these guys were showing up,
Um who were gonna snag anybody who you know, any
fly that that landed here on the fly paper, and
it didn't matter who he was. They probably had it
covered with a couple of items, you know, And I
would do it. And it started to know it started
to be inconvenient to my family because I'm I'm trying

(01:16:57):
to get my family to our The next part of
our ride are either the the car, the so called
limo that's going to take you to your hotel or
to your venue or whatever. Um. And I had little
kids with me, and it started to actually be dangerous
at times. So you know, Julie would look at me
and you know, I really wanted to do it and

(01:17:20):
then assign it, I mean and being obligating uh, obliging
um artists. And then other times I begin to actually
see a businessman stare me in the face. The worst, Bob,
the worst one of these that ever happened was I
couldn't even tell you what town. Uh. It's back when

(01:17:40):
people could follow you right to your gate where you
were going to take off. And this guy had this
among Us video camera on his shoulder and he comes
walking up and says, well, John, UM, tell me some
words about that. And I looked at and said, well, yeah, okay,
I'm I'm happy to be touring. And then he's asking

(01:18:01):
me a couple of more questions and I'm you know,
I've got my kids with me, and well, I want
to get to the gate, you know, and get everybody settled.
We don't have a lot of time. He says, well, no,
you are you going to honest, buddy? I I gave
you a little time. Now. Now my brother Bob comes up.
He sees I, I'm in a hopeless situation. I'm trying

(01:18:21):
to be nice, so I can't be firm because he's
switched from the guy. It doesn't matter if he gets
me as a nice guy and I have something polite
to say, that's probably one kind of paparazzi stuff. But
if he can get me to actually turn purple, because
now I'm mad at the guy, this is better and
you'll get he can sell it for more money. So

(01:18:43):
he's trying to make me mad. He's starting to bait me.
And that's when Bob, here's it, and I'm I don't
know how to react right, I'm still almost being sophisticated.
Bob comes up, says, the buddy, you're just gonna have
to turn it off. Take it away. John gave you
a little bit, now, please go away. Says well, I
hope you have a miserable this is the guy. I

(01:19:04):
hope you have a bad fight. I hope the airplane
crashes and I'm going wow. And after that I realized
that it's it's pretty complicated to get involved with people
that want something from you while you're traveling especially with
your family. Going back to the beginning, what kind of
kid were you? Were you kind of kid who had

(01:19:26):
a lot of friends, or the kid who was staying
at home reading comic books. We're a good student, bad student.
I was all of those, you know, don't get me started,
but the big huge I was just talking with someone
yesterday about this subject. That the time I remember, you know,
when you were a kid. There's even a good country
song I love has this in it. We were outside.

(01:19:49):
You know what he's stayed in around? We were outside.
There was nothing in your house. Your parents are in
your house. Who wants to be in your house? You
go outside and mess around. You know, we're gonna see
our friends. We're gonna go mess around. Uh do stuff
on our bicycle, you know, Uh, get on our bikes,
go over to someplace that's a bacon a lot. I mean, wow,

(01:20:11):
a bacon lot was such a world, a universe. We
didn't even have malls yet. I get it. I understand
why a mall is an attraction. But I'm talking all
the time before that, you just you found things to do.
You probably had a bicycle, um and your friends and
you all did things outside. It was just that was

(01:20:32):
a good life. Um. Later, of course, because of TV
and especially because of gaming, you know, the video games
and stuff, and then online people started more and more
congregate in. But I was an outdoor kid. I did
all of that. I love messing around. I loved going
with a couple of friends and hiking over the um

(01:20:54):
Indian Rock. We client as a place in the Bay Area.
I'm sure it's still there a few miles from my house.
You know, all all the cool things. I was in traffics,
and that means I was helped the students across the crosswalk. Uh,
during recesses and times when school was either coming in

(01:21:15):
or going out, and so we got little passes to
the local theater. And I love going down on Saturday
and seeing a movie for free or for five cents. Uh.
You know, I loved music early, so I began to
be fascinated. We had an old Stella guitar. Believe it

(01:21:38):
or not, I was blessed and lucky enough that that's
part of my upbringing. Uh. It didn't work very well,
but it's acoustic. But the fact that it was a
Stella rather than some other brand name. By the way,
that's probably Sears Roebuck. It's where my parents got it.
It's really hard to play, as my brother Bob says, Yeah,

(01:21:59):
we played baseball all with that thing. Yeah, we use
it for a bat, but it was built like a
tank and it's the same kind lead belly had, you know. Um,
So those things were in in my life. You know,
I think I had the normal amount of friends, but
they were there and I was I loved hanging out
with them. There were other times when I was in

(01:22:22):
my room, you know, like the wonderful song by the
Beach Boys. I suppose it's Brian Wilson. Um that just
says it so well. You know, it's that that area
of your life where that's your sanctuary, that's your place
where a lot of your thinking gets done or a
lot of your fears. You know, it's a it really

(01:22:42):
is a true thing. And for me, of course, I
had my radio and my little record player and a
lot of my world exploring music. You know, the whole mysterious,
magical thing to me, and music was certainly that. I mean,
first I loved music or I was attracted, but it

(01:23:05):
became this It was so full of mystery, and you know,
I had the old fashioned kind of radio, I guess
you'd call that analog. And so at night you would
be was edging the dial, the tuning dial between stations,
and sometimes you get stations from out of town you
never heard before. It might be Montana or you know,

(01:23:26):
some other far away place that just because of the
atmospheric anomalies, it was bouncing off a cloud and coming
to you but in sort of a uh rhythmically an
unclear pulse, and a lot of times it made the
record sound even better, you know, and more mysterious. Um.

(01:23:46):
And certainly the other part of that experience, by the way,
having your radio in your room as a kid in
your bedroom, the tubes, yes I said, tubes lit up
and with dance, certain little shadows on the ceiling of
your bedroom. All the lights are out, and this thing
would kind of flicker on the ceiling as you listen

(01:24:06):
to some far away station. And sometimes you heard, you know,
your current rock and roll record or a new record,
or sometimes you heard weird things like gene Autry, you know,
or a blues record oh by Lightning Hopkins called Mojo
hand that hadn't quite made it to your area yet. Um.

(01:24:28):
And when these things would happen. You felt like you
had found a portal to Mars or something that nobody
else could find. Sorry, I went on, but that was
my relationship with music. In some ways. It was so
mysterious and magical because I knew there was a big
thing out there. I guess that's what I'm saying. I

(01:24:50):
knew there was way more than I knew, and I
was just dying, craving two get to it, to be
immersed in it, to discover it. Okay. Was this interest
in music generated by your parents or by siblings, Like
my parents, they would take us through the young Kids concerts,
they would play the show tunes. Was this something you

(01:25:13):
discovered alone or was this something all your family was
exposed to? Absolutely my family first. Um, when I was
quite young. I remember, I think being on vacation is
you know. So we were probably up at the Poda
Creek in northern California. It's near Winters, and I'd be

(01:25:34):
this be night, maybe they're going to drive to the
grocery store. But to me it was like taking a
long trip. I'm sitting between them in the dark, and
my mom and my dad are harmonizing and they would sing,
you know, old standards from their day, like by the
Light of the Silvery Moon. Um. One of the songs
they sang was baby Face. You know, baby face, you

(01:25:57):
got that cute, as did Obey. But they would sing
add lack you got the keys that right, that was
their own little Um. They're already in the blues tradition.
They took something there that they liked and rewrote it. Um.
But that I discovered they were harmonizing, you know. And
again I was probably three to four years old and

(01:26:19):
asked them, well, why are your voices different? And my
mom explained that to me. Another very very important thing
that happened. I was about three and a half. We
came My mom was one of the parents and also
what I think a teacher or part time parent teacher
at preschool nursery school. That's the way she said it

(01:26:40):
to me. And we came home in the afternoon from
one of the days and she sat me down and
she presented me with a little record record, a record
yellow record, and she explained to me that the songwriter
of these songs is Stephen Foster. So she wasn't telling
me who the singers were who. I really actually don't know. Um,

(01:27:05):
it might have been a Little Golden Book or a
Little Golden Orchestra or whatever. But the songs were Oh
Susannah and Camptown Races. Do uh Do? She played both sides,
maybe several times, but again she explained to me the
song writer of these songs is Stephen Foster, and that

(01:27:27):
went in and stayed. I mean, I remember that. I
can still see myself sitting in that chair and being
taught about Stephen Foster. And as I've grown, you know,
I've just find that remarkable that anyone, any parent of
a kid who obviously loved music, because I was dancing

(01:27:47):
around and singing and you know, noticing somebody with a
drum or a pickle or whatever the piano um and
wanting to know about it. Telling a person about a
songwriter at that age is just unusual. And it has
stayed with me ever since. And I believe even to

(01:28:08):
the sort of music that I like, which you know,
the education probably continued, you know, as time went on,
but meaning my mother's influence, but the fact that you know,
Stephen wrote a certain kind of you know, I didn't
know at the time he was America's first professional songwriter. Um,

(01:28:28):
that's pride, a thing. But and also he got screwed
out of his royalties, became an alcoholic, and died pretty young.
Well everything there is true, except hopefully for the part
about dying pretty young, um as far as applied to me.
But anyway, um, I think even though I grew into

(01:28:51):
teenage years and became a what I would call a
normal rock and roll kid, somehow when it became time
for me to create my own music, I hear a
lot of Stephen Foster in what I do, and I
think that that influence just went in there and stayed
there and became part of my voice. Another thing that

(01:29:14):
was very also very influential is my I'm kind of
trace backwards, but I think I think this is really important.
It was the forties. You know, I'm three, four or
five years old. I'm born in um My mom was
one of the first folkies. You know. Um obviously her

(01:29:34):
politics were liberal left. My dad too. My parents split up,
by the way, when I was about eight. That's why
I talked about sitting between them in the car. That's
that some of the last memories I have that way.
But anyway, um my mom's so she's a liberal person
listening to folk music and at some point she starts

(01:29:56):
telling me about those guys, like especially Pete Seeger, and
she was a Pete Seeger freak, And so I became
a Pete Seeger freak. Before the folks scare, before Tom Dooley,
Let's say, I was already knowing a lot about Pete
Seeger and his music, but and and a lot of

(01:30:19):
the other artists like Sam Hinton and Burrow Lives and
uh several other the weavers. My mom would sing Goodnight
Irene all the time. But I was a kid. I
didn't have it all historically correct. It was just music.
But when the folk festival thing finally happened, and I

(01:30:39):
will say as a result of the Kingston Trio and
Tom Dooley. Even though all those old guard folkies hated
the Kingston Trio, I think because they were successful commercially,
even though you asked about royalties. By the way, all
that pezze weren't all at bad um. He was selling records.

(01:31:03):
But somehow the old guard folky's hated that Tom Dooley
by the Kingston Trio was on the jukebox right, And
so I started to hear from some of the true
folkey people. My mom actually took me down to get
folk music guitar lessons at light Bolk Park in Berkeley, right,
And I remember Barry Olivier, who I consider a very

(01:31:27):
influential person on me, but he was in their crowd.
He's an older person, and he talked about how Tom Dooley, Yeah,
they put that little pause in there, Tom Dooley, so
that the guy at the bar would you know, slip
and follow up his elbow with the hiccup, would bother him.
And I thought, gee, that had an attitude. Why did

(01:31:48):
he say that. Well, anyway, folk music really took off
after Tom Dooley and they started having folk music festivals.
The one near me was called the Berkeley Bolk Best
of All and put on by this same fella, Barry Olivier,
And all those cats were there, Pete Seeger, uh Sam

(01:32:08):
Hinton one year was Lightning Hopkins, um Uh Alan Lomax,
uh Ewan McCall, Peggy Seeger, you know, uh, Jesse Fuller,
all these people, and Pete of course was the sort
of un un anointed god of the whole thing. Also,

(01:32:30):
he's the best entertainer I ever saw. And it's the
most blessed experience if you could have ever been in
and I've seen Frank and Sammy and Elvis and Dino
and you know all that stuff. And uh, I've seen
Wayne on Wayne Newton on TV. I mean that they
call that entertainers, you know, the Vegas kind of thing.

(01:32:52):
But what Pete did was engaged in entire audience into
that world and make them part of it. And you
left out of there like had been in church. Um so, yes,
you asked me who was influential? Yeah, my mom. So

(01:33:14):
you were born in fourty five. I was born in
fifty three, and it was different because I certainly remember
the folk boom. I certainly remember the nylon string guitars,
taken lessons from somebody in the neighborhood, etcetera. But for
my generation, it was when the Beatles broke that everybody
got an electric guitar and everybody formed bands. You're older,

(01:33:38):
when did you start to perform? What music were you
doing and what was it like when the Beatles hit?
Can I do that as a two parter? Do it? However?
You want to? Sure? Well, because because of the folk
people I literally I'm talking about in the fifth and

(01:33:59):
sixth grade, but usually particularly in the sixth grade, I
started organizing a few of the other kids, boys and girls,
and I don't think it was more than five of us.
But um, well, first before that, about a year before that,
I had partnered with my best friend, I Felt, a

(01:34:19):
kid named Bob Carlton. We were pantomiming Stan Freeberg records.
They were, you know, these were these comedy bits that
he he made fun of Heartbreak Hotel, or he made
fun of the song d O by um Harry Belafonte.
So we would dress up in little costumes and stand
in front of the school class and just pantomime them.

(01:34:41):
We we didn't write anything, and we didn't say anything.
Just our lips moved our you know, we held a microphone.
So I was already getting used to the idea of
standing in front of an audience. In the sixth grade.
Kind of halfway through, I organized a group of kids
and we had bongos and shakers and stuff. Nobody could
actually play a real instrument, but we were doing banana

(01:35:04):
boat song or story whatever it's the real name, deo um,
maybe a couple other of those sort of clips. So
we folk songs and mostly just singing all right. Um.
Seventh eighth grade, I think it's right in there. I
take those begin I've already playing guitar. I think I

(01:35:24):
was in the seventh grade. I talked my mom into
help me get a Seares electric guitar out of the
catalog with my paper route money. And so it takes me,
you know, ten months to pay off eight dollars. It's
eighty dollars. It's thirty for a guitar, an am, and

(01:35:46):
over the time of eight ten months, it's eight dollars interest. Um,
But she co signs, so I get to have the
thing now, you know, with eight months in a kid's life.
Oh my god, an I start on that. So I'm
in both worlds. I've got electric guitar, and of course
I'm seeing the people from the fifties Elvis. Uh. There

(01:36:10):
was a song called Honky Talk by Bill Dogg that
was way over my pay grade. Um. The first song
that I remember on that electric guitar there is pre Beatles,
of course, was that I sounded like something was Endless
Sleep by Jody Reynolds. I remember on on Endless Sleep

(01:36:30):
by Jody was a big hit record, and it was
a it was a suicide record, you might say, well,
except it has a happy ending. But um it's called
endless sleep. But anyway, they're using a whammy bar to
make a lower note become a higher note. And so
with that sense of going bom bom bom, boom boon't

(01:36:51):
like that, but it's a guitar doing this. The way
I mimic that with my electric guitar with my amp
you know, turned up was to him are on the chord.
I kind of just discovered it myself. I could go.
It's an actual technique that especially lead guitar players, especially
in the eighties. Eddie van Halen people like that used

(01:37:13):
this technique to hammer on. But I kind of discovered
it to mimic this song I love called Endless Sleep.
So I could play these chords. Um enough, there were
three chords in this song, and I figured out those
three chords from a burl Ives songbook, by the way,
and played could play that song all the way through

(01:37:35):
with nobody else around, you know, did it like during
lunchtime from school. I'd rushed home and try and play
that like and I would just as soon as I
finish it, I just started again. That probably played six
times in a row, singing as loud as I I
wasn't shy because there was nobody home right um, and
so by n fifty nine, towards the end of my

(01:37:58):
eighth grade, I had a wonderful music teacher named Mrs Stark,
I think in seventh and eighth grade. By now I'm
going to junior high. And she let me come into
her room after school and just bang on the piano.
And I started doing that every day. Uh. And I
knew a little boogie woggie and I was playing in

(01:38:18):
wrong keys like all black keys, matter of fact, f
sharp um. But she let me do it, and that
her room. The door to her room was right at
the It was right by the stairs where you went
down to the boys and girls gym, so any of
the after school stuff, everybody had to pass by there.

(01:38:39):
So pretty soon there was a crowd of twenty people
sitting there at that piano watching John play do you
want to Dance? Uh? God, what was Do you Want
to Dance? Was when I knew all of it could
play on the piano. Um, right now I can't think
of the other ones, but you know, it doesn't matter anything.
I could, Oh, Hollo Gully, I could play Holly Gully

(01:39:02):
really loud and sing it pretty good too. Eventually, Uh,
Doug Clifford and I linked up at school because he
was at the junior high And sometime after that, uh
Stu Cook, who became the bass player in Credence. Uh,
we linked up and we formed a little band called

(01:39:23):
the Blue Velvets that mainly we were going to be instrumental,
but we you know, we were a band. It's like
blood brothers. We have this thing and we probably could
play fIF twenty instrumentals, the like of which were Dwayne Eddie,
the Ventures and Tall Cool One by the Whalers. And
you know that was an era of rock and roll instrumentals.

(01:39:47):
Um BENSI I learned how to play honky talk um again.
I'm sure in those days I had none of the
sophistication of Billy Butler, who was the guitar player. UM,
but sure appreciated. I mean, that's still one of the
best records ever made. Uh in you know my negative Woods. Anyway,

(01:40:07):
and so by the time the Beatles came, Uh, I
started hearing the Beatles at the end of my senior
year of high school. UM. I was miss hearing that
they were playing a song called Please Please Me, and
I thought It was by the Shields, and they played

(01:40:28):
it in heavy rotation as a pick of the week
or whatever, and I would hear it drive. I was
driving in my car on my way every day for
about a week. It's like May of sixty three, and
you know, I liked it. I said, hey, wow, those
Shields are pretty cool. You know. I knew there was
some old band that had I think you cheated, you lied,

(01:40:51):
but that's what I was hearing. Then for some reason,
I didn't know they had turned the record over, but
they started playing another record the Shields. It was called
from Me to You, and that was so cool. I said,
oh my god, who are these guys? You know, this
is really great. And then after two weeks they went
away and I didn't hear any more about it until

(01:41:15):
somewhere around December. I read in Time magazine there was
this band in England and they had played some concert
for the Queen. I mean, that was the way it
all came together. And one of the band members said, um,
you people in the cheap seats just clap your hands
and the rest of you rattled your jewels, and I,

(01:41:36):
you know, it was endearing already that these guys were
working whoever the Beatles were. I said, hey, I saw
a title that I reckon. That's those guys, wow, you know,
And they were I think they were in that that
stairway picture, you know, in the stairway that we're all
wearing black, and they just looked it was all together.

(01:41:56):
It was a group, you know, just but not our fashion,
this whole different look. While the rest of the world
found out about it must have been a matter of
weeks when suddenly you were here and I want to
hold your hand, and it uh the way I the
way I sometimes say it is when we were when

(01:42:17):
we were seniors in high school at Elsevito High, we
were the only band in the school. The next year
there were a hundred bands. Also, not long thereafter, we
have the famous San Francisco scene, which starts to you know,
percolate in the mid sixties, and by time we hit

(01:42:37):
the sixties, seven Jefferson Airplane has a hit that's across
the river from you. But to what degree did you
feel part of that scene? And did you partake of
that scene? Go to the film or whatever. It was
all mixed up together. Um, the politics or philosophy of
young people, the war Vietnam, l b J being the

(01:43:01):
first Nixon, then lb excuse me, lb J, then Nixon.
But at this time it was lb J and that war,
you know, sixty s or so and the music and
at some I mean you, I'm trying to give you
the first blush of this thing. There were protesters protesting

(01:43:22):
the war. Uh. Actually before that, there had been this
thing on the cal campus cal Berkeley called the free
speech Movement and Mario Savio and they wanted the right
to be able to say the F bomb. And I'm
not gonna say it here because even though I say
it all the time, and I regretted even around my

(01:43:43):
kids who are adults. Um, I try not to say
I say it when I I'm agitated, but I try
to not just say it as an affectation. I don't
know if that makes any sense to you. But so
that was sort of a short lived political movement, the
very speech movement. It's kind of silly, but all the

(01:44:05):
mechanics were in place for what later became the anti
war movement. But the funny thing was, in the beginning
the anti war movement was was a bit messed up.
I know that, Um, there was this there was gonna
be a troop train go by somewhere on the tracks
down in the lower part of Berkeley and Oakland, and

(01:44:28):
of all people, the Hell's Angels were there. But there
were you know, there were a few people that were
trying to stop the train, and then the Hell's Angels
were actually acting like true blooded Americans in the John
Wayne uh songbook and helped keep the train moving. You know.
It was just a strange thing. Of course, later the

(01:44:50):
Hell's Angels became what's the word, They had enough cred that, uh,
they were now seen as liberals where they were unfortunately
are to be bodyguards at Altamont, but eventually kind of
seen as criminals. And the whole thing was actually pretty scummy,
you know, pretty bad um. And that's just a blip

(01:45:13):
on the radar to leading up to the music I had.
I had only vaguely heard about something happening in Golden
Gate Park and that there was musicians and music over there,
and it kind of it felt like it was amateurish um.
But then by nineteen sixty seven, at least from me,

(01:45:36):
there was a local radio station called k mp X.
It eventually became known as the world's first underground video
station and lo and behold, it was Tom Donahue who
was the main guy. He had He had been a
normal rock and roll DJ on k y A, a
top forty station in the Bay Area. Tom Donahue and

(01:46:00):
uh Mitchell, Bob Mitchell, Mitchell and Donahue were kind of
the kings of the rock and roll in Bay the
Bay Area, you know, the normal place. And I was
getting a little older, you know, rock was getting a
little older, and now there was just underground thing that
was really cool because you know, there was a lot

(01:46:20):
of music that was perhaps not played on the rock,
the top forty station, or maybe not played right away.
And I'm talking about what we kind of called stacks
music or soul music. And I was, of course, I
always listened to the black station, the R and B station,
and you heard much of the music that made it
later into the top forty you would hear it on

(01:46:42):
the R and B station. First. I'm talking about Otis
Redding and Eddie Floyd. As far as the San Francisco scene,
it starts to it starts to become more noticed for
at least for me, when when one of the Stacks artists,
and certainly it was there that you started to hear

(01:47:03):
Grateful Dead, Quicksilver, the Airplane, you know, the San Francisco bands,
and that was it was quite clearly also politically involved
with what young people were feeling at the time. There
was there was there was no real party, you know,

(01:47:25):
it was that organized quite that way. I think the
real thing that was that everyone had in common is
that they were young, uh, and it was just a
different mindset obviously than let's say L. B. J or
Hubert Humphrey or any of the other old people you
know that we were looking at and the music because

(01:47:49):
it was even more um, even more free form than
rock and roll. You know, rock and roll was sort
of on the top forty stations, and this was kind
of a new thing that was. I mean, we loved
at that place. We loved the records by Stas, We
loved Van Morrison, you know, people that kind of that

(01:48:12):
blues based rock. But then there was this other new
thing coming in, particularly from San Francisco bands, and that
was getting played on k mp X. And to what
degree were you into that. Were you more of a
roots rocker or were you buying those records, listening to
those records, doing drugs, going on trips. The funny thing was, well,

(01:48:36):
I went on I went on active duty for the military,
for the Army in late January of nineteen sixty seven.
Before you tell us this story, how did you end
up going into the military, because that was our worst fear. Yes,
but I got drafted. I got drafted in early nineteen

(01:48:57):
sixty six. Um, do you want to hear that story? Yes,
every every young person, every young male, I guess, was
pretty much uh having trepidation, trepidation about being drafted. Um.

(01:49:18):
There was this war in Vietnam that none of us
knew much about, and strangely, there had been this kind
of surprise announcement right at the end of August. On
August thirty one, who I heard. I heard the announcement
on the radio at about eleven thirty twelve o'clock in

(01:49:41):
the morning, and it said, all of you who have
draft deferments because of various reasons, will now not have
draft deferments, and you will all be eligible for the
draft after August at the first nineteen unless you happen

(01:50:06):
to be married. And I was getting married in five days,
and I remember thinking for five minutes or something, Wow,
maybe I should go get married now up in Reno
or something. But you know, I kind of it almost
felt like that was a travesty to kind of to

(01:50:30):
let this affect something as beautiful as a marriage, right, uh, deferment.
And I got a draft notice and that was giving
me a certain time that I was to report, and
I got pretty agitated about all that. I actually went
down to the draft board and this young lady who
was probably twenty one. You know, but you're almost seeing

(01:50:55):
the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz talking to you,
because you know they're on the what's the word there
in the untouchable seats and your own situation is much worse.
And she says something like, well, if your wife could
become come pregnant before and I'm going you mean become

(01:51:16):
pregnant as of yesterday. So none of that was working. Um,
And finally, what what happened, I was I was pretty
agitated about going in right away, going into the regular army.
And I poked around and and you know, the word

(01:51:36):
went to all the National Guards and called people and
all the rest, and finally found an army reserve unit
that I was able to get into. And the truth
of the matter, matter is I believe my now wife,
young wife had called that place and the fella that

(01:51:59):
was the sergeant in charge of that unit said something,
you just tell him to get on down here and
we'll sign him up, and she had you know, she
had heard something in her voice. I've always thought that,
you know, if I had a called, he probably would
have said, you get down here, buddy, and you know
they're going to Vietnam. Um. So that was how I

(01:52:21):
got into the Army reserves, which meant I still had
an obligation for active duty, and I was looking at
probably six years of total of service, meaning once a
month meetings, once once a month, weekends, and also every
summer two weeks worth of UH boot camp all over again,

(01:52:45):
I guess you'd say. So it turned out that my
active duty came up in January of sixty seven. But
the guys in what I was musically what the guys
what I was getting to is we travel on these
long um. I was already going to Army meetings by

(01:53:06):
the way, reserve meetings, and sometimes we would be three
miles away playing a show on on a Friday night
and have to get back to my home so that
I could be at seven o'clock um in the morning
Army Reserve meeting, and a lot of times on the
way back, I was talking to the guys about some

(01:53:28):
of these records I had, and they were, um, some
of them were available. They were it was through our
Holy Records, but it didn't say our Holy. It said
something like old time classics, things like that. And I
had these copies of tracks I had never heard before
in my life, one of which was rolling in Tumbling

(01:53:51):
by I think it was baby Face Leroy was actually
I didn't find out untill later that that actually was
Mighty Waters, but they contry actually he was recording somewhere
else where he wasn't supposed to be, so they named
the track after the artist. After the drummer. Um, I
heard an old song called Honey, take a whiff on Me,

(01:54:13):
A lot of old blues things, and I would tell
the guys about them, and somehow I think I had
a little recorder. I was able to play stuff back
in this old Volkswagen that we would have a van
that we would travel in. So anyway, there it was
almost like before active duty and after active duty. So

(01:54:33):
I was telling the guys about this music four or
five months and then I went on active duty. By
time I came back, they were telling me about this
radio station that was playing all these things, you know,
and I, oh, cool, Yeah, that was exactly what, you know,
the the touchstone you might say, of the place. And

(01:54:54):
so now you could tune into a radio station and
hear all this stuff. I was talking about a lot
of other groovy stuff. And of course the local bands
were also getting played. So that kind of for the
for the pilgrims that joined the Faithful, that sort of
became the altar, the place where you started listening to

(01:55:16):
more often than not, because you're gonna be surprised, you know,
on a top board the station you sort of had
the way wade your way through the cow sills and
all the you know, I mean pop music in the middle,
you know, centrist, if you're gonna use political terms, it's centrist,
kind of sappy, but it's vanilla, and the most people

(01:55:39):
like that. And then there's that small percentage it might
be ten pc it's on I'm talking about on the
pop station that's really sort of edgy, and even the
censers like some of that, and they can't believe how
great it is once once they get in the mood
um and that stuff. You know, the Beatles where they

(01:56:00):
in the beginning, and so was Alvis at the beginning
of their careers. I mean, and then there came a
time when in the Bay Area all these bands like
Big Brother and the Airplane and even the Dead or
a moment, you know, they were that edgy thing that
was just too far out for the you know, that
middle of vanilla place. But anyway that was it was

(01:56:21):
a a wonderful It was almost like the beginning of
rock and roll in nineteen all over again. Here it
was a nineteen sixty seven with k mp X sort
of bringing clearly into focus this way of thinking, which
I think is part of it, um and this way

(01:56:42):
of listening to music and a certain kind of music
that was cool, and some were even more edgy than cool,
you know. There it took a while to kind of
get out there with those you know, with those people,
but eventually that was brought into it. You know. At
the same time some of the shows we were doing
that we're late, we'd we'd come home listening to Wolfman

(01:57:05):
Jack and during the middle sixties there he was definitely
in that same place. I don't know that I don't
think there was one word about politics. Um, but wolf
Man jack was definitely cool. And the music, um, I
just spoke for itself. And that's that's where I heard
things like Mistake Eyes or that wonderful Freddie Scott record

(01:57:30):
and it I think it's called are You Lonely for Me? Baby?
But all I remember is it's my last bus to Jacksonville.
Whatever became a a mainstream hit. But I first heard
stuff like that on Wolfman. Okay, when was the first

(01:57:53):
time you heard yourself on the radio And what was
that experience? Like, it's a lot earlier than you might think. Um,
we the Blue Velvets. That was that trio of Doug
and Stu and I uh. In junior high school. We

(01:58:13):
we got adopted by our local boys club, which was
really half a block away from our junior high school.
It was right there. And this wonderful man named Bob.
And I confess that I've looked for his name and
tried to google. You know that Bob. Here's another Bob
by the way, that person that was with the Del

(01:58:36):
Crito Boys Club in nine And you know, I've never
been able to track down his full name, his last name,
but he adopted us. Um. I mean, now it kind
of makes more sense, but at the time I was
just a kid fourteen years old with a paper out

(01:58:57):
with two of my musical friends. We had this, you know,
we considered ourselves a little little amateur band, um, and
we were a rock and roll band. And he adopted
us to go represent our boys club and play in
these get togethers with all the other boys clubs, you know,

(01:59:19):
like a Saturday on into evening type festival. And it
was the most wonderful thing because at that very early age,
we were being presented as something in a white shirt
with a I think that was called a continental tie
that that, you know, and made us look finished. I
think we were all allowed to just have any We

(01:59:41):
didn't have pants because that was too expensive, so we
had each had some kind of black pants and some
kind of we didn't there were no beatle boots yet,
but we weren't quite that uniform. We were kids, but
we were being presented and treated as if we mattered
like like that. It was legitimate, and you know, we'd

(02:00:01):
go play a couple of songs. We might play Walk
Don't Run, or we might play an original one of
the songs. I had written as an instrumental, and Bob
would drive us there and talk to us. You know.
We had the whole well, the piano was there. It
was drums, guitar and piano was the instrumentation, and uh

(02:00:24):
Doug had a few drums and I had my little
guitar set up. But Bob would talk to us, you know,
and kind of give us adult lessons. I'll tell you
the most important one I ever had. We had been
driven to a place to play, and we were going
to you know, we were the boys club representative. And

(02:00:46):
for some reason I was trying to plug in my amplifier,
but my AMP would not reach the electrical outlet. I
needed an extension cord, which wasn't part of my arsenal,
and so I went over to find you know, I
gotta find Bob. I gotta find, you know, because I'm
in a strange location to do this. But I I

(02:01:07):
don't even actually remember doing it, but I know it
happened because I heard the the playback of the tape,
you might say, from Bob. I walked up and Bob
was sitting talking with another gentleman who was obviously in
a similar position with another Boys Club but I must
have kind of interrupted urgently, sort of certainly, without asking

(02:01:32):
please or may I interrupt you? I probably walked up
and said something like I really needed extension cord. My
aunt's not gonna work without, you know, like I'm so
important in other words, um, and Bob looked at me,
looked at the other gentleman. Because I didn't realize I
had done this. I just suddenly, he was now saying

(02:01:53):
his mannerism, said whoa time out? Slow down? Right? And
he said, first you should say please. Now I realized
I've done something wrong that you should ask me as
a request, may I please have your help, your assistance,
because I really need to find an extension court and

(02:02:17):
I forgot to bring one. I've looked at Bob, and
of course I'm sure I was hot under the collar
then did what he said. But in all the years later,
when I've thought about that moment and and Bob, through
many more appearances that we did and a couple of
years of it, actually I've thanked him in my mind that, wow,

(02:02:40):
you know, I was a snotty kid who thought he
was important, that I was obviously what's the word embarrassed
that I didn't have it together, and so now I
was urgently whatever that is, because that's so big. You
see so much of that crop. In fact, now we
expect it from our celebrities. Is horrible. And Bob kind

(02:03:01):
of stopped me in my tracks at probably fourteen years old,
kind of just you know, he's an adult and I'm
a kid, kind of saying you're acting like a kid.
You're being immature. It's rude and you you know you
won't get very far doing that, And how can I
say it? I've had a good enough upbringing less their

(02:03:22):
heart from my mom and what other teachers had cared
to bother You know that I understood what this lesson was.
So um Again, I'm a human being. I've certainly had
my moments, but that was important to me and it's
still important to me. Okay, the band has huge success,

(02:03:44):
starts with Susie Q. Proud Mary is gigantic. I'm sure
you're on a roll, you're feeling good, you have a
couple more hits. Then, how hard is it to write
these songs? Do you feel well, I have to write
a song is good or close to as good as
the other ones? Do you discard other ones? How much
pressure internal pressure. There's always external pressure deliver a hit,

(02:04:08):
but how much internal pressure not? How did you manage that? Well? Now,
remember um, when the four when I got off of
active duty, the four of us sort of resolved to
make it or break it. We gave ourselves vaguely a year. Right.

(02:04:31):
Amazingly it happened within that year. But we figured that
Tom was the only kind of quote adult. He was
over twenty one, had a real job at pgn E,
that's the electrical company, also became a band. Yeah, that's right,
and we were rehearsing every day and took it very seriously.

(02:04:51):
We were trying to get better. And you know, we
we really as gollywogs that had made the records earlier
with Fantasy that was kind of churish, not unlike so
many records of that era, like perhaps Psychotic Reaction by
the Count Five and many others. Yeah, So just to

(02:05:11):
be clear, because I don't want to leave this hanging.
When you were with the Boys Club, did they make
a record? It was not the first time you heard
yourself on the radio? Yeah? Absolutely, That's why I went there.
Um at one of the places we played, and I
know it was an outdoor race track, and that's all
I can remember about it. But this young man named

(02:05:35):
James Powell came up and it was had seen us play,
and he said, I would like you to get you
guys to help me make a record. And you know,
he was twenty five or so, we were about fourteen, okay, Uh, needless, well,
James was a black fella. Um. His music was decidedly

(02:05:57):
doo wop, but he was really good at it. I
mean he you know, if I was to sing a
song like that, it would have sounded like a fourteen
year old middle class white boy, and James really sounded
exactly like that was his wheelhouse, right, And he had
a few songs, if I remember correctly, almost every song

(02:06:18):
he had was a girl's name, and so his the
we recorded two songs to be uh that first record,
and he, by the way, he already had a relationship
with a record company which was I believe it was
called Christie Records, And we eventually met the owner of

(02:06:40):
a man named Joe jarros Um, and we rehearsed with
James and eventually went over to Coast Recorders in San
Francisco and recorded these two songs, Beverly Angel and the
other side was Martha mke Darling Beverly Angel. It was
an absolute classic four chord slow song in the Vein

(02:07:05):
of Earth angel or in the Still of the Night. Uh.
Not quite as good as those in for sonic reasons
or others, but pretty dangn close. And I literally got
to hear that on the R and B station by
the way, uh one time. And I believe Stu Cook

(02:07:27):
may have he may have actually heard it at school
one time because he was in I think the story
goes he was, you know, the electronics class, and he
supposed to build a radio, and he built a radio,
and as it came together, he tuned in that station
and they were playing Beverly Angel. If that was true,

(02:07:47):
I can't imagine the mental Hey that's me. Um. So
that was the first time I heard myself, although I
you know, I was not the singer. I was in
the back. Well, you give yourselves a year, So continue
with that narrative. You were telling the story, all right,
So this is nineteen seven. We've resolved to do everything

(02:08:10):
we can to make it. And at some point, you know,
we we say, well, we're all gonna write songs, and
we're all gonna play and all that, and we actually
released a song that I had already written and that
had been released with I Believe, with myself and my
brother Tom credited as the writer. The song was called

(02:08:32):
porter Bill. I had written this song basically marching around
in the army in the hot sun. It was um
It was sort of a pivotal moment in my life
where you're doing all this marching. You can only imagine.
It's really hot on the asphalt. It's what they call
a parade ground. It was a mile square, so you

(02:08:53):
could march a long way in one distance in the
august heat, and I would tune into this personal radio station.
I started doing this song that was kind of kind
of my life and kind of not and turning it
into this story that was going to be a song.
I got out of the army or off active duty

(02:09:15):
and finished that song. I had learned how to do
something I hadn't done before anyway. That song got released
by the Golliwogs and called Porterville. But when we changed
our name to Credence pre Credence clear Water Revival, UH
Fantasy re released the song by Credence Clearwater Revival, and

(02:09:40):
now the the credit at where the songwriter is was
t spice bush swallowtail and what that was meant to be? Yeah,
that's something Doug came up with. We were all smoking
pot at the time and I guess it sounds like
it doesn't it. Um. Anyway, it was a It was
a word or phrase that was supposed to represent all

(02:10:03):
four of us writing the song. Well, obviously since I
wrote the song in the first place, you can see that,
I uh, can I say, generously shared my credit with
my bandmates, which is something that happened quite a bit
um during that period of time and even later. It's, Uh,

(02:10:25):
all I'm gonna say about is if you know about me,
you know that that you know that I did that
a lot and it's kind of surprising actually, But anyway,
that was um, that was how our songwriting. I'm can
I say it became collected for a while. But after

(02:10:46):
the first album was beginning to take shape and I
had written I think all the songs that were not
cover songs, I finally went to the band that they said,
I don't like this arrangement. It was now six seven
months later, eight months later, and I had written all

(02:11:08):
the songs and it had kind of turned out that
the other guys weren't coming up with ideas. I think literally,
I would show up at our everyday practice and you know,
rehearsal and go, well, does anybody have anything? And everybody
would kind of look at the ground, you know, look
at their shoe tops and say and so I would

(02:11:30):
show them what I had. And this happened day after
day for months, and we and the course of which
we started to learn musical ideas, you know, RiPPs, things
like that, drum beats, things that I had created, baselines,
and eventually several songs the best of the best I
could come up with were those ones that appear on

(02:11:51):
that album. And I didn't want to share the credit.
So what I said would look, I'll share the money,
but I think I should get credit for something I've written. Um,
at least I did that, and it's true. Uh, the
songwriting was split four ways at that time for the
next two years on the next four albums, I believe,

(02:12:16):
all of which were uh, you know, multi platinum around
the world. I think I finally said, okay, you're all
millionaires several times old is many years. Hence I said,
I think I don't have to share the money. Anymore. Um,
I realized that that sounds like backsliding. But it wasn't

(02:12:41):
too many days after that that the band broke up,
So I think it was almost with self defense. You
might say, Uh, you know, we're talking nineteen seventy one
or so. Anyhow, Okay, to go back to your question,
which was, let me ask a different question. When you

(02:13:03):
wrote proud Mary, did you know it was a smash? Uh?
What a question? And I was the only one in
the room, Um, believe it or not. Now we we
skip up to nineteen sixty eight. I've done my active duty.
I've determined that I'm going to try and get released

(02:13:27):
from the military. So I I started volunteering. Said, look,
I'll come in during the week and do my work.
I don't even have to show up to the official
meeting in my uniform and you know, make you guys
angry at me. But they wouldn't go for that, so
I began trying to figure out ways to actually get released. Okay,
so April even May of sixty eight, I'm trying to

(02:13:48):
get released from the Army reserves. But I know I'm
gonna have to go to uh summer camp. And I
also know that here's that guy, there's that communist. They're
gonna they're gonna have their way with me if I
have to go through that thing. So it was probably
Midsummer of and I don't know, I can't pin down

(02:14:12):
the month any better than that. But there's this thing
on the steps. There's an envelope sitting there, and it's
got a big government stamp on it. I literally stepped
over it two or three days in a row. I'm
a kid in a little apartment what finally, because it
kept being there, and it's in front of my neighbor's

(02:14:33):
door actually, and I look closer and it says John Fogerty,
Private John Fogerty. I look inside and it's my honorable discharge,
and I go, WHOA, Yes, are you kidding that? After
the journey I had been through. WOA, Yes. I was
so happy. And I literally there's a little patch of

(02:14:56):
grass in front of our apartment building. And I did
a cart We don't ask me how, but I did
a cart wheel. My brain was saying, you're gonna want
to know you did a cart whale, and I did.
I ran in the house and I grabbed my Rickenbacker.
I started playing with these chords I've been playing before,
kind of the vaguely the Beethoven's Fifth Thing, you know,

(02:15:18):
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, you know. And
I started doing him again and suddenly I'm you know,
I'm euphori. Wow. Wow. And I started working on this
song with these chords, and the next thing, you know,
and left a good job in the city because I
just did working boat a man every night and day. Wow,

(02:15:38):
I'm playing these chords, you know, I'm all by myself, right,
and the screen door is I mean, the door is open,
but there's a screen door that I've come in from
outside where that just happened, this bolt of whatever from
the sky. I mean, I was just in this euphoria.
I'm strumming away and suddenly I'm rolling, rolling, rolling, Wow,

(02:16:00):
what are you rolling on the river? Cat? I mean,
it was just all slamming together in my brain. I'm
so excited and happy, you know, And what's this about? What?
What is this thing? Rolling on the I left a
good job and so I grabbed this little thing. And
it's a whole another story, Bob, And we don't have time.
But it was my song book that I had only

(02:16:22):
just started a few months before. I flipped through it,
flipped through it and looking around for some kind of
and the very first thing I ever wrote in that book,
the prior October was the very first injury in the
book is the words proud Mary. And when I wrote
them there, I had no idea what the hell is

(02:16:43):
proud Mary? Who is that? But now I'm I opened
my book and I Proud Mary. Proud Mary. That sounds
like a name of a boat. Oh, this is a
song about a boat rolling on the Oh my goodness.
I mean it really happened, just like I'm living. And
now it was what oblong I'm trying to say, obscure

(02:17:07):
things coming from obscure corners, sort of clinging together in
a way that made sense to me from the structure
that I had loosely set up around myself without realizing it.
And within an hour of picking up that that envelope,

(02:17:29):
I had a song that was called Proud Mary. I
can't say that every single verse had every single word,
but it certainly wasn't finished. I had three verses, I
had a chorus, and I had this yellow piece of
like that legal pad paper, and I used those days
I used this felt tip kind of ink pin and

(02:17:53):
I was sitting there looking at Proud Mary. It said
at the top of these three verses and choruses, and
I bob setting and sitting in my room. I was, wow, Wow,
this is really this is a standard. That was my phrase,
because I was kind of old fashioned, you know, meaning
like Irving Berlin or Jogi car Michael. I said, this

(02:18:14):
is a standard. This is a really, really good song.
And I'm shaking with with such realization that how hected
me do this right? I mean, it was like if
you were had stumbled in the mountains and found the
Holy Grail or whatever. You know, I'm too dumb to

(02:18:35):
do this, but somehow I had stumbled into this and
here it is, and I knew it was great, absolutely,
with every core, you know, every bone in my body.
I just knew it. And there was nobody ever, no
one else knew. There was nobody for me to tell.
And yet my own consciousness was absolutely that this stands

(02:18:58):
up next to I don't know, Blue Skies or star
Dust or you know. I don't know if I dared
to think I want to hold your hand yet, but
I knew this song was for a long time. Well,
I find it interesting. Everybody says, uh, no one knows
what to hit. But when you talk to the masters,

(02:19:22):
they say it exactly like you when you really ring
the bell, when you hit it eleven. You know. So
in any event you start having hits, how do you
write songs thereafter? And how about the internal pressure? Okay?
So I have a spice bush swallowtail because for a
while there was that limited idea that we would all
be writing songs kind of like uh, named bands that

(02:19:46):
do that, and I can't think of one right now now,
not them, um, you know where it's a collaborative kind
of maybe more like Dan Halen or something like that. Um.
But clearly because of Proud Mary and Born on the Bayou,
which was the other side, and that second album that
they were on, um, something had happened. At least it

(02:20:09):
was clear to me. I mean, like you know, it
was clear to everybody. Come on, well, I don't know.
The guys in my band got real started to get
real weird about this, Okay. So then I knew I
wanted to follow this up, and I knew there was
nothing else on that album. The album being the second

(02:20:30):
album being Byou Country had Borne on the Bayou and
Proud Mary, and then a few clicks down was a
track called good Golly, Miss Molly, which was also a
great track, but there were there wasn't anything else that
was like Proud Mary, okay, And that meant I had
to write a new song to try and compete, you know,

(02:20:51):
be at that level. But it would be an orphan
meaning it would be a single. It's not on an album.
That didn't bother me. I didn't, you know, but it
was by itself. So I eventually wrote Bad Moon Rising
and Low Die, and even in my own heart, it
was it was the very best I could do, and

(02:21:12):
I almost felt like it didn't quite measure up to
Proud Mary. I actually told the guys, uh, well, we've
got two B sides, you know, and I guess they
were good enough, but I I mean, I feel differently now.
But it once you've had Proud Mary be taken the
way it was with everyone kind of almost did anybody

(02:21:35):
actually write that or was it just there all the time,
you know, because that's how it felt, because I had unwittingly,
you know, all that stuff we talked about Pete Seeger
and Stephen Foster in America and whatever. All that sort
of air dust is that we kind of just intuitively
understand as our country and who we are and all that. Um.

(02:21:59):
I had somehow blindly tapped into that, and you know, how,
how's that ever gonna happen again? I thought Bad Moon
was good anyway, so that was what I did, and
Bad Moon Rising became a big hit. In fact, it
started to be a hit and was on the charts

(02:22:21):
before pril Mary was off the charts, which was a
wonderful thing. So now he was, Okay, I gotta start,
you know, get busy. And now there was sort of
the attitude that, well, I can see I'm I'm the
guy that's kind of got to do this otherwise it's
not going to get done. And I had always you know,

(02:22:46):
I loved Sun Records, and I loved the sound of
a band like that that would be on Sun Records,
and we hadn't quite officially gone there yet, and I
wanted to do that. You know what, you might if
it was the top artist, it would be an Elvis track,
and if it was one of the other guys at

(02:23:06):
my Perkins or um certainly not Jerry Lee. But although
he had the spirit but the kind of guitar oriented
music that came out of Son Johnny Cash even and
you know, I had this idea about the Green River
that had been carrying around since I was eight years old,
and I managed to collect all that imagery and feeling

(02:23:30):
with the music, and I knew what it should sound like,
and I knew really nobody else was touching that. I mean,
it was my favorite stuff. If somebody would make that record,
I'd buy it, you know. And that's what I kind
of set out to do to make that music. That
song that is my very very favorite thing of all Um.

(02:23:53):
It's sort of that acoustic sounding rock and roll that
came out of Son, and I thought I did it
Um And so that was the next thing, and we
were there's one of the sad stories in our band
that it's where one of the first cracks showed up.
We were in rehearsal at Dougs Place and we were

(02:24:18):
learning the new song Green River, and probably commotion to
get it ready, you know, to be this was going
to be the third album, but we weren't anywhere near
recording the album, but we were getting ready to record
the single. Green River especially was what we were working on,

(02:24:38):
we're done, we get out to the curve. I remember
I had my Gibson guitar sitting in that the way
that certain guitar case looked, and I was going to pack.
You know, We're all saying goodbye, and Tom says to me,
you're really getting quite a repertoire. But he doesn't say
it in a loving, admirab like admiring way. I could

(02:25:01):
just tell, because we're all human beings were sensitive to
tone of voice. And you know, even though the words
were like an acknowledgement or even a U a pep talk,
it was it was just he hissed it through his teeth,
you know, And I mean it scared me. It was
really unsettling to me because of all the journeys since

(02:25:24):
I had been home from active duty, every single day
had been positive, every single step along this path, even
nights when we played someplace in some bar and there
were only three people in the audience, you know, it
was always a positive motion of us um. I mean,

(02:25:46):
if you're together and you hang together, you can overcome anything.
That's just the way Blood Brothers operate. And this was
the first moment of like what they call trouble in paradise,
you know, it's like and I just I didn't. I
didn't even know what to make of it. I didn't understand,
as they say, where it was coming from. What you know.

(02:26:09):
It was the first also the first time I thought, yeah,
I've got a couple of three songs now that are
pretty good, you know. But all I could see was
to put my head down and get that shovel digging
in the ground. The delay, the telegraphed, the unhappiness emotion,
but I really didn't understand it at all. Okay, we're

(02:26:30):
gonna have to do a whole another thing with all
the songs and all the credence. But let's jump forward
at this late date. Fortunate son and who will Stop
the Rain? Relevant of your intention when writing them, have
become part of the canon. Stephen Foster, as you mentioned earlier,
protest songs, anti war songs. Leave it at that, even

(02:26:52):
though sometimes the right has tried to glam onto those songs.
So as the son of left wingers, as a liberal
in your error, what do you think about what's going
on in the United States now? And could music play
a part like it did in the sixties and change
people's thoughts? You had to go and ask this one. Uh.

(02:27:16):
I mean, you know, there's only one way to answer,
and so I'm going to answer that way. But what
I mean is not holding back anything, not trying to
filter anything. Sometimes people think I may be a little abrasive.
Um and is I'm saddened. This all makes me very sad.

(02:27:40):
Um the political, emotional, philosophical place. I'm not talking about
the music on their radio. I'm talking about the genuine,
the genuine, the general demeanor of our cultural topography. And

(02:28:02):
I'm sorry that he's two dollar words there. It makes
me really sad because boy, in the sixties, you know,
when people would say you know everybody, and they meant everybody.
We should be better people as a country. We are
better than this. We should welcome all of our people.

(02:28:25):
We should welcome all of our citizens. We should be
willing to help the lowest in our society economically pull
themselves up because they can't perhaps do it themselves. We
should lend a hand so that we all get to
ride at a higher level. I mean that to me

(02:28:47):
was the dominating feeling, certainly of young people in the sixties,
you know, And a lot of words were used like peace, love, happiness. Um,
they were. They were genuinely meant by most people then
and felt by most people then, and certainly by young people. Um,

(02:29:10):
I know that. You know, back in the day, there
would be somebody like a Less Dramatics who happened to
be from the South, or Governor Wallace, who, um, what's
the word obviously stood for a certain point of view,
but acknowledged it publicly. You know. Um, there were some

(02:29:31):
other guys who were even worse. These were basically, in
one form or another, white supremacsts. But you didn't say
that out loud, and you certainly were not proud to
say something like that. You should be in shame on you.
You should be embarrassed to think that way. That's how
I personally feel. And we're America. We're not hey one

(02:29:53):
corner of America. Now we are America. You know when
all those people started fleeing in Europe for hopefully a
better place, um, that's what they had in mind. They
wanted to set up a utopia. And slowly but surely
we've arrived. You know, some of these things you can legislate,

(02:30:14):
and a lot of these things you can't. It's it's
really hard to make a document that for tells every
way human beings will try to circumvent other human beings. Um,
you you just have to have a premise that of
tolerance of you know, yes, you deserve to be here

(02:30:36):
just as much as I deserve to be here. And
we're gonna start with that premise. So go ahead, tell
me you're bad stuff, and I'll tell you my bed stuff.
You know, let's see if we can work this out. Um,
that's how it was in the sixties. It was volatile
and clanging and loud, and people were yelling. But aside

(02:30:58):
from a few of the crime and ofstden I'm talking
about people who were politically I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna
shut up and just keep it. People who look like
they were just politicians, but actually behind the scenes they
were much more evil than that, um, and had control

(02:31:19):
of certain arms of our government. Uh, most of us
really wanted to find that utopia. When I hear a
president of the United States nowadays utter a phrase that
could have he could have just said it after the
Buffalo shooting. Someone like that guy could have said, you know,

(02:31:40):
I think there's very good people on both sides. How
the hell do you say that. I mean, does that
sound ludicrous to you or what? That's that's how I
would I'm so sad that we now have politicians even
a week later now expousing this trap about replacement. I

(02:32:03):
can't let one of those people in my country because
he's gonna take my place. That's not what we're doing here.
We're inviting everybody. Yeah. I realized there's got to be
some kind of quota system, but nobody's like walking around
the back of the auditorium and eliminating you. Right, you're here,
they're here. Let's work it out. Um, yes, I'm I'm

(02:32:28):
I'm uh like like that. That's a legitimate way of thinking.
I no wonder other people get mad. Uh. We gotta
do better, We gotta we gotta start to agree that
you you don't have the right to go wipe out
a whole bunch of people, and then some politician is
going to give you a you know, an elbow and

(02:32:50):
wink a nudge and say it's okay, we understand that one.
That's wrong. Okay. We believe that music could change the
world in the six these is there a role for
music and changing people's thoughts and moving the country to
a place where you would be more uh, you would
be happier about the state. So you're asking about You're

(02:33:13):
asking me about something that hasn't occurred now. But all
I can the answer is, yes, is there? Yes, I
absolutely believe music, the arts, certainly, and music being perhaps

(02:33:33):
the most accessible form of art um does have the
potential to change hearts and minds everywhere. Can I see
that happening in this America in two thousand twenty two? Yes, Um,
I think you know even my own experience and emotion

(02:33:58):
that I did not realize I possessed. And it's happened
to me many times, you know, sort of a little
bit off center here. But one of those songs to
me was a song called Sending the Clowns, which I've
been both the clown and the guy on the ground,

(02:34:19):
you know, And at some point hearing that song and
hearing how it is so full of humanity, you know,
I'm sure when I was twenty one, my my heart
didn't even know how to experience that. I'm sure you
understand what I'm saying. And I realized I was I

(02:34:40):
was not that person at twenty. Um I am now,
you know, And I hope that my words can convey it,
at least to my family certainly how I feel about them. Um,
there's been many of these kind of things where I see,
gosh you oh. Um. I'm trying to be specific, and

(02:35:05):
I don't have a great there's a car. There's a
couple of moments. I remember hearing Jesse jacksonation and we were,
you know, some of us at least were Remember Reagan
at some point said apartheid is good. So at least

(02:35:26):
it's on the record. I can use that one. I didn't,
of course believe that, And there was at some point
in his presidency Jesse Jackson said it is not Ronald
Reagan's fault that he's president. And I actually listened to
those words and and thought about those. Of course, he
didn't elect himself. Other people made him president. That's the

(02:35:50):
upsetting thing here. Um. Look, I'm not trying to sit
here and say Ronald Reagan was a bad man. He
just didn't happen to be in you know, my political
real house. But he was the guy that said apartheid
is good. Go ask Nelson Mandela. Um, So I learned
something from that phrase. I also in my lifetime, through

(02:36:12):
my life, have I have listened to Martin Luther King Jr.
Say those words over and over about I have seen
the other side of the mountain. I may not get
there with you. And holy smokes, if that doesn't make
if you were alive when he was alive, and you

(02:36:34):
think about that as I'm almost doing right now, that
makes you cry and you realize there are heroes in
our world. Um, some you know, some of the parents
of these people in this last tragedy in Buffalo. Um,
it's sorrd for me, as a white person to even

(02:36:59):
express it all, you know, any anywhere near the way
a person from that community would say it. But when
you hear the son of a person have to deal
with the death of their mom, and you hear them
just trying to keep their memory alive right in the

(02:37:25):
heat of the moment, when you know, I can only
imagine the anger and the frustration and all that. You know, Um,
we got to start talking to each other because just
we've when you've got eighteen year old boys running around
it are here. As I said earlier, I don't know
who I was at twenty, but I'm not who I am.

(02:37:47):
It wasn't who I am now I know an eighteen
year old doesn't even understand what the f he's doing,
and he's here seeing and hearing all this dribble and
being in doctor aided, you know, because older people who
should know better are telling him it's okay with a
wink and a and uh, a real tickle from an elbow.

(02:38:10):
I mean, that's horrible. Uh. It wouldn't make any difference
if that kid had been fifty six. No, but it's
just worse because because young people can be so misguided,
so idealistic, you know, is it only takes a couple
of twick tweaks of the radio station too to make

(02:38:32):
it seem like it's some kind of cause, like their
rebel without a cause, you know, and turned into turned
into that. I'm sorry, I'm I'm trying to I'm babbling
a little bit, But yes, I am very unsettled about
what I see on the landscape of America now, because

(02:38:55):
we have senators and congress people and sometimes even President
is talking in ways that's just outrageous as far as
lack of humanity for our fellow man, well articulated. You know,
you talk about talking to each other. I've loved listening
to you, you know, there's so much we didn't cover.

(02:39:16):
I didn't want to, you know, go too deep in
the stuff that's been covered by so many other people before.
But I just want to add one note. You know,
there was this rock artist coalition for a minute there
in the beginning of this century, and there was a
concert at the Forum which you participated in, and you
just blew me away. I wrote it, so it's not

(02:39:36):
like I'm lying. You can look it up. Whatever. People
who haven't seen you have no idea. It's beyond the songs.
You have one of the best bands. You have Kenny
Aaron Off on drums, and there's a power just in
the sound. Never mind, you still have your voice and delivery,
and therefore you're on the road. People should go see.
I can say that with all my sincerity. But John,

(02:40:00):
I want to thank you so much for taking the
time to talk to me in my audience today. But well,
thank you for those kind words and some of which
I know you have also written for which I'm so appreciative.
Thank you, sir um. But I do want to say,
you know, there was a movie called The Wizard of
Oz and at one point one of the characters started

(02:40:24):
talking about his importance and some day don't build a
statue for me. And then the ladies say, I think
it's anti m but it said, I said, well, don't
start posing for it now, and seconds later the other
fellow ranges it's a twist stop, it's a twist stop. Um,
thank you for all of that. I I just I

(02:40:46):
try to I take the music very seriously. I tried
to present what I can, you know, in the best
way possible. I mean, um, I try not to be
self important about it, though I'm sort of the conduit
lucky enough to get to do this, and you know,
I'm in all humility. I want people to understand it

(02:41:09):
like if I was if I was at Babe Ruth,
I would probably look in the mirror and go, yeah,
you're doing pretty good today. You know. I'm not Babe Ruth,
but I'm I can only imagine what that must have
been like to be that guy. You know. Um, there's that.
There's that I can say, personality. Duty to yourself to

(02:41:31):
try and then you owe it to everyone, especially yourself too,
to give that a hundred percent effort to make sure
that you always operate that way. Listen. I grew up
in the era when baseball stars were heroes. I was
even there when Roger Merris in his sixty one and
Babe Ruth is a legend. Yeah, I was there at

(02:41:55):
Yankee Stadium. I can tell you the whole story where
I was sitting while did the ball goes? Really some
them October one. But music superseded baseball for so many
of us. And I'm not lying whatsoever. I would say
most boomers would say, you're bigger than Babe Ruth. Babe
Ruth it is seven fourteen or fifteen home runs and

(02:42:18):
he had a great career. I don't wanna take anything,
but your songs have lived on for fifty years and
will continue to live and affect people in a three
dimensional way that an athlete cannot reach. A human being. Well,
I hope to always kind of live up to that,
you know what you're saying. I I do try to
write songs now, and of course there's always that specter

(02:42:41):
of you know, probad Mary just sitting there kind of
laughing at me. And in some ways that's almost another person,
you know. I think that's a device. By the way
some of us use two what's the word release yourself
from that guy, so that I can look at him
and go, hey, he was pretty was your He was

(02:43:02):
pretty good? You know, didn't you used to be John Fogerty.
Oh yeah. The older I get, the better I was.
It's all of that stuff because you you tried. You know,
at the time, I know my intensity and and even now, um,
I don't. I don't think I've hit that mark in

(02:43:22):
the last five years, although I don't know. Maybe we've
been in the Promised Lands. Pretty good song. Um you
know what I'm saying, though, it's you. You have to
be able to have a little humor about it and
laugh at yourself trying to do that because others and
by that shadow that won't let me have a good time,

(02:43:44):
because I think that's the undoing of At some point
the things deteriorate and you can't hit that home run.
But um are you know, artists and writers and that
sort of thing. We can keep going, but there is
that if you keep struggling and don't have give yourself
some kind of release from it, some humor. You know. Um,

(02:44:07):
I think you I don't know if it's arrogant or
just futile, and you to the outside world, you won't
look very nice, you know, what I'm saying. I know
exactly what you're saying. You know, you have to survive.
There can't be the person that people expect you to be.
For every day. People go through changes, they become somebody different,
they learn things, they're a different person. I mean, it's

(02:44:29):
like Bob Dylan says when they talk about the songs
of the at Least six, he says, I can't do
that anymore. He says, you know, I have to do
something different. You kind of covered it, so there you go. Right, Okay,
we can talk for days. We want to talk more
about credence and the songs, etcetera. But once again, thanks
for taking the time. All right, Bob, thank you enjoying
this very nut. You bet me too. Until next time.

(02:44:51):
This is Bob left six