Creedence Clearwater Revival
How inflated egos, brotherly hate, bitter feuds, financial ruin and tragic death brought down one of the most successful bands of their era.
Hugely successful by the late 60s, what Creedence Clearwater Revival surely saw ahead was more success on an even grander scale. What none of them could have seen coming up around the bend instead was inflated egos, brotherly hate, bitter feuds, financial ruin and tragic death.
It’s half-past midnight when Creedence Clearwater Revival, by now huge in the US, take the stage at what will become to be regarded as the most significant festival event of the 20th century, 1969’s Woodstock. They kick off an 11-song set with Born On The Bayou, from Bayou Country, one of three albums they release that year, the others being
Green River and Willy And The Poor Boys.
Evidently the Avalon ballroom floor manager hired for Woodstock isn’t impressed; he pulls the plug on their encore, Suzie Q, telling them: “You guys aren’t going anywhere anyway.” As they troop off, the next act up, Janis Joplin, applauds from the wings and swigs from her customary bottle of Southern Comfort she’s clutching.
John Fogerty, Creedence’s leader, principal songwriter and producer, has mixed feelings about the band’s performance at Woodstock and refuses to let it anywhere near the official Woodstock triple album and film of 1970; a disastrously ill-informed decision that infuriates his fellow band members: elder brother Tom, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford. Some of their music from that show will be released later – but not until the expanded reissue of Woodstock in 1994.
Speaking to Classic Rock today, Clifford describes Woodstock as “the high point in our career, with a kinetic energy I never felt before or since. Stu said: ‘It wasn’t about the bands anyway, it was about the people – five hundred thousand of ’em.’ We came on after the Grateful Dead, who insisted on playing a forty-five-minute version of Turn On Your Love Light. [The Dead also managed to blow the stage amps.] I was tearing my hair out. There were technical problems and water issues. It was pitch black. John yelled: ‘Is there anybody out there?’
And a lone voice in the distance shouted back: ‘We’re with you.’ Cook thought it was ‘a classic performance. I’m amazed people don’t even know we were a headliner.’”
Cook was right. The Creedence performance at Woodstock, captured on bootleg, is brilliant. Everything about it, from Fogerty’s frenzied harmonica playing on Keep On Chooglin’ to Clifford’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt, is bang on trend.
John Fogerty’s stubborn nature was becoming the norm. A “control freak”, Clifford says, he kept the others at arm’s length creatively, then humiliated them by using sub-standard versions of songs on their final album, Mardi Gras, as if to prove his point.
“The best times were early on, when we overcame every obstacle except success.” Doug Clifford
With Craft Recordings re-releasing the Creedence Clearwater Revival albums in a 50th Anniversary set at the end of November, as well as reissues of Clifford’s solo LP Doug Cosmo Clifford and Tom Fogerty’s second solo album Excalibur (both first released in 1972), this should be a time of celebration. Is it?
“The best times were early on, when we overcame every obstacle except success,” Clifford says today, at his home in Sierra Nevada. “We saw the hippie bands from San Francisco play whacked out and think themselves brilliant, when they were terrible. We made a pact that if the four of us couldn’t get off on the music alone, then why bother? We had discipline. The Roman candle of rock can kill most groups. But we played straight, even in rehearsal.”
At Woodstock, the distinctly non-hippie Creedence Clearwater Revival were called, patronisingly, “a Boy Scout singles act”. Their work ethic, however, was all about integrity; downhome and rootsy swamp rock played by San Francisco Bay Area Californians in plaid shirts from the working-class district of El Cerrito. They were polar opposites of what became the cocaine and groupie culture of the era. Unsurprisingly, Keith Richards dissed them in 1979: “When I first heard them I was really knocked out, but I became bored with them very quickly. After a few times it started to annoy me. They’re so basic and simple that maybe it’s a little too much.”
There was nothing simple about Creedence’s business affairs. Saul Zaentz, who owned their record label, Fantasy, and produced their debut album, had been like a father figure to John Fogerty, who’d worked at the company’s warehouse. He bankrolled the band after purchasing Fantasy, and encouraged a name change from The Golliwogs to Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Zaentz took over Fantasy from Max and Sol Weiss, who were rumoured to pay their jazz roster in heroin and handshakes. He cleaned up its image, but didn’t offer CCR a spectacular upgrade on the five per cent the Weiss’s offered in 1964 when all of the band except Tom Fogerty were technically minors (i.e. under 21) and signed the paper wafted under their noses without independent legal advice. In 1967 it increased to 10 per cent, although Fantasy still retained all CCR’s publishing.
“We were the only artists that mattered on the label,” John Fogerty told The Guardian in 2000. “We were selling almost 99.9% of the
company’s records. We had signed a contract thinking we were all in it equally. I thought we would share to a great degree in the company’s success. But then it didn’t happen.”
By 1970 the big royalties were flooding in, but John still refused to hire a lawyer and insisted on doing business with the bosses on his own. “He wanted to be the victim.” Clifford claims. “We were finally offered ten per cent of the entire company. No one ever had a deal like that, but John was such a control freak he thought he’d be locked out of negotiations.”
“But whatever we said didn’t matter,” says Clifford. “They [Fantasy] ran rings round John. Just because you’re a talented musician doesn’t make you a good businessman. That was the biggest mistake John made. He was an idiot. He thought he was the Steve McQueen character in The Great Escape [Virgil Hilts], so he went to meetings with a baseball and a glove and played catch against the wall with his back to the executives.”
Once John had completely fallen out with the other band members, including his brother, Cook and Clifford negotiated an independent deal based on compilations, of which there would be many. CCR’s biggest-ever-selling album is 1976’s Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits (billed, tellingly, as ‘Creedence Clearwater Revival Featuring John Fogerty’), which sold more than 10 million copies in the US.
“John fought that too!” Clifford says. “‘I wrote the music. I made those songs. Your contribution is nothing to mine.’ It’s true he took a lot of pressure, but we took a lot off him. We were the best supporting cast he ever had; we enabled him to be that songwriter. In Creedence we had seventeen hit songs, to be exact, and five consecutive top-five albums between 1968 and 1972. The one named after me, Cosmo’s Factory, was the biggest of the lot. In over forty years as a solo artist he’s had two top-ten singles. So, we didn’t hold him back; we helped him make that great work and we never got any credit. We were always seen as the guys who got in John’s way.”
Laurie Clifford, Doug’s wife of 50 years, calls it “the saddest story in rock’n’roll”. Cook adds: “And the most stupid feud in rock history.”
But if the financial squabbles were sordid, they were nothing compared to the fallout between John and his brother Tom, who bailed out in 1971 after the Pendulum album, saying: “I’ve never known such a bunch of egotistical maniacs. It’s a shame that they all changed so fast, but there it is. John and I got on really well together; well you know how long the group was together before we made it. It was a really democratic group to begin with, but by the time I left it was a dictatorship.”
Tom was a jock and a family man. He’d been a truck driver and a steel mill worker. He was also their original manager, who saw Creedence become “John’s show”, Tom told Disc & Music Echo in 1972. “I had to keep swallowing my ego, and it kept coming back. But I didn’t leave, and kept putting it off because I’d invested so much time into that group – years of my life. And when we’d gone professional I’d put all my savings into the band – fifteen hundred dollars. It had taken me years and years to save that. And although we were earning far more than that, it was just the principle of it.”
Yet a year before Tom quit CCR, he told Hit Parader magazine: “Our relationship with Fantasy Records is a beautiful thing. We were nowhere, and Saul Zaentz is on our side.” To which John added: “He believes in honest music too.” They surely never saw eye to eye again.
Tom made a series of solo albums, including Excalibur, but John appeared on only one of his brother’s tracks, Joyful Resurrection, on the Zephyr National LP. Even then, he refused even to be in the same studio as the other three when he laid down a simple rhythm guitar. He also insisted on being billed as J. C. Fogerty, and hid his face behind a baseball cap on the album’s back cover.
In 1980 the four men reunited to play some old hits at Tom’s wedding, and also got the gang together for a high-school reunion. Further clamour for a Creedence re-formation was always quashed, especially since John’s third solo album, Centerfield, contained the songs Zanz Kant Danz (later changed to Vanz Kant Danz) and Mr. Greed, thinly veiled attacks on the Fantasy owner. Zaentz’s response was to sue Fogerty for self-plagiarism. His claim – that new song The Old Man Down The Road was a replica of CCR’s Run Through The Jungle – was unsuccessful, but John still didn’t own publishing rights to a single song from the old days.
In the 80s, Tom started suffering intense back pain. During an operation, he was given a blood injection. Doug Clifford takes up the story: “They gave him twenty amps of blood, which contained the Aids virus.
“While Tom was in and out of hospital, we’d become great friends again. I’d visit him and do twelve-hour shifts for a week at a time. He should have been in intensive care, but because of the
Aids the insurance didn’t cover the fees. It was disgraceful and unbearable to see him deteriorate, to see how fast he diminished as a person. He’d
“[The rest of the band] were always seen as the guys who got in John’s way.” Doug Clifford
been a giant of a man, six foot two and two hundred and fifty pounds, and he went to less than a hundred and thirty. We just sat and talked about how brutal the disease was. He needed a full-time nurse because his wife had two little kids and was at her wits’ end. I called Tom my brother, he was like family to me. He was very brave. Nobody knew what this thing was. I was with him once, both asleep, and I woke up thirsty and took a drink from his table then realised it was his food.
‘Oh God, what have I done? Am I going to get this terrible disease?’ That had a huge impact on me to this day.”
Once, Tom had been allowed home and asked the others to come and play acoustic guitars like the old days, to leave behind the animosity. Allegedly John refused; he arrived only when Tom could no longer hold a guitar. Those who saw this say that Tom had tears streaming down his face. “John promised he’d come and play and he didn’t, and now I can’t.”
If this seemed beyond callous (it caused intense fury in the ranks), John’s excuse was that he’d been to see Tom in hospital and heard his brother whisper: “Saul Zaentz is my best friend. I can count on him”, having previously received “nasty letters that said things like ‘Saul and I will win’”.
Saul Zaentz did not attend Tom’s funeral. So much for being Tom’s “best friend”.
After years of simmering hatred against Fantasy Records, this was all too much for John. “I felt like a little prisoner in their dungeon, their little mouse in a cage that they played with,” he told the The Guardian. “To take somebody that was at their height, like Elvis or The Beatles, and then treat them so badly is really a horrible thing.”
John has said he thought he’d written Tom a conciliatory letter. He thought he might have called him to clear stuff up when their mother died.
In his 2015 book Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music, John wrote: “In the late eighties, Doug was proposing that Creedence re-form even though Tom was very sick. All I could think was, oh, great – Doug and Stu want to drag Tom around the world in a wheelchair…
“I went to see Tom a couple of times in 1990, shortly before he died. He was very thin and fragile-looking. Always wearing sunglasses, even indoors. And still kind of detached, in that way he had been, going all the way back to 1969 or 1970. After I won the plagiarism trial, I ran into Tom. He said, “Congrats on the trial.” Like it was a science project. He had become so aloof, maddeningly detached.”
The lack of resolution was tragic, but John still wouldn’t forget. “I have very confused feelings for my brother, because there was a time when things were happy,” he told The Guardian. “The best I can say in Tom’s case is he was the older brother, and the younger brother had a lot more talent, therefore he was jealous even to a greater degree than the other two in Creedence Clearwater Revival.”
Tom Fogerty died on September 6, 1990, aged 48, from Aids-related tuberculosis, in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in Half Moon
Bay, California.
In 1993 Creedence Clearwater Revival were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame by Bruce Springsteen, who had once called John “the Hank Williams of our generation”. Always keen to see the good in people, the romantic Springsteen got folksy in his speech: “Creedence made music for all the waylaid Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns… and for the world that would never be able to take them up on their most simple and eloquent invitation, which is: ‘If you get lost, come on home to Green River.’”
John Fogerty refused to play with Cook and Clifford at the ceremony. Instead he left them enraged by the podium as he played some CCR classics with Springsteen and The Band’s Robbie Robertson. It was a very public snub that saw Fogerty take the moral high ground.
“I had run into Doug and Stu the day of the ceremony, or perhaps the day before, in the very room where the inductions would be held,” John wrote in Fortunate Son. “I wanted to be very clear about my intentions and their expectations. I told them, ‘Considering what you have done, I will not play with you. You guys went and joined with my worst enemy.’ Stu said: “Well, we did kinda leave you twisting in the wind.” They knew this, but during the ceremony they still pretended to be shocked. As if they were pure as the driven snow. Anyone who has ever been in a band knows how disgusting it is that these guys sold their voting rights to an outsider. They have shamed themselves forever. Nothing will ever change that.” Will the hatchet ever be buried?
“No. It never will,” says Clifford. “Because John won’t bury it. I don’t care any more. It would be nice but it’s not gonna happen. I’m happy playing with Stu in Creedence Clearwater Revisited.”
You can guess who didn’t like that idea.
John, in Fortunate Son: “In 1995, Stu and Doug formed an outfit called Creedence Clearwater Revisited to go out and play my songs on the oldies circuit. You can probably guess how I felt about this… I just hope that people don’t go to see them expecting something good. There is an old truth in the world, I don’t know who said it first, Plato or Socrates: When you have no taste, you can do anything.”
Is Clifford bothered?
“Not at all. I never felt much like a rock star, though we did make thousands of people happy, and that felt pretty cool. I’m a man of nature. I got my nickname Cosmo because of my love of entomology, ant colonies, roaches and butterflies. Sure I live well, so does Stu, but that’s because we got accountants and lawyers and handled our affairs in a businesslike fashion. I never got whacked and threw shit out of hotel windows. I’m a grandfather who goes to the stores and likes barbecue. Actually, when CC Revisited play in South America they treat us like rock stars, but I’m more worried about my safety. The star novelty has worn off. I’m proud of the music.
That’s our legacy.”
“I’ve never known such a bunch of egotistical maniacs.” Tom Fogerty
Doug ‘Cosmo’ Clifford and Tom Fogerty’s Excalibur are out now on Craft Recordings. CCR’s The Complete Studio Albums Deluxe Box Set is out on November 30 via Craft Recordings and is reviewed on page 95.