The story of Creedence Clearwater Revival

Three kids from El Cerrito

The story starts in 1959 at Portola Junior High School in El Cerrito, a quiet town in the hills between Berkeley and Richmond, just across the bay from San Francisco. Three fourteen year olds became friends over rock and roll records. John Fogerty played guitar, Doug Clifford had a drum kit, and Stu Cook, a lawyer's son, started out on piano before switching to bass. They called themselves the Blue Velvets and played mostly instrumentals in the style of the Ventures and Duane Eddy, with John singing the odd jukebox favorite. They discovered Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins and Elvis together, and learned the basics of music theory together too. That shared apprenticeship, years before anyone had heard of them, is a big part of why they would later lock together so tightly on record.[1] [2] [3]

John was the third of five boys born to Galen and Lucile Fogerty. His father was a Linotype operator at the Berkeley Gazette and his mother taught second grade. In his memoir John wrote that both parents drank, and that they divorced when he was in the third or fourth grade. His mother raised the boys on a teacher's salary. John slept in the basement, and when heavy rain flooded it he laid down planks of wood to reach his bed. He later said he felt ashamed of the house and did not want people to see it. He found his calling at about ten, hearing Elvis sing My Baby Left Me on a jukebox in a little country store, and deciding on the spot that this was what he wanted to do.[1] [2] [3]

John's older brother Tom was the first Fogerty with a music career. Born in 1941, Tom sang with a high school band called the Playboys, then joined a local group, Spider Webb and the Insects, who signed to Del-Fi Records in 1959 before breaking up. Tom then borrowed his little brother's band as his backing group, and they recorded three singles for Orchestra Records in 1961 and 1962 as Tommy Fogerty and the Blue Velvets. The second one got picked up by a young disc jockey in Oakland named Casey Kasem. Stu Cook later said it was Tom, not John, who first pushed the younger boys to think of music as a real career. Tom joined the band for good around 1963.[1] [2] [3]

In 1964 the band signed to Fantasy Records, a small independent jazz label in San Francisco. They picked it because Fantasy had scored a national hit with Vince Guaraldi's instrumental Cast Your Fate to the Wind. John even worked in the Fantasy warehouse. But the label had its own ideas. Co-owner Max Weiss renamed them the Visions, then the Golliwogs, a gimmicky name meant to sound like the British Invasion bands topping the charts. The band hated it. Fantasy even had them wear fuzzy white wigs on stage. The members admitted they used to mumble into their collars when anyone asked what the group was called.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Golliwogs and the draft

As the Golliwogs, the roles inside the band shifted. Tom moved from lead vocals to rhythm guitar, Stu settled on bass, and John became the singer and main songwriter. Tom put it simply years later. He could sing, he said, but John had a sound. For songwriting credits the brothers used pen names, Tom as Rann Wild and John as Toby Green. Between 1964 and 1967 the Golliwogs released a string of singles on Fantasy and its sister label Scorpio. None of them charted nationally, though they got airplay on little stations in California's Central Valley, in towns like San Jose, Merced and Lodi. The band spent those years playing small towns and military bases around Northern California.[1] [2] [3]

Then the Vietnam War reached El Cerrito. In 1966 John Fogerty and Doug Clifford were both drafted. John went to an Army Reserve recruiter the same day his notice arrived and was signed up as a supply clerk. He believes the recruiter dated the paperwork so it took effect before the draft letter. Doug joined the Coast Guard Reserve, and later said he came within two weeks of being transferred to the Army and sent to Vietnam, with the paper naming his destination already in his hand. John trained at Fort Bragg, Fort Knox and Fort Lee, finishing six months of active duty in July 1967, and lived with the fear that his unit could be activated at any moment.[1] [2] [3]

The Army gave John his first real breakthrough as a writer. He described being marched around endlessly with nothing to do, falling into a kind of trance, and narrating a story to himself. That story became the song Porterville, about a boy carrying the burden of his family name. He said it was the moment he realized he could go anywhere in a song and simply make it up, and he gave up writing love songs about things he knew nothing about. Porterville became the last Golliwogs single and failed to chart, but the same recording was later reissued as the first Creedence single, with the writing credit given to a made up name, T. Spicebush Swallowtail.[1] [2] [3]

John's memoir tells a darker story about how he got out of the Reserve. Facing four or five more years of weekend duty and the ever present risk of Vietnam, he set out to make himself look unfit. By his own account he fasted to look gaunt, smoked marijuana before an army psychological evaluation, committed petty offences and planted a syringe among his belongings. It worked. He was granted an early discharge in 1968. Meanwhile, back home in 1967, he had quit his job at the Pacific Gas and Electric Company and put his savings into the band's shared pot, betting everything on music.[1] [2]

A new name and Suzie Q

In 1967 a Fantasy employee named Saul Zaentz and a group of investors bought the label from the Weiss brothers. Zaentz offered the band a chance to make a full album, and they took the opportunity to ditch the name they hated. In January 1968 they became Creedence Clearwater Revival. Creedence came from Credence Newball, a friend of Tom's, with the spelling changed to suggest a creed. Clearwater came from a television commercial for Olympia beer. Revival stood for the four of them recommitting to the band and to the values of fifties rock and roll. Rejected names included Muddy Rabbit and Gossamer Wump. Stu Cook joked that the result was even weirder than Buffalo Springfield or Jefferson Airplane.[1] [2] [3]

Stu Cook remembers the band sitting in Saul Zaentz's kitchen while Zaentz promised that once they were successful he would tear up their contract and give them a real deal. Cook's verdict decades later was short. The band kept its side of the bargain, he said, and Zaentz did not. That contract, signed when nobody expected them to sell many records, would shape the rest of their lives. For now, though, they were playing everywhere in the Bay Area, from a club called Deno and Carlo's to the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore West, often third on the bill. Their tour manager Jake Rohrer said they regularly blew the headliners off the stage.[1] [2]

Their first album came out in May 1968, and its centrepiece was an eight and a half minute version of Suzie Q, the 1957 rockabilly hit by Louisiana singer Dale Hawkins. John admitted he stretched it out on purpose to get played on KMPX, San Francisco's free form underground station, with feedback and a little telephone box effect on the vocal that he later said was the only part he regretted. The plan worked far beyond the underground. Fantasy split it across two sides of a single, AM radio in San Francisco and on Chicago's WLS picked it up, and it reached number eleven. It would be their only top forty hit that John did not write.[1] [2] [3]

With the discharge came a flood of songs. John told an NPR audience in 2025 that he opened his honorable discharge papers, went straight into the house, picked up his Rickenbacker and started strumming, and the first line out of him was about leaving a good job in the city. That was Proud Mary. His method in those days was almost monastic. He sat up late in his small apartment after his wife and baby were asleep and stared at a bare beige wall, because he could not afford pictures and could not make noise. He called it a blank canvas and later said he was the best he had ever been in his life.[1] [2] [3]

1969, the year of three albums

Bayou Country arrived in January 1969, recorded at RCA's studio in Hollywood, and reached number seven. Its single paired Proud Mary with Born on the Bayou. Proud Mary climbed to number two and stayed stuck there, blocked by Tommy Roe's bubblegum hit Dizzy. It became their most covered song, recorded by more than a hundred artists, most famously Ike and Tina Turner, whose version reached number four in 1971 and won a Grammy. John wrote much of this album in June 1968 with a muted television in the corner of his room showing reactions to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He had never lived in the South, yet the record invented a whole swampy mythology of bayous, hoodoo and riverboats.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band's discipline set them apart from the San Francisco scene. Doug Clifford said that after watching local bands so stoned they could not stay in tune, the four of them made a pact on the floor of the Fillmore to do no drugs or alcohol while working. Other bands called them boy scouts, because they did not get high and were all married with families. John said he did smoke a little pot, but his rules were absolute. Never when recording and never when playing. He also hated the forty five minute guitar solos of acid rock. Music, he said, should get to the point a little more quickly than that.[1] [2] [3]

In April came Bad Moon Rising backed with Lodi. John took the idea from a hurricane scene in the 1941 film The Devil and Daniel Webster, and only noticed later how cheerful the tune sounded for a song about the apocalypse. It reached number two in America and spent three weeks at number one in Britain, their only British chart topper. Lodi, about a washed up musician stranded in a small California town, was written by a twenty three year old who had never actually been to Lodi. He picked it for having the coolest sounding name. The band had played nearby stations for years, though, and Doug Clifford remembered it as a farm town with a seedy bar and not a woman in the place.[1] [2] [3]

Green River, released in August 1969, was their first number one album and remains John's favorite. The title song is about Putah Creek near the town of Winters, where the family holidayed until he was ten. He learned to swim there, there was a rope swing, and the cabin they rented belonged to a descendant of Buffalo Bill Cody, which is where the character Cody Junior comes from. The name Green River came from a lime soda syrup he used to order at the soda fountain. This album also began their long partnership with engineer Russ Gary at Wally Heider's new studio in San Francisco. The band rehearsed so hard that whole albums were finished in about two and a half weeks.[1] [2] [3]

The Creedence sound was built cheaply and cleverly. According to NPR, each of the first three albums cost less than two thousand dollars to make. Russ Gary put simple Shure microphones on almost everything, used almost no equalization, and created John's beloved slapback echo, the sound of the old Sun Records singles, by running two tape machines into the studio's echo chambers. Doug Clifford played an unusually large eighteen inch hi hat. The band cut the basic tracks live together in one room, then John came back alone to add his lead vocal and nearly all the overdubs, from backing vocals to piano and tambourine.[1] [2]

Woodstock and Fortunate Son

In April 1969 Creedence became the first act to sign a contract for the Woodstock festival, for a fee of ten thousand dollars. Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune wrote that other bands only followed after they signed on. But the night went badly. The Grateful Dead's set ran hours long, and Creedence did not get on stage until after midnight on Sunday the seventeenth of August. John looked out at what he called a scene from Dante, half a million people intertwined, asleep and covered in mud. He said it took thirty five minutes to wake them up. He still blames the Dead, who he claimed had put the whole crowd to sleep.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Unhappy with the show, John refused to let Creedence appear in the Woodstock film or on the soundtrack album. He was sent a recording of Bad Moon Rising for the record and turned it down, saying there was no reason to show the band struggling. The film won an Academy Award and the soundtrack topped the charts, so millions came to know Woodstock without Creedence in it. John says he has never even watched the movie. It took until 2019 for the complete eleven song set to be released, as Live at Woodstock. Archivist Andy Zax, who assembled the festival's tapes, called it one of the best performances of the whole weekend.[1] [2] [3]

Just weeks after Green River, the band recorded its third album of the year, Willy and the Poor Boys, released at the end of October 1969. Its cover was shot outside the Duck Kee Market on the corner of Peralta and Hollis Streets in Oakland, with the band posing as a street corner jug band. The idea for Down on the Corner came from a newspaper advertisement for Winnie the Pooh. John's brain turned Winnie the Pooh and the Pooh Boys into Willy and the Poor Boys. On television the band played the song in character, with Stu on a washtub gut bass, Doug on washboard and Tom on a cheap Kalamazoo guitar.[1] [2]

The other side of that single was Fortunate Son. John said he wrote it in about twenty minutes, sitting on the edge of his bed, boiling with anger about a war he had been drafted into that nobody could explain. He had in mind the privileged sons of senators and congressmen who got deferments or cushy posts, and in particular David Eisenhower, grandson of one president and fiance of the daughter of another, Julie Nixon. The band played it on The Ed Sullivan Show on the sixteenth of November 1969. It became one of the defining protest songs of the Vietnam era, and in 2013 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.[1] [2] [3]

By the end of 1969 Creedence had three top ten albums and a run of singles that stalled at number two or three. The BBC has reported that they may even have outsold the Beatles in album sales that year. Their press man Jake Rohrer said their audience spanned every age, from preteens to grandparents, and some of their most passionate fan mail came from American soldiers in Vietnam and from inmates in federal prisons. Doug Clifford believed John's great gift was writing messages that both sides of a divided country could hear. Some left wing bands wrote slogans only the hardcore would listen to. Creedence, he said, reached the masses with strong messages set to feel good music.[1] [2] [3]

Cosmo's Factory and the top of the world

The new decade opened with another double sided hit, Travelin' Band backed with Who'll Stop the Rain. Travelin' Band was John's salute to Little Richard, and it borrowed so much from Good Golly Miss Molly that the song's publisher later sued. The case was settled out of court, and decades on John still mentioned it sarcastically from the stage. Who'll Stop the Rain was much darker, and many heard it as a veiled comment on Vietnam and on the band's soggy weekend at Woodstock. John has said he was thinking about Washington. When he brought the finished recording home, his four year old son Josh listened and said, Daddy, stop the rain.[1] [2] [3]

On the thirty first of January 1970 the band recorded a show at the Oakland Coliseum Arena, and in February they were on the cover of Rolling Stone. In April they set off on their first European tour, and John wrote Up Around the Bend and Run Through the Jungle just days before leaving. Both sides of that single hit number four in America. In Europe they headlined London's Royal Albert Hall, and Jake Rohrer remembered arriving in West Germany to find they were bigger than the Beatles there. With the Beatles breaking up that spring, many writers have argued Creedence were for a moment the biggest band in the world.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Cosmo's Factory came out in July 1970 and spent nine weeks at number one in America. Six of its eleven songs were released as singles, and all of them went top five. The title came from the huge warehouse in an industrial part of Berkeley where the band rehearsed almost every day. Doug Clifford, whose nickname was Cosmo, dubbed it the Factory because John worked them so hard. The cover photo was taken by the Fogertys' brother Bob and shows the four of them looking more like lumberjacks than rock stars. A handwritten sign reading Third Generation pokes fun at a critic who once filed them as a third generation San Francisco band.[1] [2] [3]

Several Cosmo's Factory songs have hidden stories. Run Through the Jungle sounds like a Vietnam song, but John says it is about the flood of guns in America. He had read there was one gun for every man, woman and child in the country. Its jungle noises were made with backwards guitar and piano, and it was Tom's favorite Creedence song. Lookin' Out My Back Door, with its flying spoons and dancing animals, was taken by some as a drug song, but John wrote it for his three year old son and borrowed the parade from a Doctor Seuss book. The album also stretched Marvin Gaye's I Heard It Through the Grapevine out to eleven minutes.[1] [2] [3]

Lookin' Out My Back Door became their fifth single to peak at number two in America, held off the top by Diana Ross and Ain't No Mountain High Enough. Creedence ended up with five number two hits and never a number one on the Hot 100, a record for a group. John had a theory about why they kept pumping out double sided singles. People told him great B sides were wasted hits, and he answered, look at the Beatles, look at Elvis. Doug Clifford saw the cost. The band worked on what he called a twelve week cycle, because John believed that if they ever dropped off the charts they would be forgotten.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pendulum, Mardi Gras and the end

In the autumn of 1970, at the peak of their fame, the band held something it had never needed before, a meeting. The other three wanted a bigger say in the music and the business. Creedence had no manager, no agent and almost no staff, and John ran everything himself. Stu Cook, who had a business degree, said John had failed to get them the better Fantasy contract he had promised and was not qualified to manage the biggest band in the world. According to Cook, John's response was to bring in the manager Allen Klein. Klein was sent packing after one meeting.[1] [2]

Pendulum came out in December 1970. With the old backlog of songs used up, the sessions began with the band jamming and hoping new songs would appear. None did, and John went home each night to write. He played Hammond organ on much of it, in tribute to Booker T. and the MGs. When Doug played the record to two of the MGs, they said it sounded remarkably like Booker T. Jones himself. The big single was Have You Ever Seen the Rain, which reached number one in Canada and number eight in America. John has said the image of rain falling on a sunny day was about the band coming apart at the height of its success.[1] [2]

Tom Fogerty left as soon as Pendulum was finished, and his departure was announced at the start of February 1971. The press release called it amicable. The Los Angeles Times reported that Tom said he wanted to spend more time with his wife and children. But Tom later told a more painful story. After six platinum albums he had hoped to do a little singing, he said, and had become just the guy who stood there and played rhythm guitar. John was not going to change things, so he split. Doug Clifford, Tom's closest ally in the band, said John never wanted Tom to sing in case it became a hit.[1] [2] [3]

The others thought about asking Duck Dunn of Booker T. and the MGs to join, then carried on as a trio. The summer 1971 single Sweet Hitch-Hiker reached number six, their last top ten hit. It name checks the Greasy King, a hamburger stand back in El Cerrito. It was also one of only two Creedence singles whose publishing John owned, because an old deal had just expired. Its B side was Stu Cook's Door to Door, a sign of a new so called democratic approach in which every member would write and sing his own songs. John later described the results as underwhelming, to put it mildly.[1] [2]

That approach produced Mardi Gras in April 1972, with three songs each from John, Stu and Doug. Critics were brutal. In Rolling Stone Jon Landau called it the worst album he had ever heard from a major rock band, and joked it might be remembered as Fogerty's Revenge. It still went gold and reached number twelve. John's Someday Never Comes, about his parents' divorce and his own crumbling marriage, was a quiet gem. Stu Cook called it John's finest song and said it brought tears to his eyes. After a short American tour, Fantasy and the band announced on the sixteenth of October 1972 that Creedence Clearwater Revival was finished.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The long war with Fantasy

John's first move after the split was a one man band. On The Blue Ridge Rangers in 1973 he played every instrument on a set of country and gospel covers, and credited it to an imaginary group so his name was not on the cover. Jambalaya reached number sixteen. But his contract said he still owed Fantasy eight more records, and he refused to make them. The deadlock only broke when David Geffen of Asylum Records bought out his contract for a million dollars. His 1975 solo album included Rockin' All Over the World. Status Quo's cover became far better known, and opened Live Aid in 1985. John said its success lifted him during a very dark period.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The money troubles went deeper than contracts. The band members lost millions of dollars in an offshore banking scheme that turned out to be a swindle, and Stu Cook said they discovered they were not only broke but also in trouble with the tax authorities. The BBC later reported that the band successfully sued Zaentz over bad investments that had cost them millions. In 1976 John finished an album called Hoodoo, but Asylum rejected it weeks before release, and he agreed it was not good enough. Sometime in the eighties he told the label to destroy the master tapes. He then disappeared from recording for nearly a decade, calling it the darkest time of his life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

To get free of Fantasy for good, John signed away his rights to his Creedence songs, giving up his royalties around 1980. He said later he did not see a payment from them for decades. He also stopped playing the songs entirely. He told Uncut he was afraid he would start singing Proud Mary and go off on a tirade, and if one of his old hits came on the car radio he would switch stations. He imagined himself trapped in a cheesy Las Vegas act, singing rolling on the river night after night, and said he would rather not perform them at all than become that person. Doug Clifford cruelly described him in those years as Brian Wilson without the drugs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 1985 John came roaring back with Centerfield, recorded entirely on his own. It went to number one, and The Old Man Down the Road reached number ten. But the album also mocked his old boss in two songs, Mr. Greed and Zanz Kant Danz, about a pig that cannot dance but will steal your money. Zaentz sued for defamation and the title became Vanz Kant Danz. Then Fantasy, which owned Run Through the Jungle, sued John for plagiarizing himself. At the trial he brought his guitar to the witness stand and played both songs, and the jury found in his favor. His fight to recover his legal costs went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled for him in 1994 in Fogerty versus Fantasy, a case lawyers still cite.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

John's vow of silence on the old songs began to crack in 1987. On the nineteenth of February, at the Palomino Club in North Hollywood, Bob Dylan and George Harrison joined him on stage and urged him to play them, warning that otherwise the whole world would think Proud Mary was Tina Turner's song. On the Fourth of July that year, at a benefit for Vietnam veterans in Washington that was shown on HBO, he played a full set of Creedence hits. In 1989 he did it again at a concert against AIDS in Oakland, backed by Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, the band he blamed for Woodstock.[1] [2] [3]

Tom's death and the Hall of Fame

Tom Fogerty's solo career never came close to Creedence. He played rhythm guitar in Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders' band in Bay Area clubs, and made albums with Garcia and with Stu and Doug. In 1974 a song called Mystic Isle Avalon became the last recording to feature all four, though John added his guitar separately. At Tom's wedding in October 1980, all four played together for the first time in a decade. It was the only full reunion there ever was. John, Stu and Doug played again at their twentieth high school reunion in El Cerrito in 1983, billed as the Blue Velvets, just as they had been at fourteen.[1] [2] [3]

Tom had needed several operations on his back, and during one of them in the eighties he received a blood transfusion that his family believed gave him HIV. By 1989 he was gravely ill with AIDS. He died of tuberculosis at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, on the sixth of September 1990, aged forty eight, leaving his wife Tricia and six children. The brothers never truly made peace. Tom had sided with Saul Zaentz in John's disputes, and Stu Cook said John refused Tom's last wish, to play as a four piece one more time, until Tom was too weak to lift his arm. At the funeral John said they had wanted to grow up and be musicians, and had only achieved half of that.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Grieving and blocked, John drove to Mississippi in 1990 and stood at the grave of the blues singer Robert Johnson. He found himself wondering who owned Johnson's songs, picturing some lawyer with a cigar in New York, and realized it did not matter. They were Johnson's songs, whoever held the paperwork, and the same was true of his own. That trip eventually led him back to his Creedence catalog. It also started a quieter mission. John helped pay for headstones for forgotten bluesmen including Charlie Patton, James Son Thomas, Mississippi Joe Callicott, Eugene Powell and Lonnie Pitchford.[1] [2]

Creedence entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the twelfth of January 1993 at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. John refused to play with Stu and Doug. Instead he performed Who'll Stop the Rain, Born on the Bayou and Green River with a house band featuring Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson. Cook said John told them backstage that he was never going to play with them again and that he hated them. John did not dispute it, telling the Los Angeles Times he had said they were not friends. Tom's widow Tricia had brought the urn holding Tom's ashes, expecting a reunion. At the first chord, Stu and Doug walked out of the ballroom.[1] [2] [3]

Afterwards Stu and Doug wrote separate letters to the Hall of Fame's board, calling the night hurtful and insulting. One board member admitted they had a point, while Jann Wenner said it was not the Hall's job to reconcile bands. In his speech Springsteen called John an Old Testament, shaggy haired prophet and said Creedence made music for all the waylaid Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns. John's version of events came much later, in his memoir. He said he had already turned down a request to play Bill Clinton's inauguration as Creedence, and refused to be presented as a band with people who, as he saw it, had sold out to his worst enemy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Revisited, reclaimed and still rolling

In 1995 Stu Cook bought a house at Lake Tahoe near Doug Clifford's and the two started jamming again. A promoter friend talked them into a couple of shows, and Creedence Clearwater Revisited was born, with former Cars guitarist Elliot Easton and a singer, also called John, named John Tristao. Doug later admitted the seeds were planted by the humiliation at the Hall of Fame. John sued over the name in 1997 and won an injunction, so for a while they toured as Cosmo's Factory, until an appeals court overturned it. Revisited played about one hundred and ninety shows in 1996 alone, and lasted twenty five years, five times longer than the original band.[1] [2] [3]

John returned to regular recording in 1997 with Blue Moon Swamp, which won the Grammy for best rock album, and began playing Creedence songs again for good. In 2004 Zaentz sold Fantasy to Concord, which quickly restored the royalties John had gone without for decades. Zaentz died in January 2014, aged ninety two, and John marked it by posting his Vanz Kant Danz video. The feud with his old bandmates rumbled on. When John said in 2011 he was open to a reunion, Stu answered that leopards do not change their spots. In 2014 Stu, Doug and Tom's widow sued John over how he billed his Creedence shows, and he countersued over royalties they admitted withholding. Yet all of them now share a company that approves Creedence projects. Revisited played its last show in Mexico on the twenty ninth of February 2020.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

The songs kept living lives of their own. Fantasy licensed them for adverts John hated, including Fortunate Son in a Wrangler jeans commercial in 2002. When a Los Angeles Times reporter asked him about it, he said he did not want his song selling pants, and Wrangler dropped it. In September 2020 Donald Trump played Fortunate Son at a rally in Michigan. John called it confounding, pointed out that the song is about people of privilege avoiding the draft, and said the president was probably the fortunate son himself. He sent a cease and desist letter. The song has also turned up in countless Vietnam films, while Bad Moon Rising became a football chant in England.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 2023, after a fifty year fight, John announced that he owned his songs again. With help from his wife and manager Julie and his former manager Irving Azoff, he bought a majority stake in the publishing of sixty five Creedence songs from Concord, which still owns the original recordings. In August 2025 he released Legacy, twenty careful re recordings of those songs made with his sons Shane and Tyler. He joked that he had wanted to call it Taylor's Version. He played his old Rickenbacker on it. He had once turned down a chance to buy it back, and Julie secretly bought it for him as a Christmas present.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

As of 2026, John Fogerty is still performing. He played NPR's Tiny Desk with his sons in the band, filmed on Veterans Day 2025 and released in January 2026, and closed with the audience singing Have You Ever Seen the Rain. Stu Cook and Doug Clifford have retired from the road. The band's greatest hits album Chronicle, first released in 1976, has sold more than twelve million copies in America and passed seven hundred and fifty weeks on the Billboard album chart in June 2025. Creedence lasted barely four years as a recording band, but Springsteen summed up their pull when he said they were not the hippest band in the world, just the best.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Creedence Clearwater Revival

John Fogerty and Tom Fogerty. Tom was four years older and first to chase a music career, and John's band started out backing him. Once John found his voice, the older brother became the rhythm guitarist, and resentment grew until Tom quit in 1971. Tom later sided with Saul Zaentz in John's disputes, and among his last words to John were that Zaentz was his best friend. The brothers had barely reconciled when Tom died in 1990.[1] [2] [3]

John Fogerty and Saul Zaentz. Zaentz bought Fantasy in 1967 and signed the band to a contract John came to see as a prison. John gave up his song rights to escape, then lampooned Zaentz on Centerfield. Zaentz answered with a defamation suit and the famous self plagiarism case, which he lost. John later called him the evil guy he finally overcame. When Zaentz died in 2014, John posted Vanz Kant Danz.[1] [2] [3] [4]

John Fogerty and Stu Cook and Doug Clifford. Friends since junior high, the rhythm section and the leader fell out over control, money and the Mardi Gras album. The wound deepened at the 1993 Hall of Fame, when John refused to play with them, and through lawsuits over the Revisited name and unpaid royalties. As of 2019 Stu said they only spoke through lawyers, yet all three share a company that manages the Creedence legacy.[1] [2] [3]

Stu Cook and Doug Clifford. Classmates at Portola Junior High who went on to San Jose State University together, Stu and Doug have been a unit for more than sixty years. After Creedence they played together in the Don Harrison Band, ran a mobile recording business, and in 1995 formed Creedence Clearwater Revisited, which they kept on the road for twenty five years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Doug Clifford and Tom Fogerty. Doug was Tom's closest ally inside Creedence. He backed Tom's wish to sing and write, argued that Tom had a voice like Ritchie Valens, and later accused John of keeping Tom down in case he had a hit. Doug and Stu also played on Tom's 1974 solo albums Zephyr National and Myopia.[1] [2]

John Fogerty and Julie Fogerty. John met Julie Lebiedzinski on tour in Indianapolis in 1986 and married her in 1991. He credits her with helping him make peace with his past. She persuaded him to hang up his gold records, suggested the duets album and the Legacy remakes, secretly bought back his old Rickenbacker, and as his manager drove the 2023 deal that returned his songs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

John Fogerty and Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen has long been one of Creedence's champions, opening shows with Who'll Stop the Rain whenever it rained. He played alongside John when Creedence entered the Hall of Fame in 1993 and gave the induction speech. The two dueted on When Will I Be Loved in 2009, and in 2025 Springsteen inducted John at the American Music Honors.[1] [2] [3]

John Fogerty and The Grateful Dead. The Dead were the stars of the San Francisco scene Creedence stood apart from, and John never forgave them for Woodstock, where their overlong set pushed Creedence past midnight to a sleeping crowd. He mocked the Dead's pose of not wanting success. Yet in 1989 Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir backed him on Creedence songs at a benefit in Oakland, and Tom Fogerty played with Garcia for years.[1] [2] [3]

John Fogerty and Martha Paiz. John married Martha Paiz in 1965, at twenty, and they had three children, including Josh, who inspired Lookin' Out My Back Door. John admits the band came first. Wrote a Song for Everyone grew out of a row with her, and Someday Never Comes reflected their marriage falling apart. They divorced in the late eighties.[1] [2] [3]

John Fogerty and Bob Dylan and George Harrison. In February 1987, with John still refusing to sing his old hits, Dylan and Harrison joined him on stage at the Palomino Club in North Hollywood. They told him that if he did not play the songs, the world would think Proud Mary was Tina Turner's song. Months later he played a full Creedence set for Vietnam veterans.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Creedence Clearwater Revival

• Before he was a star, John Fogerty worked in the warehouse of Fantasy Records, the label that would later own his songs. Saul Zaentz's biography describes the young John Fogerty as a former Fantasy warehouseman. The same company went on to control his Creedence catalog for decades.[1]
• An early Blue Velvets single was picked up by a young Oakland disc jockey named Casey Kasem. The band's second single got airplay thanks to Kasem, then working at KEWB in Oakland, years before he became famous for counting down the charts.[1]
• One rejected name for the band was Gossamer Wump, and John later dedicated Centerfield to Gossamer Wump. Gossamer Wump was the hero of a children's record the Fogerty brothers owned, a kid who spends ten years learning the triangle. John saw himself in that stubborn dream.[1] [2]
• The Clearwater in the band's name came from a television commercial for Olympia beer. Creedence came from a friend of Tom's named Credence Newball, Clearwater from the beer advert, and Revival from the band's recommitment to rock and roll.[1] [2]
• Fantasy made the Golliwogs wear fuzzy white wigs on stage. The label renamed them after a children's book character to sound like a British Invasion band, and dressed them to match. The band was so embarrassed it mumbled the name.[1] [2]
• Porterville was first credited to a songwriter called T. Spicebush Swallowtail. When it came out on Fantasy's Scorpio label, John's song about a boy burdened by his family name carried the invented writing credit. It became the first Creedence single.[1]
• Doug Clifford says he came within two weeks of being sent to Vietnam. Drafted in 1966, he joined the Coast Guard Reserve but says he was holding orders for a transfer to the Army. He calls his escape the destiny of Creedence.[1]
• John's guitar on Born on the Bayou, a Gibson ES one seventy five, was stolen from his car soon after. The swampy tremolo intro was played on that Gibson, which disappeared shortly after the session. Doug Clifford calls Born on the Bayou his favorite Creedence record.[1]
• Creedence's first three albums each cost less than two thousand dollars to make. NPR reported the budget figure. The band rehearsed so thoroughly that whole albums were recorded in a couple of weeks, with the arrangements already locked in.[1] [2]
• Proud Mary was held at number two by Tommy Roe's bubblegum hit Dizzy. Green River was then blocked by the Archies' Sugar Sugar, and Lookin' Out My Back Door by Diana Ross. Creedence never reached number one on the Hot 100.[1] [2]
• The Green River in the song was really Putah Creek near Winters, California. John named it after a lime soda syrup he loved at the soda fountain. Cody Junior refers to the descendant of Buffalo Bill Cody who owned the family's holiday cabin.[1] [2]
• John Fogerty had never been to Lodi when he wrote Lodi. He chose the Central Valley town because it had the coolest sounding name. The city has since used the line about being stuck in Lodi as the theme of civic events.[1]
• On Andy Williams' TV show in 1969, a marching troupe sang a jingle about Creedence before Green River. The performers rhymed troubled times with survival and Creedence Clearwater Revival, then froze as props while the band played. NPR called it a sign TV never understood them.[1]
• Creedence were paid ten thousand dollars for Woodstock and were the first act to sign. They signed in April 1969. Greg Kot argued other big acts only committed after Creedence did, yet the band was left out of the film.[1] [2]
• John Fogerty says he has never watched the Woodstock movie. He told Rolling Stone this while explaining why he kept Creedence out of it. He did not even know the band was being recorded that night.[1]
• Down on the Corner began with a Winnie the Pooh newspaper advert. John misread it in his head as Winnie the Pooh and the Pooh Boys, which became Willy and the Poor Boys. He later shared his love of Pooh with his daughter Kelsy.[1]
• The Willy and the Poor Boys cover was shot outside the Duck Kee Market in Oakland. The photo was taken at the corner of Peralta and Hollis Streets, at a store owned by a woman named Ruby Lee.[1]
• Effigy was John's response to Richard Nixon brushing off protesters to go watch football. John recalled Nixon saying nothing the demonstrators did would affect him, and that he was going back inside to watch the game. Effigy closes Willy and the Poor Boys.[1] [2]
• Travelin' Band opens with a nod to the new Boeing 737 airliner. The first line's seven thirty seven coming out of the sky refers to the jet, then new on short hops. The song itself drew a lawsuit from Little Richard's publisher.[1]
• A live album sold as The Royal Albert Hall Concert was actually recorded in Oakland. Fantasy mislabelled a tape of the January 1970 Oakland Coliseum show. When the mistake emerged in 1981, the album was renamed The Concert. It still went platinum.[1]
• Doug Clifford played an unusually big eighteen inch hi hat. Engineer Russ Gary said he never recorded anyone else using cymbals that large, and that it remained part of the sound Doug and Stu made together for decades.[1]
• Creedence's rehearsal warehouse, the Factory, covered about twenty two thousand square feet. The Berkeley building gave Cosmo's Factory its name, and later housed a studio Russ Gary created with Stu Cook and Doug Clifford.[1] [2]
• The band considered making Duck Dunn of Booker T. and the MGs a member after Tom left. They decided to continue as a trio instead. Dunn had once said he nearly burned his Creedence records on learning the band came from Berkeley.[1]
• Fantasy's Berkeley headquarters was nicknamed The House That Creedence Built. The label built the offices in 1971 on the band's earnings. Saul Zaentz also used Creedence profits to fund his Oscar winning films.[1] [2]
• Stu Cook auditioned to replace Bill Wyman in the Rolling Stones in 1993. The same year Creedence entered the Hall of Fame, Cook tried out for the bass job. Earlier he played in the country band Southern Pacific.[1]
• Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic first played together in a Creedence cover band. Dave Grohl told NPR about Nirvana's roots and said everybody, mohawk or Madonna shirt, loves Fogerty's music.[1]
• Dave Grohl says John Fogerty's guitar amp is the loudest he has ever stood beside. Grohl, a Motorhead and AC/DC fan, told NPR that standing next to Fogerty's amp would burn the hairs off your face.[1]
• Fogerty's lawyers' fees in the self plagiarism case came to about one point three five million dollars. After his Supreme Court win in 1994, the lower courts ordered Fantasy to pay the fees he had spent defending himself.[1] [2]
• John paid for headstones for forgotten Mississippi bluesmen, including Charlie Patton. After visiting Robert Johnson's grave in 1990, he funded markers for Patton, Son Thomas, Joe Callicott, Eugene Powell and Lonnie Pitchford.[1]
• In 2010 John became the only musician celebrated at a Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony, for Centerfield. The song is a fixture at ballparks. John had also played it from center field at the opening of the new Yankee Stadium in 2009.[1] [2]
• Julie Fogerty secretly bought back John's old Creedence Rickenbacker as a Christmas present. He had passed on buying it for forty thousand dollars in the nineties because the memories hurt. He played it on the 2025 Legacy album.[1]
• John Fogerty kept his gold records in storage for decades. He told NPR in 2013 that his current home was the first where he had hung his Creedence discs, after Julie insisted it was time.[1]
• John credits a drugstore moisturiser, Cetaphil, with saving his guitar hands. He told Mojo that washing before playing left his skin cracked and painful until he discovered the cream about thirty five years earlier.[1]
• Have You Ever Seen the Rain passed one billion Spotify streams in March 2023. The 1970 single, a number one in Canada, got a new video for the band's fiftieth anniversary starring Jack Quaid.[1]
• Tom Fogerty's favorite Creedence song was Run Through the Jungle. He loved that it never changes key yet feels like it does, and called it a little movie in itself with its backwards guitar and piano effects.[1]
• Stu Cook calls Someday Never Comes John's finest song. Even in the bitter Mardi Gras sessions, Cook said the song brought tears to his eyes. Critic Greil Marcus said it made him cry too.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.