A full fifty years after Creedence Clearwater Revival's heyday, front man John Fogerty is going through his very own rebirth. He brings his Bad Moon Rising Celebration Tour to Dublin’s 3Arena on 23 May
Turn the dial on any radio and it won’t be long before you chance across a track by one of the most successful acts of rock’s golden age of the 1960s.
Creedence Clearwater Revival are the band behind hit songs like Proud Mary, Bad Moon Rising, Fortunate Son (once covered by U2), Green River, and Have You Ever Seen The Rain (which just clocked up its one billionth stream on Spotify) and they all remain staples of classic rock radio. As well as go to covers for bar bands everywhere.
When the rest of the world was turning psychedelic in the late sixties, Creedence Clearwater Revival went back to basics and played a country, blues and rock hybrid that struck a chord in an America traumatised by the Vietnam War, civil unrest, and political assassination.
In an almost unequalled run in rock history, they had nine top 10 singles and eight gold albums between 1968 and 1972 and let’s not forget that front man John Fogerty’s song Rockin' All Over the World was made famous by Status Quo, who played it at the opening of the 1985 Live Aid concert.
Led by the gentlemanly Fogerty, Creedence were like a souped-up jug band in plaid shirts and blue jeans, who jammed out a combustible swamp rock and deep-fired country boogie. But if they sounded and looked like down home boys, they actually came from the city of Cerrito in California and not the bayou they so evocatively captured with their songs.
Fogerty’s sandpapered holler was fuelled by the spirit of Leadbelly, Howlin’ Wolf, and Jerry Lee Lewis but they also straddled two worlds. They may not have been as subversive as contemporaries like The Doors or as revered as The Band but the night before Creedence headlined the Saturday night at the counterculture free for all of Woodstock in 1969, they appeared on middle American TV favourite The Andy Williams Show.
We went on stage at Woodstock at around half-past midnight and "By the time we got to Woodstock, I felt we were the number one band." pic.twitter.com/OKX12qOypN
— John Fogerty (@John_Fogerty) March 29, 2023
However, where there’s a hit, there’s a writ and like many huge acts of the era, it all ended in 1972 in rancour and protracted legal wrangles that only saw Fogerty win back control of his own songs last January after fifty years of court battles.
Even when he enjoyed his greatest solo success in 1985 with his album Centerfield, it was soured when a former label boss bizarrely sued him for plagiarising himself.
Now a very well preserved 77, Fogerty is still on the road and brings his The Bad Moon Rising Celebration Tour to Dublin’s 3Arena on 23 May. When I call him on Zoom, he’s driving through the desert in Southern California. Beside him at the wheel is Julie, his wife of 30 years.
Alan Corr: Can I start by congratulating you on the recent news that you have finally secured the majority stake in CCR's publishing, which gives you control over your own songs for the first time ever. That must be a good feeling . . .
John Fogerty: "To finally have these songs after all this time is an amazing, joyful feeling. I’ve tried so hard over the years to make this come to pass and it just seemed to be quite a Gordian knot that I could never unravel. I tried and at different points I thought I was getting close to it but failed in the end but with the help of my beautiful wife Julie, she’s been very creative, we figured out a way to get this done so I’m very happy."
Not surprisingly you’ve always had a jaundiced view of the music industry but by finally securing ownership of your songs, you’re flying against the current trend of artists as diverse as Bob Dylan and Justin Bieber who have sold their publishing rights . . .
"I think it makes sense to the other people who have done it. When it first started happening, I couldn’t understand it because all I ever wanted to do was own my songs and I was being denied that, of course. All I thought about was getting the rights to my own songs and never thinking about selling but I think Bob Dylan said it best.
"They asked him why he sold his wonderful catalogue, and he said, `well, I don’t want my children fighting over this when I’m gone', he wanted to make it simple for them and sell the songs while he’s still alive and therefore there will just be an estate. It won’t be the children arguing, `I want Blowing in The Wind!,’ `I Want Tambourine Man!’"
You’re back on the road with The Bad Moon Rising Celebration Tour and you’re coming to Dublin on 23 May. Your two sons, Shane and Tyler, will be opening the show with their band Hearty Har and then they play in your band. That must be a proud dad moment . . .
"Their band is wonderful. They do things differently than me and that’s the way it should be. They don’t sound like a clone of me at all. I can hear the roots of my era, not just me, but there are a lot of other elements to their music as well and it’s great to see them be passionate about the music they’re making."
Julie will be with you and the boys in Dublin. She really has been your rock over the past three decades, hasn’t she?
"She’s my rock, there’s no other way to say it. She surprises me every day with her ability and her insights into things and her energy and her willingness to roll up her sleeves and do the work and sometimes very hard work and sometimes frustrating work to try and get the things done. It’s great to have a partner that really cares about you and tries to help you. We’re a good team."
Your show in Dublin this May will only be your third ever Irish gig. You played here first in 2000 supporting Tina Turner at the RDS and you were back in 2018. I believe a recent DNA test has established you as 44% Irish . . .
"My wife is the one who informed me of it and, of course, I said I knew that! Hahaha. 2000 was the first time I’d performed in Ireland and the first time I’d ever been to Ireland. I should have come much sooner but it just didn’t happen."
Your 1969 song Fortunate Son is one of the most well-known anti-war songs of the era so how angry and amazed were you when Donald Trump, who famously had his military service deferred, used it in his 2020 for re-election campaign?
"Yeah . . . haha. It frustrated me, bewildered me, and finally make me pissed off. A normal person would ask the question, `well, didn’t he listen to what the song is about?' but he’s so . . . strange that I daresay he loved the fact that I didn’t want me to use it and many other people didn’t want him to use it and he didn’t care at all what the song was about or not about. Trump is only interested in causing controversy and chaos out in the world. He thrives on that, that’s his energy and he doesn’t do it in a conscious way that you and I might. He’s just happy that there’s a forest fire raging around him. That’s what he loves."
You look amazing for a man of 77. You saw a lot of your sixties and seventies contemporaries not even make it out of their twenties. You had a strict no drugs policy in CCR. As you wrote in your biography, Fortunate Son, "Not in my band. You dare not be stoned playing music around me.... When you’re working, you’re supposed to be working."
"If you’re asking if I imbibed in the usual pitfalls and substances of the Sixties, I think my most honest answer would be I smoked a little bit of pot at the time, I think most young people did, but everything else to me was scary. It was a common thing when I was a young man in a band back in those days. On stage and even out and about, if you were walking on the street in Berkeley or San Francisco and especially backstage, there would be people who’d come wandering through who were my age and looked kinda like us they’d hold out their hand and say `anybody want some of these?’
"Strange descriptions like, `I’ve got some purple dinosaurs!' and weird names. All I knew was that people my age were jumping out of windows because they thought they could fly. That scared me. I did not like the idea of not knowing who I was or what I took so I certainly stayed away from that world, I just stayed away. I didn’t have a big soap box I was on. For self-preservation, I just thought that the fact that nobody knew what it was, I just wasn’t going to take it. looking back now, I still feel the same way. I try to pass that on to anyone who will listen to me speak. We have again entered another phase in the modern world where there are people are taking things and they don’t know what’s in 'em and they’re dying and it’s a very sad situation."
John Fogerty brings The Bad Moon Rising Celebration Tour to Dublin’s 3Arena on 23 May.
