This year John Fogerty has been busy making peace with his past. After finally wresting the rights to his recorded music following a protracted legal battle, he has rerecorded 20 tracks from the Creedence Clearwater Revival catalogue and released them under his own name.
Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years, listed on some streaming services with “(John’s Version)” a la Taylor Swift, is very much a family affair.
His sons, Taylor and Shane, perform on the record. Shane produces it. His wife, Julie, named it Legacy and serves as executive producer. And, perhaps most importantly, she also supplied the electric guitar that Fogerty uses across the album, his modded ‘68 Fireglo Rickenbacker, nicknamed Acme.
Speaking to the Sodajerker On Songwriting podcast, Fogerty admitted that revisiting some of this material was difficult. Maybe after all these years performing these songs he had played some things differently. “I realised the first pass of Proud Mary, I went in, I played the song, played the solo,” he says. “It was all right, but I just knew it wasn’t killing me, and I just can’t describe what that was.”
He and his wife wanted to make these CCR tracks to sound like the originals, not “Hawaiian folk music or bluegrass”. Having Acme back in the studio helped him find that sound.
This was the guitar that he used back in the day. It had seen a lot of action. The Acme was there at all of the big moments in CCR history, giving that Up Around The Bend riff its squirrelly, wiry energy; it was on The Ed Sullivan Show as Fogerty and co played Fortunate Son.
“That guitar played on Green River, played on Down On The Corner, played on Up Around The Bend,” says Fogerty. Yeah, and he reminds the crowd every night, he played this guitar at Woodstock. “Everybody is excited about that,” he says.
Fogerty was only reunited with the Acme Rickenbacker in 2016, after parting with the guitar some time in 1973 or ’74, and even now he sounds a note of regret that he hadn’t owned it for over 40 years, and explains why he had to let it go.
“Happily, Julie went out and found my old Acme guitar, several years ago. It must be about eight years ago now, something like that,” he says. “I had given it away to a 12-year-old kid, shortly after Creedence broke up. I think at the time, I was kind of heartbroken about my band breaking up, and all of that… hurt and heartbroken and wanting to turn over a new leaf and start a new page.”
Easier said than done. Fogerty’s battle with Fantasy Records over his publishing rights just heating up. He admits he wasn’t thinking straight.
I gave this guitar away. Julie, got it back. It sounds great. And more important, it sounds like that guitar that’s on these records
“Dumb idea, foolish idea, to give a guitar away that has meant so much to you and has been so much a part of your recording, right?” he says. “But I’m just a human swimming in the river that we’re all swimming in, and I was just affected by my feelings, so I gave this guitar away. Julie, got it back. It sounds great. And more important, it sounds like that guitar that’s on these records.”
And it would have cost a pretty penny. We’d guess Fogerty had never received a Christmas present like this when he found this under the tree. “I was immediately struck dumb,” Fogerty told Rolling Stone in 2017. “I turned to my wife and said, ‘Am I about to get overwhelmed here?’”
He was, and he did. Especially once he put it through his amp and played the solo to Green River. Everything was just as it should be.
“The hairs stood up on the back of my neck,” he says. “It was exactly that sound, 100 percent. I dare say I haven’t heard that sound since those days when I had the guitar.”
Julie went through a lot to get that guitar back. Norman Harris of Norman’s Rare Guitars, in Los Angeles, had owned the Acme Rickenbacker, so-called because Fogerty had replaced the Rickenbacker name-plate on the headstock with a blank with “ACME” handwritten in yellow letters, in tribute to the Warner Bros cartoons and on account of the signicant mods he made to it (more on them shortly).
![Creedence Clearwater Revival - Green River [Live At Royal Albert Hall, London, England] 04/14/1970 - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/QFISpbt5AV4/maxresdefault.jpg)
When the Fogertys visited Harris’ store, he offered to cut them a deal. The former CCR frontman couldn’t bring himself to pay that. But as Harris recently revealed to Guitar World, that was a bargain price.
“I decided I was going to sell it,” says Harris. “I was asking a certain price, I think about $90,000, and John came in with his wife and was interested. He was interested in doing something but said, ‘You know what? I gave the guitar away. I feel stupid buying it.’ I said, ‘Well, you can have it for 40 [thousand],’ and he just said, ‘I don’t feel good about buying it and spending all this money.’ So he didn’t buy it from me. I sold it to Gary’s Classic Guitars, and he paid 90.”
Fogerty should have taken the deal. Whatever Gary’s Classic Guitars charged Julie, Harris says it would have been definitely more than $40,000. But by the sounds of things the Acme Rickenbacker has paid for itself.
On the Legacy recordings, it sounds just as good as it did back in the day, largely thanks to Fogerty’s mods. He swapped out the bridge pickup for a Gibson humbucker and installed a Bigsby vibrato. No other Rickenbacker 325s sounded like this.
“I acquired Acme right at the beginning of 1969, so it’s probably a ’68 Rickenbacker, officially,” he tells the Sodajerker pod. “That’s probably when it was made. But one of the first things I did was I put a humbucker pickup in the bridge position, off of a Les Paul guitar, because I’d heard about – and I always say this [in concert] – Jimmy, Jeff and Eric.”
That reference doesn’t always go down so well these days. Fogerty’s music speaks to all generations, and today he is seeing a lot younger faces in the crowd. But he’s talking about Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton – the great trinity of British rock players who plugged Les Pauls into Marshall amps and created one of the defining sounds of rock and roll.
“They all [used] that setup of gear at some point in their careers, and made wonderful music that way,” says Fogerty. “That was why I put the humbucker on my Rickenbacker, and it certainly gave it a unique sound.”
Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years is out now via Concord.
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