John Forgerty releases an album of 20 of his most famous songs, all re-recorded this week, and in a lengthy interview in today’s Guardian, has been talking about his career and the long fight to regain control over those songs.
“The best way I can describe it is I was imprisoned wrongfully and sent away to the penitentiary for many, many years,” he says of his years battling with Fantasy Records, the label that put out the early Creedence Clearwater Revival records, and their then-owner Saul Zaentz.
Fogerty fell out with his brother Tom, who left Creedence in 1971. The band split after their panned 1972 album Mardi Gras and after a couple of solo albums, Fogerty’s own well of inspiration ran dry and he had what sounds like something of a breakdown.
“I never really thought I had a nervous breakdown, but I would say I was not well,” he says. “Not stable, or even-keeled, or normal. It would manifest itself in strange ways: I remember going into a department store to buy some socks, and I was unable to approach the salesperson because it was far too complicated for me. It sounds pathetic…
"I guess I might have seen a shrink, but I was in the middle of the stream swimming and just trying to keep my head above water.”
Zaentz sold his share of Fantasy to the Concord label in 2004 and finally, after much negotiating, Fogerty was able to buy back his back catalogue in 2023. Working on the Legacy album, he claims he had something of a moment when he was listening back to the vocal tracks for Proud Mary, the rock standard he originally wrote about a Mississippi saddle steamer.
“There was what they call an epiphany,” he remembers. “The track sounded really stunning, and the lead vocal paled by comparison. And it finally dawned on me: John, when you were doing this way back when, it was life or death for you. I came from a state of if not poverty, then the lower economic rungs.
"It was very important and necessary to be great, as great as whatever was in me. And at that point I felt as if I was going through a portal, and really trying to be that person again. I continued to work on Proud Mary that way and I ended up in a place I felt very good about.”
He continued: “My wife told me she’d been watching me from the control room, and she said she could see it in my face that I actually was making myself go back, so I continued to work that way with the rest of the songs. I’m just an adventurer, you know, like an explorer coming back to the homeland.”
Fogerty’s new album, Legacy: The Creedeence Clearwater Revival Years is out on Friday 22 August.
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