Latest / NO FILTER / Joe Rogan Experience _2485 - John Fogerty

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Joe Rogan Experience _2485 - John Fogerty · NO FILTER

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Train by day. Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Put your stuff on the floor.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: It doesn't matter. You can keep it on the table.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: It's fine.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: There's water there, too, in this metal cup. And then
• 0:22
  there's coffee.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Oh, thanks so much.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: There's coffee in here.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he's ready to... I have some notes that I'll
• 0:28
  probably never look at, but.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: You got notes? Meh. What's on the notes?
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Just stuff like what I went through with CCR and
• 0:40
  all that. But tell me something. Did you read up
• 0:45
  on me or anything?
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: I'm a huge fan. I don't have to read up
• 0:48
  on you. Okay. I read up on you a little
• 0:51
  bit just to catch up about how you got out
• 0:53
  of the, well, you did do military service, but you
• 0:57
  got out by smoking a lot of weed and not eating.
• 1:00
  I read that. Is that true?
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Is that true? They lied?
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: There was a story about you smoking a lot of
• 1:05
  weed and getting emaciated so you can get out of
• 1:08
  the Army.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Well, it's not quite in that sequence, but those things
• 1:16
  did happen. Yeah, I had determined to lose a lot
• 1:25
  of weight, right? So I was kind of really skinny
• 1:30
  by 1965. seven, 68. Uh, I mean like a hundred
• 1:35
  and I think it was 129 pounds.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, and then I was going to go, uh,
• 1:42
  to the thing. It was the presidio and I had
• 1:45
  to meet with the army doctor.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: And my friends gave me a couple of joints and
• 1:54
  I stuck them in, you know, I used to smoke
• 1:56
  and those cigarettes, I stuck it in the, cigarette and
• 2:00
  going across the bay bridge i smoked them that's so
• 2:05
  i hadn't even thought about it so if you want
• 2:07
  yeah man he he he went on a starvation diet
• 2:10
  a protest diet and then smoked a lot of weed
• 2:13
  that's what i heard that way but yeah okay but
• 2:16
  it's it's essentially some truth.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: Some truth to it uh you had a legendary career
• 2:23
  my friend Thank you.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: Still working on it.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: It's incredible, man. You are like one of the main
• 2:30
  voices of rock and roll in America, if you really
• 2:32
  think about it. Your songs, I mean, you have so
• 2:37
  many gigantic hits. You know, when the UFC has a
• 2:42
  lot of walkout songs, you know, when fighters come out
• 2:44
  and walk out, a lot of guys walk out to
• 2:46
  your music. I don't even know if you're aware of it.
• 2:49
  Fortunate Son is a big one.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: Bad Moon Rising, that's another big one people walk out to.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Great. Wow.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: It's pretty awesome.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, I'm not that aware of the UFC stuff, but,
• 3:03
  you know, everybody, whatever floats your boat.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: Wow, people just love your music.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: So you went through many generations. Like, you got your
• 3:12
  first record contract. How old were you?
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: I know I signed one when I was around 19.
• 3:18
  Of course, it would have been....
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: Unenforceable it's not legal at the time right you had
• 3:25
  to be.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: 21 yeah I believe so.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah there's well you're also one of the first rock
• 3:32
  and roll artists that wrote songs that became very popular
• 3:37
  about how you're getting screwed over by the record business
• 3:40
  you know what I mean so Leonard Skidder did it
• 3:43
  working for MCA they did that song but you had
• 3:46
  Vans Can't Dance.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: It was actually Zant's Can't Dance but you had to
• 3:50
  change it right Yeah, the name of the person was Zantz.
• 3:55
  It sold about a half a million copies as Zantz,
• 3:59
  but the record company Warner Brothers, in their way of
• 4:04
  settling somewhat, had me change it to Vance.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: Because the guy's name was Zantz.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: Zantz, yeah.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: It was screwing up.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: That's right in the middle of that whole thing was
• 4:20
  a mess. I got sued for sounding like myself.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: What?
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: How'd that happen?
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you. So, and I didn't find this out.
• 4:33
  And there was eventually a trial. So it's not... Many
• 4:38
  people think that that's funny. You got sued for sounding
• 4:42
  like yourself. Wow, that's funny. Well, no, you're getting a
• 4:45
  legal lawsuit that's probably going to take away a lot
• 4:50
  of your... uh money and you're going to go through
• 4:55
  three four years of anguish well anyway um ended up
• 5:00
  in a trial he was suing me for at the
• 5:03
  time was an enormous amount of money 144 million dollars
• 5:08
  for his uh whatever metal anguish or something um the
• 5:17
  the logistics i guess you'd call it I had made
• 5:19
  a new song called the old man down the road.
• 5:22
  It was on my album. It was my comeback on
• 5:25
  center field. And I had finally gotten away from fantasy records,
• 5:30
  which is where credence was and saw its hands who
• 5:33
  owned it. So, you know, when you finally escape and
• 5:38
  get success over somewhere else, the former people tend to
• 5:43
  be jealous, I guess. And, uh, So he was suing me.
• 5:48
  What had happened, though, I found out in the trial,
• 5:52
  the bass player from Creedence was another one of those people,
• 5:56
  I guess, that couldn't stand that I'd now had success
• 6:00
  in a later life. He went down to Fantasy and
• 6:05
  saw Mr. Saul's ants and said, John is ripping off Creedence.
• 6:10
  You should sue him. The irony in all of that
• 6:14
  is that I had taught Stu every single note that
• 6:18
  he ever played in Creedence. It was not his own creation.
• 6:21
  As we talk, you'll see. I was the guy inventing
• 6:26
  the arrangements. And so to take possession of Creedence was
• 6:32
  pretty ironic and pretty over the top. Anyway, he talks
• 6:37
  Saul into suing me, and Saul had unlimited funds. And
• 6:42
  so it went to a trial. I prevailed that trial
• 6:47
  and got that over with.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: But they torture you during the process because it takes
• 6:53
  years and it costs an enormous amount of money to
• 6:55
  fight yourself.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all that stuff.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: That is so crazy that they can sue you for
• 7:00
  sounding like you.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: Well, it's a blessing to the world, I think, that
• 7:06
  I prevailed. I mean, you know, what we're really talking
• 7:09
  about is when You come into the consciousness of the world,
• 7:14
  I guess, and you have a certain style, if you're lucky.
• 7:18
  And so you start creating whatever your art is. You're
• 7:21
  an actor or you're a painter or, in my case,
• 7:24
  a musician. And people start liking the style. Well, how
• 7:31
  unfair would it be that at some point somebody takes
• 7:34
  ownership of your style and now says, you have to
• 7:37
  go back and invent some other style. Be some other person.
• 7:41
  You know, it's just. That would be really difficult. Imagine
• 7:44
  Dylan or Springsteen or all the other people that have
• 7:48
  their own style having to reinvent and change to something else.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: Well, it's just insane to even ask an artist to
• 7:56
  do that. It's insane because, look, so many artists sound
• 8:00
  like other artists anyway, and no one has a problem
• 8:03
  with that as long as they're not ripping off the
• 8:05
  notes and the lyrics. There's a lot of people that
• 8:06
  sound like people. But the idea that you could get
• 8:10
  sued for sounding like you with new music and new
• 8:15
  lyrics is– that's one of the most insane things I've
• 8:18
  ever heard of. I can't believe that didn't get thrown
• 8:20
  out immediately.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: Immediately, right. Well, that shows the– I guess the ego
• 8:27
  and the possessiveness that people want to have. I had
• 8:33
  written a new song, and he wanted to own me, basically.
• 8:39
  That was the idea. You can never do anything unless
• 8:42
  you do it for me. But not just for myself,
• 8:49
  for everyone, for all artists. It was kind of a
• 8:52
  major ruling, and thank God it went that way.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: Well, thank God it also was public, like with that
• 9:00
  song and the lawsuit around the song, you having to
• 9:03
  change the name of the song. Because back then, at
• 9:06
  least at the time, like this was probably, what, the 80s?
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: Most people had no idea how evil the music business
• 9:14
  can be. Unless they were told, they had no idea.
• 9:19
  They bought the albums, they loved the musicians, and they
• 9:22
  just liked the music. They didn't know what was going
• 9:25
  on behind the scenes. They didn't know how these people
• 9:27
  own your catalog, they own the music, they own the publishing.
• 9:31
  They try to just get as much money out of
• 9:35
  you as humanly possible, own your name, own your likeness.
• 9:39
  Most fans had no idea.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: And that's probably the way it really should be. When
• 9:44
  I was young, I just cared about Elvis and his
• 9:47
  guitar player. You know, I didn't want to know all.
• 9:50
  I didn't even know there was stuff behind it to know.
• 9:53
  The Colonel. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. Right. I picked
• 9:57
  a good one there, didn't I?
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a really good one.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, the kernel was evil. That's just too bad.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: Another similar situation. Like, there's a lot of these great
• 10:04
  artists get, like Prince. He got wrapped up to the
• 10:07
  point where he had to change his name to a
• 10:09
  symbol because he didn't own his name anymore. Prince!
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember going, well, if he doesn't want to
• 10:15
  use it, I'll take it.
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: You know? Yeah, it's just the business itself. I mean,
• 10:23
  you have these creative artists that make this music that
• 10:27
  everybody loves, and then you have these hyenas that work
• 10:30
  behind the scenes that are the ones that are collecting
• 10:32
  the majority of the money from it, and they're not
• 10:35
  making any music. And to the average fan like myself, like,
• 10:38
  that's abhorrent. That's disgusting. Like, you see that. It just
• 10:42
  drives you nuts.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: Well, also, you know, the creative people are special, right? And,
• 10:50
  I mean, you know, look around. There's way more of
• 10:54
  other types of people than there are creative people. And
• 10:58
  to douse that, you know, or own that, which is
• 11:02
  what was going to happen, is just an onerous thing.
• 11:07
  I used to be a lot more angry about all
• 11:12
  this stuff. I'm a lot older. I can't say wiser.
• 11:15
  It's more like.
• 11:18
  I came out on the good side of it. I
• 11:20
  try not to worry about it too much.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: It's great that you came out on the good side
• 11:25
  of it, but it's also great for people to know.
• 11:28
  And it's really great for young artists to be aware
• 11:31
  as they're coming up, especially as they're beginning their journey,
• 11:35
  that this could happen to them.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's all kinds of bad people around just
• 11:44
  waiting for you to slip up and sign something that
• 11:47
  will give your rights away, that sort of thing. I
• 11:53
  get such a joy out of music, you know, I mean,
• 11:55
  I just, it started that way when I was a
• 11:59
  little kid. I mean, didn't even know what I was
• 12:01
  doing or what that was. I was hearing this sound and,
• 12:06
  you know, and I liked it and I just kind
• 12:07
  of went with it. I didn't try to analyze it
• 12:10
  too much. And of course, later with all the things,
• 12:14
  you know, the, different roads you go through trying to
• 12:19
  get to some place. Happily, I still get that same joy.
• 12:27
  I mean, I just, I'm just so glad. You know,
• 12:30
  a lot of this, of course, is from the care
• 12:33
  of my wife, Julie. If I hadn't have met her,
• 12:38
  I probably would be dead. Simple as that.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Wow.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: Why do you think you'd be dead?
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: I didn't see any way out. I was really abusing myself,
• 12:54
  alcohol mostly. I really felt bad inside. When you get
• 13:01
  like that, Joe, you're not really operating on the same
• 13:07
  plane in the world that all the other people that
• 13:09
  you see. You walk into a market or something, look
• 13:13
  around and Probably most of the people are kind of normal,
• 13:16
  you know, whatever we call that. But when you're really
• 13:21
  hurting inside for whatever reason, I mean, in my case,
• 13:25
  something really unjust had been done to me. But, you know,
• 13:31
  however you get there and then you start abusing yourself
• 13:35
  with drugs, alcohol, whatever, you just kind of, it becomes
• 13:42
  a habit. You just stay there, right? And so you're
• 13:45
  not really enjoying the sunshine and the love that's around
• 13:49
  you and all the rest of it. You become kind
• 13:52
  of a pathetic person, sad, certainly. So that, you know,
• 13:57
  that was the deal. When Julie met me, I was
• 14:02
  that guy. There was sort of a, certainly an anger,
• 14:07
  I mean, but a bitterness, too. Almost like a self-fulfilling...
• 14:15
  prophecy where you look for something to go wrong and
• 14:19
  then it goes wrong. And you go, see, I told you.
• 14:23
  I mean, it's a terrible mental place to be. And
• 14:27
  I was there.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: Do you think this was a loop that you got
• 14:29
  in because of the lawsuits?
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: It really just got you that hard?
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Well, there was more than one lawsuit, but The betrayal
• 14:39
  by the people in my band, you know. I just
• 14:43
  told you about a very evil man, right?
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: And I'm the only guy from Credence who's ever actually
• 14:49
  mentioned that he's an evil person to the extent that
• 14:55
  quite publicly my brother Tom, right during this same time,
• 15:00
  was saying that Saul was his best friend.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: Oh, Jesus.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: It was just really hard to deal with. The other
• 15:09
  two guys in the band were kind of just more
• 15:12
  cowardly about it. They just never spoke up. Just kind of,
• 15:16
  give me the money.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: How the fuck was your brother saying that guy was
• 15:21
  your best friend while he was suing you?
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: He was signed, re-signed, after the breakup of Credence. He
• 15:33
  kind of shopped around and didn't have much success finding
• 15:37
  a label. And so he went, right about the time
• 15:40
  that this trial was going to happen, he resigned with Fantasy.
• 15:46
  I'm talking about the first trial.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: Which was the first trial?
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: The first trial was about, basically the band had lost
• 15:55
  its life savings. All of us in Creedence, the record
• 16:00
  company had gotten us into this offshore tax plan And
• 16:08
  I'm saying this with a smile because nowadays it just
• 16:11
  sounds so... You know, if some guy comes walking up
• 16:14
  to you and got a trench coat on a corner
• 16:17
  in New York City, hey, buddy, you know, you're probably
• 16:21
  going to avoid that guy. But the record company was
• 16:25
  in this tax thing. And for all we knew, we
• 16:30
  were going to be paying 90% income tax, right? I mean,
• 16:36
  the tax... are pretty stringent and pretty high. And so
• 16:43
  they offered us or basically kind of ushered us into
• 16:49
  this plan, offshore tax plan, and it would allow us
• 16:55
  to pay a lot less taxes, probably somewhere between 10
• 17:00
  and 20%, something like that. So it was a huge
• 17:05
  financial savings for us. I can tell you that the
• 17:11
  name of this particular thing was a bank in the
• 17:13
  Bahamas called Castle Bank. And we had it checked out.
• 17:19
  I mean, the people on our side in the band
• 17:22
  had it checked out by our people, our own accountant.
• 17:29
  The bass player's father was an entertainment lawyer and had
• 17:34
  a big firm. They, among other people, represented the Oakland Raiders.
• 17:39
  So we thought they were pretty solid. And they checked
• 17:42
  it all out and said that it was okay.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: It was legit.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: So we did it. But time went on and it
• 17:51
  seemed to be not legit to the point that somewhere
• 17:55
  in the 70s, the bank disappeared and all our money
• 18:00
  in it disappeared. So we sued.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, Jesus.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: So here it is. The bank was being used by
• 18:10
  the CIA to funnel money for covert military operations, including
• 18:14
  those at Andros Island, a staging area for anti-Castro activities.
• 18:19
  So they were stealing your money. How?
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: I just found that.
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: I just typed it in and went to the Wikipedia
• 18:27
  and I was like, well, that's interesting.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: So insane.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: See, I didn't know any of that.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: You didn't know until now?
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Oh, I knew that now. Or I suspect, yeah.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: Did you know that up until now or did you
• 18:40
  just find it out just now?
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: You could tell me a lot of things right now
• 18:45
  and I'd say, oh, yeah, I guess assumed all that
• 18:48
  stuff was kind of happening. But I didn't know it
• 18:51
  at the time in the early 70s or late 60s
• 18:56
  when we got into this thing. It was actually 70s.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: Do you know how anti-American that is? The CIA stole
• 19:02
  from Creedence Clearwater Revival.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: You know how fucking crazy that is? That is so wild.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: No, I didn't know that part. The funny thing is
• 19:16
  I had decided to get out of that plan, right?
• 19:22
  And I'd gone down to see my own people, my accountant,
• 19:26
  my attorney in Oakland and told them I just want
• 19:31
  out of this thing. I don't like the idea that
• 19:35
  Whenever I want some money, like an allowance, you got
• 19:38
  to call up some bank account somewhere over there and
• 19:42
  it takes some time, some few days before I actually
• 19:46
  receive my money. And it was starting. to just smell.
• 19:51
  It was starting this. And now we're talking 1975, 76.
• 20:00
  And so I actually had the meeting and I said,
• 20:03
  I want to be out of this plan. I don't
• 20:06
  want to. Oh, I said, one of the things I
• 20:09
  said to the, meeting of professionals, look, take a shoebox,
• 20:14
  put all the money I've ever earned into the shoebox,
• 20:19
  and now hand me the shoebox so I can see
• 20:22
  how much money have I earned. Because I didn't know.
• 20:25
  It was just going straight into this fund, right, into
• 20:29
  this Castle Bank. But they couldn't tell me. So I leave.
• 20:34
  I get down to the parking lot in the basement
• 20:37
  of this tall building in Oakland. And I'm with the
• 20:41
  guy that runs my office. And I say, we're going
• 20:45
  to have to have another meeting. Because even though I
• 20:48
  told him I want to get out of the plan,
• 20:49
  I didn't stand up like on the table and go,
• 20:52
  I'm ordering you and you and you get me out
• 20:56
  of the plan. I realized they could weasel some more
• 21:00
  time until I actually pointed. So the next week, I
• 21:04
  showed up and did that. I'm ordering you, get me out. Okay.
• 21:09
  Out of the plan, right? Pretty quickly after that, a
• 21:17
  week or two, we hear that the bank has closed.
• 21:25
  There's a telegram that apparently was sent on Valentine's Day.
• 21:30
  And the bank president has died. He died in a sauna. Whoa.
• 21:39
  I've seen that movie, you know, where Abbott and Costello,
• 21:43
  and the mob comes in and they're in those heat
• 21:46
  things that are up here. And the guy sticks a
• 21:48
  broom in the door so you can't get out. I mean,
• 21:53
  except that this was serious and there will be no
• 21:57
  more withdrawals until this thing is understood. A bank president dies,
• 22:05
  you don't close the Bank of America. You still can
• 22:08
  go get your money. And so pretty quick after that,
• 22:12
  it all just disappeared in a pop of smoke.
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: They just stole the money.
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: Done. Yep.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: And it was the fucking CIA. That is crazy. That
• 22:22
  is so crazy. How much money was involved with all
• 22:25
  the different people that lost their money? Like how much
• 22:27
  money was this bank holding? Do you know?
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: Oh, well, there were other names that I never saw
• 22:34
  in those days. A lot of sort of. mobby kind
• 22:38
  of sounding names. I will tell you, after the thing
• 22:44
  closed and we got the telegram that the president, I started,
• 22:48
  I literally started checking under my cars, looking for wires
• 22:55
  and what, you know, something funny. I did that for
• 22:57
  about three months.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: I finally just, well, I was scared.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I would be too.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: Because I was the guy who said, I want to
• 23:03
  get out of this thing. And suddenly it goes kaboom
• 23:06
  and the president dies. Right. Right. And I just figured
• 23:10
  that I was some kind of whistleblower to them or something. And,
• 23:14
  you know, I'm in their way.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: I guarantee you're the reason why it happened.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: I don't think. No, I don't believe that's true.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: Well, no, I mean, you probably caused the whole thing
• 23:26
  to close down. I mean, it's not a coincidence that
• 23:28
  it closed down right after you asked for your money back.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: You're a big public name and a big voice. You
• 23:35
  get out. You take your money out.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: I will say, after that point in time, I really
• 23:39
  never wanted to talk too loudly about stuff anymore. Oh,
• 23:44
  my goodness. So there eventually was our lawsuit. Well, actually,
• 23:51
  it was my lawsuit. I got with a lawyer, a
• 23:55
  tall building, I call it, and proceeded to start proceedings
• 24:01
  against this fantasy our own attorneys and experts uh the
• 24:08
  people that designed this plan all the rest right but
• 24:12
  i was the only one in the band that did
• 24:14
  that the rest of the guys kind of just went
• 24:18
  along and weren't making any waves and i you know
• 24:22
  i was pretty adamant i'm telling you this because at
• 24:26
  some point later more than a year had passed maybe
• 24:30
  a maybe a year and a half. My lawsuit had
• 24:36
  been rolling along a while. And then the other guys
• 24:41
  asked to join my lawsuit because the statute of limitations
• 24:47
  had run out on them being able to sue anyone
• 24:51
  because they literally tried to stay in the plan. I
• 24:55
  was willing to take the penalty anyway. whatever it was,
• 25:01
  for being the dumbass that let himself get into some
• 25:06
  financial thing like this, right? I felt like Joe Louis.
• 25:11
  I thought I was going to need an act of
• 25:12
  Congress to forgive the debt. These experts in the meeting
• 25:20
  that I talked about who were trying to dissuade me
• 25:23
  from making a noise and trying to get out of
• 25:25
  the plan told me eventually, John, if you receive all
• 25:29
  the money at once, You will pay more than 110%
• 25:32
  in taxes of what you have earned. In other words,
• 25:37
  I was going to go in the hole.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for receiving it all at once, right?
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: That sounds insane.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: That's why I felt like Joe Louis.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: That's the most insane thing I've ever heard.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: Well, they were trying to intimidate me.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: Of course. Yeah. How much money were you talking about?
• 25:53
  How much money did they steal from you?
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: When it finally was over, the headline in the San
• 25:57
  Francisco Chronicle, I mean, you're going to laugh at this.
• 26:01
  Rock band Victorious wins $ 8. 1 million. That was our entire
• 26:09
  take for everybody in the band. Each guy had a
• 26:12
  little bit different amount. But, you know, those numbers, I mean,
• 26:18
  I don't know. Dion once made a joke at the
• 26:21
  Rock and Roll Hall of Fame about Bruce. And Dion says, well,
• 26:28
  I sold $ 40 million. Meaning, you know, you sue me. Well,
• 26:31
  Bruce has that on him. It was pretty funny. Yeah,
• 26:38
  I mean, $ 8 million, that was it. That was our
• 26:41
  take from all the sales of Creedence.
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: So was that the amount of money that was in
• 26:48
  the bank that they stole from you?
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: That was what we got returned to us.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: So you did get the money back?
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay. I figured they would just vanish. Yeah.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: The money didn't come back from Saul's Ants or Castle
• 27:06
  Bank or any of those people. What had happened was
• 27:12
  Fantasy was let out of the lawsuit by the local
• 27:15
  judge in the Bay Area. I don't know why because
• 27:19
  they're the ones that got us into the plan. But anyway,
• 27:21
  they were let out of the whole thing. So who
• 27:24
  was left was this guy named Bert Cantor in Chicago
• 27:27
  who designed the plan and our own our own accountant
• 27:32
  and lawyers. And so what most of them did was
• 27:37
  settle for pennies on the dollar. You know, we said
• 27:41
  that you owe us a million dollars or whatever, and
• 27:45
  they settled for like $ 10, 000. Really? Right? Rather than go
• 27:50
  to trial. But our own accountant's legal team said, ah,
• 27:56
  we got these guys. They can never win this. So,
• 27:58
  I mean, ironically... They wanted to go to trial and
• 28:03
  put the poor accountant, you know, who was an old guy,
• 28:08
  through a whole trial. And Creedence got— we retained the money
• 28:14
  we had lost in that plan, the $ 8 million I
• 28:16
  just mentioned, from the law firm, the insurance firm. It
• 28:23
  was his insurance company's lawyers that were representing him. And
• 28:27
  they had to pay. Nobody else had to pay. Interesting.
• 28:31
  And then CIA or whoever you're talking about got away
• 28:34
  with it.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: Of course they did.
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: They know how to do that. It's kind of crazy, too,
• 28:39
  that it's only $ 8 million. You think about how much
• 28:41
  money you probably made the record companies.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: Yep. Well, there was 100 million records plus, so. Right.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: Do the math. How much was an album back then?
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: Four bucks.
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So 400 million plus operating expenses, costs, all that stuff.
• 28:58
  You know, you guys got a small percentage. That's how
• 29:02
  it works, though. That's why the business is so dirty. So,
• 29:06
  you know, the idea is that they help you and
• 29:07
  they bring you up. But the reality is they sell art.
• 29:11
  And if they don't have artists, they have nothing. The
• 29:14
  artists are what fund their very existence and they make
• 29:17
  the majority of the money. It's pretty dark when you
• 29:21
  really think about it.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and Joe, I got to tell you, I love
• 29:26
  making music and I don't do it for the money.
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: I mean.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: I know that sounds a little naive, but the happiness
• 29:35
  in my heart from doing this is from the music.
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: I believe you.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: From the joy.
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: I believe you.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: The only thing is when you, I mean, I'll say,
• 29:44
  I'm not like, well, maybe I'm an idiot, but probably
• 29:47
  not about this. When you find out that there was money,
• 29:50
  but somebody else got it, then that kind of gets
• 29:53
  your attention.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: You know, but the... For me, at least, it wasn't
• 30:00
  even about being famous, literally, if you can believe that.
• 30:04
  It was the joy of understanding the music from other
• 30:11
  people that you loved. And as you grew up from
• 30:15
  that little first inspiration, you began to kind of understand
• 30:19
  what it was you liked about what they did. And
• 30:22
  at some point then started to try and do it yourself.
• 30:26
  But that was all. That was a long, long time
• 30:29
  after the initial joy of just enjoying what they did.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of sad that money always does kind
• 30:38
  of distort things. But if you were only interested in
• 30:42
  money and only interested in fame or if that was
• 30:44
  your primary concern, there's no way the music would be
• 30:47
  that good. It's like that has to come from a
• 30:51
  real place. It's a real place of creativity and enjoyment, 100%.
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: 100%. You know?
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: Well, for me, I just.
• 31:02
  And also the prospect of creating something new tomorrow, you know,
• 31:07
  and the... What's the word? You get certain feelings. Well,
• 31:13
  we all do, but I've learned to... How can I
• 31:17
  say it? Sort of... It's like being in a big
• 31:20
  swimming pool or something. You know, it's all... It just
• 31:23
  surrounds you. Letting yourself... Enjoy that feeling and then try
• 31:30
  to figure out a way to put that into the music.
• 31:33
  You know, express it.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, you did it, man. It's a long story
• 31:41
  with all these different artists that have had to deal
• 31:43
  with all these horrific managers. I was reading this article
• 31:46
  about Jimi Hendrix's manager. So one of his bodyguards wrote
• 31:52
  a book where he's blaming Hendrix's manager for his death.
• 31:57
  And he was essentially saying that Hendricks was murdered and
• 31:59
  Hendricks was about to leave his manager. And that's why
• 32:02
  he killed him. And I don't know if you know
• 32:04
  the story about Hendricks, but his girlfriend fell from a
• 32:08
  roof or jumped off a roof shortly after Hendricks died.
• 32:12
  And apparently they were trying to get rid of her
• 32:13
  as well because they knew that she knew the whole
• 32:15
  deal behind it.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: Was this the one with kind of a. Funny foreign name.
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: Yes. Yes.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: I read a couple of Jimmy biographies, but, you know, yeah.
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: So many of these guys had mobbed up managers.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I do know that there was some manager of his.
• 32:35
  I mean, Jimmy owned his masters. That was remarkable. That's
• 32:40
  why his family has the masters, his estate. You know,
• 32:45
  they're the ones that decide. because every so often a
• 32:48
  new Jimmy album would come out, that sort of thing.
• 32:52
  I didn't know any of this way back then. I
• 32:54
  just wondered, you know, who was driving the bus. So,
• 32:57
  I mean, that part was pretty good. He had to
• 33:02
  talk to somebody at Reprise Records, and some of those
• 33:05
  people were Reprise Warner Brothers. In other words, about the
• 33:10
  time I was at Warner Brothers, it must have been
• 33:13
  a couple of them, you know, that decided that way
• 33:16
  back in the 60s. I guess I was a little envious,
• 33:21
  because I sure didn't own my masters, that's for sure.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: How many people owned their own masters back then?
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: Nobody.
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: That's crazy. How do you think he got that deal?
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: That I don't know. I don't know how it came
• 33:33
  about that he was able to have that much influence.
• 33:37
  I mean, that's the part... I did... I did get
• 33:43
  the inference from at least one of the books I
• 33:45
  read about Jimmy that they didn't try too hard to
• 33:51
  save him. Jimmy, I guess, was just really effed up
• 33:57
  for a couple of weeks there. I almost got the
• 34:01
  sense that somebody took a bottle of wine and just
• 34:08
  Poured it in him.
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I heard. That was what the bodyguard
• 34:13
  was inferring, that they poured pills and alcohol down his mouth.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Terrible. Well, I hope they never be in
• 34:21
  such a state that I can't protest something like that.
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah. Yeah.
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: It's dark because apparently he was ready to leave. He
• 34:31
  wanted to leave his manager. And obviously Jimmy was a
• 34:35
  gigantic star. Huge. That guy saw all the money.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: Well, he still is.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: He still is to this day.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: Every single guitar survey that ever comes out, all the
• 34:45
  other numbers after two keep changing with fashion and all that.
• 34:51
  But number one is Jimi Hendrix. Always.
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: Kind of extraordinary when you think about it. The guy
• 34:57
  died at 27 years old and was already just from
• 35:02
  another planet. Like you'd listen to his, like you listen
• 35:05
  to Voodoo Child, Slight Latern. You listen to that song,
• 35:08
  you're like, is this guy from Earth? Like this was
• 35:11
  so different than any other guitar playing that had ever
• 35:15
  taken place before him. He was a complete revolutionary, like
• 35:18
  just a completely new creative artist. You know, and one
• 35:23
  of my favorite musicians absolutely of all time. That's why
• 35:25
  I named the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: I wondered about that. Well, there it is.
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: That's it.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: Stole it from Jimmy.
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: I'll go for you.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: Yep. Yep. I should have named it the John Fogerty Experience.
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: Instead of Credence?
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: Well, I did create that name.
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: What was the crazy name that the record company called
• 35:49
  one of your first bands?
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: Well, it was the same people.
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: Same people?
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, the same individual musicians. In high school,
• 36:00
  or junior high, actually, I started... band and called it
• 36:04
  the Blue Velvets. Not all that earth-shaking, but kind of
• 36:09
  a cool vibe. And we were really the Blue Velvets.
• 36:16
  I mean, this was really a trio, but my brother
• 36:19
  was older. He was in another orbit. So we kind
• 36:25
  of went through high school, seeing each other every once
• 36:29
  in a while. It wasn't like we were all tromping
• 36:30
  around playing gig after gig. It was more like, you know,
• 36:34
  every few months there might be a sock hop or
• 36:37
  something like that. And then after high school, and Tom
• 36:44
  would come and sing. He was my older brother. He'd
• 36:47
  come and sing once in a while with us. We
• 36:50
  made a couple of recordings during that time with real
• 36:54
  record companies. But it was always kind of just haphazard.
• 36:59
  And finally, around the age of 19, I went over
• 37:03
  and knocked on Fantasy Records' door. They had done this
• 37:06
  special about Vince Giraldi, and they were in the Bay Area.
• 37:10
  So I went over there and introduced myself. Anyway, one
• 37:15
  thing led to another. Finally, we're recording. And at that time,
• 37:21
  I think we made a record with only three of us,
• 37:23
  me and Tom and Doug, the drummer. And I overdubbed
• 37:28
  a bass part. And this was early, or this was
• 37:32
  in 1964. When they finally pressed the single, one side
• 37:38
  was called Little Girl. It's kind of a four-chord doo-wop song.
• 37:43
  The other side was sort of an English or a
• 37:47
  British invasion song. answer kind of thing, mod music. It
• 37:53
  was called Don't Tell Me No Lies. Anyway, we excitedly
• 37:58
  go over to San Francisco to their warehouse and open
• 38:01
  up the package, and it says The Gollywogs. And we
• 38:04
  look at each other and go, what the hell? No, no, no.
• 38:09
  I think we had chosen our name to be The Visions.
• 38:13
  It was just something at the last minute because we
• 38:16
  weren't really the Blue Belvets anymore, but that was it.
• 38:19
  We thought it was going to say Visions. But the
• 38:24
  record company had decided they wanted to get in on
• 38:27
  the British invasion mod, whatever, and named us the Gollywogs.
• 38:31
  It sounds like Pollywog.
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: He said, well, a Gollywog, you see, is this doll
• 38:38
  that when the British soldiers were in India, the kids
• 38:43
  would have this little doll called a Gollywog. And so
• 38:46
  that's all we knew about it. As time went on,
• 38:50
  I mean, years and years later, long after I had been,
• 38:55
  we renamed the band, or I'd renamed the band Credence,
• 39:00
  found out that gollywog was a, this was a very
• 39:02
  racial thing. This was the British soldiers calling the people.
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: Wogs or gollywogs, yeah.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: That's a gollywog?
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, sambo, right?
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: Same sort of, yep.
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: And they didn't know this either, obviously. There was no
• 39:18
  Wikipedia back then.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: I don't know, no. I don't know. I didn't know that.
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: That's crazy that they could just change the name of
• 39:24
  your band without you having any knowledge of it at all.
• 39:27
  You open up the record and it's right there.
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: Yep. And they kind of insisted, you know, it's that
• 39:33
  same thing that, well, we're going to own the publishing
• 39:35
  to your song. No, no, I should own it. Well,
• 39:38
  then we're not going to make any records. Oh, okay.
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: You're 19. Yeah.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 39:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's how they get you. You don't know anything.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: Well, and you kind of want to make a record.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you want to make a record. It's right there.
• 39:52
  You taste it. Oh, my God, I'm going to be
• 39:53
  signed to a record label. I'm going to be a
• 39:55
  rock star. And then they come to you with a
• 39:58
  shady contract, and that's their modus operandi. That's what they
• 40:02
  do with everybody.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: And for— I know they call it business.
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: Funny term.
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Most of those people— I mean, it's like lottery
• 40:17
  to them. It's like gambling. They don't have a clue
• 40:22
  what creativity is. And at that age, the young... I mean,
• 40:27
  I guess I'm looking at you and saying, if I only... No,
• 40:30
  what's that line? If I didn't know now what I
• 40:32
  didn't know then. You're a young artist. You don't even
• 40:37
  know what you got. Right. Right? You know you have
• 40:41
  feelings about music, but you don't... You know, you're less
• 40:46
  than a rookie.
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: You know, maybe you were good in junior high, but
• 40:51
  that doesn't mean you're Willie Mays. Right. You know? So
• 40:54
  that's sort of how that works. And they sign you
• 40:58
  up before any of that self-realization happens. And then you're messed. Yeah.
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: Again, that's what happened to Prince. That's what happened to Skinner.
• 41:10
  That's what happened to most bands. I mean, they're very
• 41:13
  clever in how they do it. He's signed a bunch
• 41:15
  of people that are emerging and some of them are
• 41:18
  going to hit.
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: And they bankroll it and then they make the majority
• 41:22
  of the money when those people hit.
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: Well, in our case, Credence was the only thing that
• 41:27
  ever happened. Fantasy became a very wealthy record company. Saul
• 41:37
  eventually went into making movies, so that money that I
• 41:41
  had made for him at The record company, you know,
• 41:45
  turned into One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: Some other. Saul even had, in those times, had bought
• 41:56
  the movie rights for Lord of the Rings. So, you know,
• 42:03
  his ticket got punched way up high. It's crazy. And
• 42:08
  we never got a dime, of course, of any of that.
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: It's crazy how bad people can get ahead like that.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: Well, see, that's... Yeah.
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: That's what's disturbing.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: It's a different... That's why I had a little hesitation
• 42:22
  when you were talking about that you thought the music
• 42:25
  came from a... or creativity came from a joyful, good place. But, boy,
• 42:30
  you can sure look in different parts of entertainment or
• 42:35
  business in general and see some really bad people have
• 42:39
  made a lot of money.
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: Well... It takes the good people to create things, though.
• 42:44
  The creative people make the things, and there's always just
• 42:46
  going to be people taking advantage of people being naive
• 42:49
  about business.
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: I choose to believe that— at least it works for me.
• 42:57
  I choose to believe that you've got to have a
• 42:59
  good heart. You've got to try to use the golden rule, basically.
• 43:06
  Don't do something bad to him— that you wouldn't want
• 43:11
  to have done to you. So the do unto others
• 43:14
  as you would have them do to you. Yes. I
• 43:19
  believe in God and I believe God is watching me
• 43:23
  all the time, you know, all of us. So that
• 43:27
  part helps me to feel like there's a reason, you know,
• 43:32
  to try and be a good person. The reason being
• 43:39
  You're in God's grace if you do those things, if
• 43:44
  you try to live a good life, honest and I
• 43:47
  guess we call it transparent nowadays. Don't get me wrong,
• 43:52
  I'm not running around the world with a thumping a
• 43:55
  Bible or something. I just think it's common sense about
• 44:02
  how ultimately you want to exist in the universe.
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: Right. Yeah.
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: So, you know, that that's how I operate. And so
• 44:14
  when I certainly now at my age, when I see
• 44:18
  other people really getting away with stuff, I just it
• 44:21
  isn't like I gee, that's not fair. I should get
• 44:24
  the I don't see it that way now. I just
• 44:27
  look at that poor sap who's being so evil and go,
• 44:31
  you know, he's going to get his come up and someday.
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: Well, it's a horrible existence because nobody loves you when
• 44:37
  you're like that. If you're doing that and fucking people over,
• 44:40
  all your relationships are adversarial. It's a bad way to exist.
• 44:44
  You're on a very bad frequency, the way you exist
• 44:48
  with the people in your circle.
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: I think that's true. I believe that.
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of people that choose that life just
• 44:55
  for financial benefit. They choose to just fuck people over
• 44:59
  and be in that bad frequency all the time. But
• 45:02
  that's not a good life. And I agree with you.
• 45:05
  I think if you live your life like God exists,
• 45:08
  you'll have a much better life. And the golden rule
• 45:11
  is just it's provable. Like if you're a nice person
• 45:15
  and you treat people well and it spreads a lot
• 45:18
  of good energy around you and positive momentum with all
• 45:25
  these other people, it's the butterfly effect. It carries on
• 45:28
  to other people that they encounter too. They're inspired by
• 45:31
  how kind and friendly and generous you are. And it's
• 45:34
  good for everybody. It's good for you. It's good for
• 45:36
  the people that you're generous and friendly to. It's good
• 45:39
  for the other people that they encounter because they're inspired
• 45:42
  by it. It's just good for everyone. That's how people
• 45:44
  should exist.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I literally believe everything you have just said and
• 45:52
  literally have sometimes asked God for a, you know, I
• 45:57
  never sat around and asked for money or a hit record.
• 46:01
  I always thought that's kind of poor. That's bad. I mean,
• 46:05
  that's selfish or greedy or something. But I would ask
• 46:09
  for clarity or, you know, I would ask God to
• 46:12
  help me figure something out. And amazingly, there would be
• 46:20
  through a relation, you know, somebody I was dealing with,
• 46:25
  there would be something It was like karma, good karma
• 46:29
  coming back. And I could see the... To me, it
• 46:35
  was a result of my prayer or my openness of
• 46:39
  wanting to help get a situation resolved. So for me,
• 46:45
  to me, there's evidence that it all works that way.
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: Did you always have a belief in God?
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think there was times... Yeah, because I was
• 46:59
  just brought up that way. Again, I don't believe my...
• 47:05
  I was just taught in a kind of nice and
• 47:08
  simple way about God. It wasn't beat over my head
• 47:12
  or anything. I was raised Catholic, so in some sense
• 47:15
  you can't avoid having it beat over your head.
• 47:17
  Speaker 2: I suppose.
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: And some of that I resisted. But I went to
• 47:22
  the normal things. I did my first communion, my first confession.
• 47:28
  I did, what do you call that when you're 12
• 47:31
  years old? Confirmation. I chose the name for St. Jerome
• 47:39
  basically because there's a song by Bo Diddley called Bring
• 47:43
  It To Jerome. And Jerome was his, I think Jerome
• 47:48
  Green was his maraca player. And I really liked the
• 47:51
  vibe of that. I'm gonna be Jerome, that's my confirmation name. Yeah,
• 47:57
  it was there in those ways. There was times I was— boy,
• 48:02
  you've opened a can of worms here. Because I was
• 48:07
  so invested in being a Catholic, even though my parents
• 48:12
  tried to have me go to parochial school, Catholic school,
• 48:17
  I was in the first grade, and then I want
• 48:20
  to say they kicked me out. And then my mom
• 48:24
  had me start again in ninth grade at St. Mary's
• 48:27
  High School, and they kicked me out again. But it
• 48:32
  wasn't my fault. Anyway, the one that happened is funny.
• 48:37
  I mean, it's just the one that happened in the
• 48:39
  first grade, I had to take a bus to get there.
• 48:43
  I lived in El Cerrito, and it was the School
• 48:46
  of the Madeline in Berkeley. And I'm in the first grade.
• 48:50
  I'm six years old. So you had to go to
• 48:53
  the bus stop, get on a bus, get a transfer
• 48:57
  so that then when the bus came to a certain
• 48:59
  stop over in Albany, you then got on a train,
• 49:02
  you know, transferred in other words, got on the train
• 49:05
  and that went another mile or so into Berkeley and
• 49:09
  at a certain stop right behind the school, the school
• 49:13
  of the Madeleine, Catholic school, you get off the train
• 49:17
  and go on down into school. Now what happened, my
• 49:23
  parents had split up, so it was only my mom
• 49:26
  in the house, and she's leaving early because she's got
• 49:30
  a job as a teacher. So she's out of the
• 49:33
  house before me. And so it's up to me to
• 49:36
  get myself together get to the bus stop on time. Many,
• 49:41
  many times I was late, I missed it. So I
• 49:44
  had to get the next bus, so I'm late. So
• 49:47
  I'm rushing to school, but I get there after they've already,
• 49:52
  they would march every morning to John Philip Sousa. You know,
• 49:55
  all that. And go on into school, and I get
• 49:58
  there now, I'm late, the school yard is empty, I
• 50:07
  literally have to climb over the fence because they've locked
• 50:10
  the fence at, boom, 8 o'clock or whatever it was.
• 50:14
  And I had to scale the fence running the class
• 50:17
  without going to the bathroom. This was my first great experience.
• 50:22
  Sat down in my chair. Within an hour, I really
• 50:25
  got to pee. And Sister Damien would not answer me.
• 50:31
  I got to, I got to, I got to. And
• 50:36
  so she would, One day, I peed in my seat.
• 50:42
  It happened again. It became a habit. Sister Damien, John
• 50:48
  Fogerty has a puddle under his chair. Oh, no.
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: That was so traumatizing to me. But ask yourself, how
• 50:59
  is a six-year-old getting on a bus all by himself,
• 51:05
  traveling three or four miles, Then getting out of the bus,
• 51:09
  going over to where the train station thing is, getting
• 51:12
  on a train, going over there. I mean, I certainly
• 51:16
  never let my six-year-olds do anything like that.
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: I know it is kind of crazy how kids were
• 51:23
  just able to just leave the house and do anything
• 51:26
  back then. I think about that. When I was a
• 51:28
  little kid, I used to just leave my house. Seven
• 51:31
  years old, just leave the house, wander around.
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: As long as you were home for dinner time. Yeah.
• 51:35
  Speaker 2: It's kind of crazy. I mean, it's kind of amazing.
• 51:37
  We all lived.
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: If you stop and think about it. But to have
• 51:41
  to take a bus and then a train and go
• 51:42
  to school when you're six years old, that's nuts. So
• 51:47
  I went to Catholic school, too, for first grade only.
• 51:50
  And that screwed me off of religion for a long time.
• 51:55
  Because I thought of God back when I was a
• 51:58
  little kid before I went to Catholic school as– you know,
• 52:01
  God is all knowing and God is love and God
• 52:04
  created the universe and God is, God's looking out for you.
• 52:07
  It's just got some rules you have to follow. Made
• 52:09
  sense to me. And then when I went to Catholic school,
• 52:11
  there was a lady, I don't remember anybody's name from
• 52:13
  back then, but I remember her, Sister Mary Josephine. She
• 52:17
  was so mean. She was just a mean lady. She
• 52:21
  did the whole thing, the whacking people with rulers, tell
• 52:25
  you you're going to have to stay overnight and you're
• 52:27
  going to have to sleep on a nail in the closet.
• 52:29
  Like Just evil. Like, wanted you to cry. And when
• 52:32
  I would cry, she'd call me a crybaby. And I
• 52:35
  remember thinking after that, like, I don't want to have
• 52:37
  nothing to do with religion ever again. Right when I
• 52:40
  left first grade.
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 52:43
  Speaker 2: I hated it. And I was like, whatever God is,
• 52:46
  this is not God. Like, these people have nothing to
• 52:48
  do with God. There's no way this lady is the
• 52:50
  messenger of God. This lady's mean.
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: That took a whole lifetime to figure out, to realize... Well,
• 52:59
  this is just a man-made thing. You know, God's there. Right.
• 53:03
  And some man-made thing over here, you know, they became Mormons.
• 53:07
  And some man-made thing over there, they became Muslims.
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: You know, and it's just all man-made. It isn't actually God. Right. Right.
• 53:16
  And man is fallible, of course. Yeah. He's not infinite
• 53:22
  and he's not infallible. And so all these things were,
• 53:26
  but that took a lifetime for me. I'm sure I
• 53:29
  was in my 40s still working on that. Yeah. That
• 53:34
  God's okay, John. You don't have to resist when somebody
• 53:38
  wants to make a prayer or something. You know, it
• 53:41
  isn't God's fault that you peed at your desk when
• 53:45
  you were in the first grade, et cetera.
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: It's the mean nun.
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 53:51
  Speaker 2: I have a similar perspective. I think all religious scriptures,
• 53:58
  they're trying to document a real thing, especially Christianity, which
• 54:03
  is the one I've paid the most attention to. I
• 54:05
  think they're trying to document a real thing. But the
• 54:09
  hand of man is clearly all over it. That's the problem.
• 54:13
  The problem with anything that's written down, and we know
• 54:15
  that just in like the religious canon, the books that
• 54:18
  were included in the Bible, human beings had a decision
• 54:21
  on what goes in and what doesn't go in. There
• 54:24
  was rabbis that kept the book of Enoch out of
• 54:26
  the Old Testament. There's a lot of this weird stuff
• 54:29
  to it that you go like, well, why do people
• 54:31
  have any say? Why does a human have any say
• 54:35
  in what the word of God is? That sounds crazy.
• 54:39
  And when you read the scriptures, you're like, somebody wrote
• 54:42
  that down and someone told that story for who knows
• 54:46
  how many years before it was ever written down. But
• 54:49
  I think The origins of it, there's truth to it.
• 54:52
  It's just you have to get through all these many
• 54:55
  layers of confusion to try to decipher what God's original
• 55:01
  message was. And how was it received? Who got it?
• 55:05
  How did it even get relayed? What was the original
• 55:10
  event that led to this oral tradition that led to
• 55:13
  it being written down?
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: I'm smiling because this sounds... Exactly like a young musician
• 55:21
  has come to see this more learned person and tell
• 55:25
  him about his experience. And the more learned person turns
• 55:30
  into the manager or the record company and he says,
• 55:33
  I want to own this. Right. And they take all
• 55:38
  that good intentions and faith and somebody ends up owning it.
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: Certainly.
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: And you end up paying a tithe into a plate.
• 55:48
  And they make a lot of money.
• 55:50
  Speaker 2: That's certainly what you see in organized religion, especially when
• 55:53
  it gets to these huge megachurches and preachers. That's exactly
• 55:56
  what it is. It's someone taking advantage of this good
• 56:00
  thing and profiting off of it immensely. Yeah. I think
• 56:05
  the point of if you live your life like God's real,
• 56:08
  it'll be a better life.
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: I agree with that. But I think you also know.
• 56:13
  Speaker 2: There's something there.
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: It's sensible that you try to share, that you try
• 56:20
  not to be greedy. I don't mean you have to
• 56:23
  be a fool. I just mean that you don't have
• 56:26
  to be overtly always taking way more than your share.
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, just be kind. Be kind and be fair. How
• 56:34
  old were you when you first started playing music?
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: You mean as an instrument?
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, just messing around. How did you get into it?
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: Right. Well, actually, I was given a snare drum I
• 56:48
  think I was about four years old. That was a
• 56:51
  really cheap paper one.
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: Was your family musicians?
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: Not really, but they were musical, both of them, my
• 56:59
  mom and dad. One of my finest and favorite memories
• 57:06
  is we lived in the Bay Area, the East Bay
• 57:12
  from San Francisco, and My parents would go up to
• 57:16
  this place in Northern California near Winters, California. That's like
• 57:21
  toward Sacramento. And there was this creek, this body of
• 57:26
  water called the Pouda Creek. Eventually they dammed that up
• 57:30
  and made Lake Berryessa. But anyway, back then it was
• 57:34
  just running water and there was some people could camp there.
• 57:41
  There was this one place they took me reputedly was
• 57:47
  owned by a man named Cody, and he was a
• 57:51
  direct descendant of Buffalo Bill Cody. I actually met him
• 57:55
  one day when I was about four, and he was
• 57:58
  probably coming to collect the payment for the cabin and
• 58:02
  the little space. Anyway, I remember looking at him and going, wow.
• 58:09
  So I was told that story, and he would have
• 58:11
  been about 75, He literally could have been a son
• 58:15
  of Buffalo Bill. He would have been born at that point.
• 58:19
  It was probably 1949, the story I'm relating, and he
• 58:25
  would have been born in 1875. I mean, it's mind-boggling
• 58:29
  to think that. But my favorite memory thing, other than
• 58:34
  the fact that that whole place inspired my song Green River,
• 58:39
  all the little parts are in Green River, But one
• 58:42
  of the things, my parents had this old Ford, old
• 58:45
  green Ford, and they'd be driving along at night up there.
• 58:50
  I guess they were more happy or something there. And
• 58:53
  I remember sitting between them. It was just a big couch,
• 58:58
  the front seat. And they were singing songs in the dark.
• 59:02
  And they were singing like By the Light of the
• 59:05
  Silvery Moon or baby face and harmonizing. One was taking
• 59:12
  the melody and the other was harmonizing. The reason I
• 59:15
  know is because I'd sat there and I'm probably three, four,
• 59:19
  five years old right in there. I said, what are
• 59:23
  you guys doing? Because I knew the melody, but I
• 59:26
  hear two notes. What are you doing? And they explained
• 59:30
  they were harmonizing. And it was just the coolest thing.
• 59:34
  And it was such a happy time. I mean, I really,
• 59:37
  I felt, what's that, bonded to that, I guess? Like,
• 59:42
  I really like this, whatever it is.
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: So that was the initial spark.
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: Well, they began to notice that I was musical. So
• 59:51
  at some point, I know, again, at my fourth birthday,
• 59:54
  somebody gave me, or I had a little toy harmonica
• 59:58
  And my dad, you know, those little plastic kind of things.
• 1:00:01
  My dad picked it up and he played Oh Susanna
• 1:00:04
  in the cowboy style. In other words, it's probably a
• 1:00:07
  C harmonica. He played in C, not like blues players
• 1:00:11
  do bending notes. He played that thing you see in
• 1:00:14
  the cowboy movies when they're sitting around the campfire. That
• 1:00:20
  sort of thing. I was just shocked. I'd never seen
• 1:00:22
  my dad do anything like that.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 2: Wow. And then.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: On top of that, my mom could play piano, what
• 1:00:30
  we now call stride piano. She would hit and then
• 1:00:34
  play a chord, like an octave of bass notes and
• 1:00:37
  then a chord above it. Keep that going as like
• 1:00:42
  the drummer in the thing and then play melody and
• 1:00:46
  high notes up above. And it was, you know, she did,
• 1:00:49
  she would, one of my favorite ones was Harvest Moon,
• 1:00:54
  Shine On Harvest Moon, which is a great song And
• 1:00:58
  it just was magical to me. So that kind of
• 1:01:03
  opened the door to let me know that, oh, why,
• 1:01:07
  we can do this in our own house. So the
• 1:01:11
  piano was around. And then we also, I don't know
• 1:01:14
  whose it was, but we had an old Stella acoustic guitar.
• 1:01:20
  Stella is a name going back into the 30s, 20s.
• 1:01:24
  And this thing was built like a tank. It was
• 1:01:29
  hard to play. The strings were like way high and
• 1:01:32
  all that. Eventually, Brother Bob told me at some point, yeah,
• 1:01:36
  we used to play baseball with that guitar. We'd hit
• 1:01:40
  the ball. That's how sturdy it was. But that was
• 1:01:44
  around so that I would every once in a while
• 1:01:48
  mess with it. But somewhere literally in the 7th, is
• 1:01:56
  where I started to really try and learn a chord
• 1:02:00
  and that sort of thing.
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 2: Is that when you thought, I'm going to be a musician?
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: I think that moment was a little bit earlier. It was, again,
• 1:02:13
  up at this place, Winters. My dad had driven into
• 1:02:18
  the town from our little cabin, our little campsite, And
• 1:02:23
  I was with him, and he'd gone to this general store.
• 1:02:26
  And the general store had everything. It had food and stuff,
• 1:02:29
  but it also had fishing tackle and, you know, various
• 1:02:32
  weird things. So I'm standing there sort of near the counter,
• 1:02:36
  and my dad's doing some kind of business. I'm just looking,
• 1:02:40
  and suddenly I hear music. And I'm, what the heck
• 1:02:44
  is that? I didn't even know. They had a jukebox
• 1:02:47
  in this place, right? And somebody had started the jukebox.
• 1:02:51
  So it's playing... music that I really like. It's rock
• 1:02:55
  and roll. I'm about 10 years old. Man, that's good.
• 1:03:00
  And I don't know who it is. It's just got
• 1:03:02
  a really bluesy sound, but it's fast. It's rock and roll.
• 1:03:08
  I run over and I finally determined it's Elvis Presley.
• 1:03:12
  I never heard this. I knew of Elvis, of course,
• 1:03:15
  on TV. He had done Heartbreak Hotel. I had seen
• 1:03:18
  the the Tommy Jimmy Dorsey show that he'd been on
• 1:03:23
  three times. He was on there, I think, five times. Anyway,
• 1:03:28
  and so, wow, Elvis did this? What is this? Well,
• 1:03:31
  it turned out it was the other side of his
• 1:03:33
  second big million seller, which was I Want You, I
• 1:03:37
  Need You, I Love You. This was a song called
• 1:03:39
  My Baby Left Me. And this was basically classic Sun
• 1:03:45
  Records vibe, even though he was now on RCA. It
• 1:03:48
  was that thing they did on Sun Records that just
• 1:03:52
  that kind of country wail with guitar that was more
• 1:03:57
  country than blues and the guitar especially just what is
• 1:04:02
  that I'm watching and this Scotty Moore who I didn't
• 1:04:05
  know his name at the time but he's just playing
• 1:04:07
  this otherworldly stuff and that was I looked at that
• 1:04:13
  and I mean literally my head made I don't know
• 1:04:16
  I said this to myself I don't know what they're doing,
• 1:04:21
  but that's what I want to do. Wow. And I
• 1:04:23
  made up my mind right there in that three minutes
• 1:04:26
  of that song.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 2: That's amazing.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: Well, it was transformative. It still is. It's just a
• 1:04:33
  pretty unique slice of American music.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 2: I don't think I'm aware of that song. I'm going
• 1:04:40
  to listen to it after the podcast.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: You probably know Elvis' song, That's All Right, Mama? Sure. Right. Well,
• 1:04:46
  this is in that vein. It's actually the same writer.
• 1:04:51
  Arthur Crudup. Arthur Big Boy Crudup.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 2: So your family was musical, but you didn't know any musicians.
• 1:04:59
  So what did you think you were going to do?
• 1:05:01
  How did you think you were going to eventually become
• 1:05:03
  a musician? Did you have a plan?
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: At some point, you know what? At some point, a
• 1:05:16
  little earlier than that, but right around that time, It
• 1:05:20
  was the era of doo-wop, right? This is the way,
• 1:05:25
  I mean, a kid can, you can just go anywhere
• 1:05:29
  in your mind, right? And I suppose the Corvette automobile,
• 1:05:35
  of course, had come out. So in a very young mind,
• 1:05:41
  but one of those cool, I guess we call them mashups,
• 1:05:45
  I was going to have a group, but it was
• 1:05:48
  all singing. I was going to have a group, and
• 1:05:52
  it was going to be called Johnny Corvette and the Corvettes. Right?
• 1:06:00
  And there was four. I'm Johnny and three other guys,
• 1:06:05
  and we're all in sparkle jackets, you know, the show business, right?
• 1:06:11
  And we're black, all of us.
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 2: That was your idea?
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: That's what I saw. I was referring to what I
• 1:06:21
  was seeing to be Johnny Corvette in the Corvettes. That
• 1:06:27
  was one of the ingredients.
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: How were you going to be black?
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I didn't have to worry about that.
• 1:06:35
  I mean, the funny thing is that's so similar here
• 1:06:38
  is like when I was little, I wanted to be
• 1:06:41
  a baseball player, right? But some kids dream of being
• 1:06:45
  in the NBA, right? but you got to be 90, 11, 27. Right.
• 1:06:51
  You know, I mean, so how's that going to happen?
• 1:06:54
  I mean, you just said it in a really innocent way,
• 1:06:56
  but a kid just eats spinach or something, you know.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: You eat spinach and become black. And tall. And tall.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: You know, I don't know, but it worked for me.
• 1:07:07
  I mean, literally when I, you know, one of my
• 1:07:09
  dreams as a kid really was I wanted to, I
• 1:07:11
  love baseball, I still do. I wanted to, you know, okay,
• 1:07:16
  what do I got to do? And I'd start throwing,
• 1:07:18
  I was throwing a ball against the side of the house.
• 1:07:21
  I'd made a big, like a target, you know, bullseye.
• 1:07:24
  And I don't know why I did it that way.
• 1:07:27
  And my mom caught me. I was throwing an actual
• 1:07:30
  hard ball. And it was dinting the clapboard, you know,
• 1:07:33
  the wood. I was tearing the house down. So she
• 1:07:38
  got me a tennis ball and that was okay. I
• 1:07:41
  was no good. You know, I wasn't. That dream was
• 1:07:45
  never going to happen.
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 2: Is that what inspired Put Me In, Coach?
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: Of course. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 2: What a great anthem.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: It's amazing.
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: Thank you. Yeah, well.
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 2: I mean, how many baseball games have played that song?
• 1:07:58
  My God.
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: I mean, at least, you know, I mean, there's a
• 1:08:02
  lot of us semi-nerds, I guess, you know, wanted to
• 1:08:05
  play ball, wanted to be a jock, and just really
• 1:08:08
  at some point, you know, the ones that really have it,
• 1:08:12
  pass you by right of course and you just kind
• 1:08:15
  of but in your mind everybody got their scorecard and
• 1:08:18
  you know and they're following the game and all that
• 1:08:21
  and that that vicarious joy of watching otani or aaron
• 1:08:25
  judge or whoever it is you love uh you get
• 1:08:31
  to have that in your heart anyway but i mean
• 1:08:35
  i'm the luckiest guy in the universe okay i didn't
• 1:08:39
  get to play but But I wrote a song, and
• 1:08:43
  my song's there all the time. It's just the coolest feeling.
• 1:08:48
  That song's in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 2: That's amazing.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: It is amazing. It's ridiculous.
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 2: That's so cool.
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: But it's just like, that happened to me. It's like, God,
• 1:08:59
  I could cry.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 2: Over that.
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: When they had sent a letter to me and they
• 1:09:03
  were going to put the music in the hall, I
• 1:09:06
  just was, God, who do I tell? Jeez. Yeah, it
• 1:09:11
  was so good.
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 2: That's amazing. That's amazing. So when did you start writing
• 1:09:15
  your own songs?
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: I was eight years old. Wow.
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 2: Do you remember your first song?
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: Yes, or at least the one I remember is, I
• 1:09:24
  call it the best, the one I can remember. It
• 1:09:30
  was morning. I was getting ready to go to school.
• 1:09:33
  I could walk to school. It was like two and
• 1:09:37
  a half blocks from my house, something like that. I
• 1:09:40
  lived on Ramona. You go past Pomona, and then the
• 1:09:44
  next street was Ashbury. And the school was on Ashbury,
• 1:09:50
  up about two blocks. Harding School. It was a grammar school. Anyway,
• 1:09:57
  I'm getting ready to go to school. Got my lunch.
• 1:09:59
  I'm about to turn off the radio and this commercial
• 1:10:03
  comes on. I was listening to R & B. The
• 1:10:06
  Rhythm and Blues Channel from Oakland. And the DJ suddenly says,
• 1:10:11
  do you have the Wash Day Blues? Is this day
• 1:10:15
  going to be drudgery? Well, maybe you're using the wrong,
• 1:10:19
  and they went off talking about laundry soap. I don't
• 1:10:24
  know if there was a song involved in the commercial.
• 1:10:26
  I think it was just a red, because it was
• 1:10:28
  probably live, you know, right there on old time radio.
• 1:10:33
  So I went out the door with, you know, carrying
• 1:10:35
  my little sack with the lunch in it. It's a
• 1:10:38
  wash day blues.
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: I get kind of to the end of the street.
• 1:10:42
  I think that's Lynn. I got to go down, you know,
• 1:10:45
  Three streets. I'm walking along. I said, wow. I got
• 1:10:50
  the white tape blue. I'm making that noise. It's Muddy Waters.
• 1:10:55
  It's the riff from probably Hoochie Coochie Man, you know.
• 1:11:02
  And it all comes together. I'm just walking down the
• 1:11:05
  street singing about all the stuff that, because it's blues.
• 1:11:08
  It's blues. And I'm hearing all these guys on this
• 1:11:11
  channel I listen to singing the blues and about blues.
• 1:11:15
  So I got Wash Day Blues. That's my song. You know,
• 1:11:20
  for years and years I thought I was embarrassed about
• 1:11:23
  that story. God, John, why couldn't you have a great
• 1:11:28
  story about the sinking of the Titanic or something? Wash
• 1:11:31
  Day Blues. Because it just seems so mundane. But now
• 1:11:36
  I kind of recognize because of the The two elements
• 1:11:39
  I had put together, it's just kind of natural. It's
• 1:11:45
  really the process of writing songs.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 2: That's amazing. And so when you wrote songs, like I
• 1:11:53
  saw this video clip where you're talking about, I think
• 1:11:56
  it was Old Man Down the Road. Is that the
• 1:11:59
  beginning riff? You got it. Yeah. And you were talking
• 1:12:03
  about how that riff just hit you.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 2: Is that it?
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I had this place. It was my studio. It
• 1:12:14
  was basically the garage of a house that I had
• 1:12:20
  bought to be my office and my place. So it
• 1:12:22
  was the size of a garage. I would go there
• 1:12:26
  every day. So in the morning I'd get in, I'd
• 1:12:29
  turn on my tape recorder and various pieces of equipment
• 1:12:34
  and stuff. That was my process, certainly every weekday morning.
• 1:12:38
  sometimes on Saturday, Sunday, whatever, but certainly the five days
• 1:12:43
  a week. And I'd walk in there and work on music.
• 1:12:49
  I did this every day for, I mean, years and years,
• 1:12:51
  from 74 until Centerfield came out, basically, which was 11
• 1:12:58
  years later. And so one morning I walk in and
• 1:13:03
  I haven't even turned on the stuff yet. I just,
• 1:13:07
  for some reason, I went right to the guitar and
• 1:13:12
  I turned on the amp and picked up the guitar
• 1:13:15
  and just kind of noodling because I like to do that.
• 1:13:17
  A lot of my songs have started this way, but
• 1:13:21
  suddenly just played and it really had that sound to it.
• 1:13:26
  And I got my attention because I knew that it
• 1:13:29
  wasn't anything else. And I also, I mean, this is
• 1:13:33
  like in a, this is how quick our brains can work.
• 1:13:36
  You know, it's, taken me way longer to tell it
• 1:13:39
  than the actual thing. But so I played the and
• 1:13:45
  I realized it's not complete. It needs an answer. And
• 1:13:50
  I'm also aware that it's like being on a tightrope
• 1:13:54
  or something over Niagara Falls. You know, you got to
• 1:13:58
  have the right answer. And there's probably only one because
• 1:14:02
  all the other ones are going to kill it. And
• 1:14:05
  you'll never remember this again. Because that happens all the time. Right.
• 1:14:08
  You know, it'd be lame. There, it's precarious. It's hanging
• 1:14:13
  in the air. And you got to come back with
• 1:14:18
  the thing to make it complete. And it has to
• 1:14:21
  be the right thing.
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah!
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 2: Yes!
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: And so I... Oh, my God, yeah. And, you know,
• 1:14:38
  I play it over and over probably for five minutes.
• 1:14:40
  I just tend to do that. That's the joy of music.
• 1:14:45
  That's the joy right there. Because I knew it wasn't
• 1:14:49
  anything else. There was no question in my mind that, well,
• 1:14:51
  is this coming from, you know, The Beatles or Howlin'
• 1:14:55
  Wolf or something? Right. So immediately, I had kept this
• 1:15:01
  little songbook that's only about that big with titles in it.
• 1:15:07
  And I go flipping through the book, and I think
• 1:15:12
  I see something that's somewhere down the road. Okay, that
• 1:15:17
  for some reason appealed to me, and I stuck with it. Okay,
• 1:15:20
  that's what it's called. This song is going to be
• 1:15:23
  somewhere down the road. And that day, so now I
• 1:15:27
  turn on my tape recorder and all that. I play some,
• 1:15:30
  because I had to play real drums then. That's what
• 1:15:33
  took me so long, folks. Anyway, so I make a
• 1:15:39
  little thing that's just the riff and then make a
• 1:15:43
  space of just the drums playing and nothing else so
• 1:15:46
  I can kind of listen to it and improvise what's
• 1:15:51
  going on after this riff. What's somewhere down the road? And,
• 1:15:55
  of course, I start talking about he'd get the thunder
• 1:16:00
  from the mountain, he'd bring the lightning from the sky,
• 1:16:03
  you know, and all that. And these things are going on.
• 1:16:06
  And so you've got to shoot forward probably a few weeks.
• 1:16:11
  I realize I'm starting to write a song, but the
• 1:16:15
  title somewhere down the road to me just seems lame.
• 1:16:18
  It seems undefined, not cool enough, not focused. And probably
• 1:16:26
  not going to remember it because it sounds like just
• 1:16:29
  what it is. You won't remember that. Right. Right. You know,
• 1:16:33
  if you say, I've got a polka dot Chevy sitting
• 1:16:37
  on top of a bull moose or whatever, and that's
• 1:16:42
  your title, you probably get a picture in your head. Right.
• 1:16:46
  It's going to stick. So I'm hunting around. What are
• 1:16:49
  you doing here? What are you talking about in this song?
• 1:16:52
  We're talking about this guy. He's, He's the old man.
• 1:16:57
  He's the old man down the road. That's way better.
• 1:17:02
  So the song became that. The deal is, with my
• 1:17:07
  little song book, probably two years later after that album
• 1:17:12
  had come out, I said, you know what? I want
• 1:17:15
  to check on where somewhere down the road came. And
• 1:17:18
  I went cover to cover, and it's not in there.
• 1:17:24
  There is no place where I've written somewhere down the road.
• 1:17:29
  I just thought I saw it. And that led me
• 1:17:34
  to a really cool song.
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: The reason I'm telling you this is there was a
• 1:17:39
  time I had an office in Warner Brothers when I
• 1:17:43
  was staying down in L.A. And I would go in
• 1:17:49
  there all the time and write, had some keyboards and stuff.
• 1:17:54
  And one day I thought I needed a break. I
• 1:17:57
  took my book and I went out and sat. It
• 1:17:59
  was Warner Brothers parking lot. I went out to my
• 1:18:02
  car and sat down because I was trying to give
• 1:18:05
  myself some, you know, get going, do something. And I
• 1:18:12
  thumbed through the book and I saw changing the weather.
• 1:18:16
  I said, man, I like that. And I look up
• 1:18:20
  and it's kind of a cloudy, gloomy sky, you know. Yeah.
• 1:18:27
  So I ran back in my room and I went off.
• 1:18:30
  I was inspired and I wrote a song called Change
• 1:18:33
  in the Weather. Well, same deal. After that album came out,
• 1:18:38
  I decided to check my... It ain't in there. It's
• 1:18:43
  nowhere in my book where it says Change in the Weather.
• 1:18:47
  So nowadays, until people, you know, maybe it's a shapeshifter.
• 1:18:53
  And there's stuff in there. It can just kind of go, John,
• 1:18:57
  listen to this. I got an idea for you. Right.
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 2: Well, the creative process is so mysterious.
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 2: Because everybody that I talk to, whether it's comedians or
• 1:19:06
  authors or musicians, they They say the ideas almost don't
• 1:19:10
  feel like they're theirs, like they're receiving them from somewhere.
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: For certain.
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 2: That's how you feel?
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: Yep. To me, it's like tuning in a radio. Yeah. Right?
• 1:19:20
  And a lot of it, I guess it's the way
• 1:19:25
  I was raised. You kind of have to be worthy. Right.
• 1:19:28
  You know? I mean, there's a big dose of, if
• 1:19:33
  you're all angry and treating people mean and doing all that,
• 1:19:38
  I'm closing the book.
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: I'm not sending you nothing.
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 2: I think that too.
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 2: I think that too.
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: You got to be receptive and honor this process that
• 1:19:48
  we're going through here. And if you are in that
• 1:19:51
  frame of mind and some humility about this whole thing,
• 1:19:56
  maybe I'll send you something.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 2: The muse.
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Have you ever heard of Steven Pressfield?
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: Huh?
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 2: Steven Pressfield. He's an author. He wrote a great book
• 1:20:05
  called The War of Art. And I have boxes of
• 1:20:10
  this book out front, and I give it to comedians
• 1:20:12
  and artists all the time because it's just a book
• 1:20:15
  about the creative process, about writing. And one of the
• 1:20:18
  things that he talks about is the muse, about giving
• 1:20:21
  honor to the muse and sitting there and calling upon
• 1:20:25
  the muse for these ideas. That if you treat it
• 1:20:27
  like it's a real thing, it will provide you. If
• 1:20:29
  you show up every day and you put in the work,
• 1:20:32
  the muse will give you these ideas.
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 2: But they do feel, like to everybody that I talk
• 1:20:37
  to that's really creative, they feel like they're coming from somewhere.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And it feels like it's always been there. Right.
• 1:20:46
  And it's just up to you to be able to
• 1:20:49
  actually be able to see it or hear it. Right?
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: So I do a lot of, I get ideas in
• 1:20:54
  my head. I'm just walking around and it'll play to
• 1:20:58
  me the same as if you're listening to the radio.
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 2: It just gets in the head. Right. And you start
• 1:21:03
  feeling it.
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: But- I, I do believe you have to, you have
• 1:21:11
  to be doing it all the time. Like for me,
• 1:21:13
  it was a process to actually sit down, be ready.
• 1:21:17
  And a lot of times nothing happens, you know, you
• 1:21:19
  got a blank sheet of paper and it stays blank.
• 1:21:25
  But if you do that enough times at certain times, you'll,
• 1:21:31
  Get a really good inspiration. You'll be allowed to receive it.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: Right? But it really isn't you. Right. That's the way
• 1:21:42
  I think of it. What it is is you have talent.
• 1:21:45
  You're supposed to honor your talent. And so I'm going
• 1:21:49
  to give you something if you're worthy. And now it's
• 1:21:52
  up to you to honor, you know, use yourself. Don't
• 1:21:55
  just go, I got it.
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 2: We're done. No.
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: You got to work it now. Polish it. You know,
• 1:22:01
  make it. Yeah.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I feel the exact same way. I think there's
• 1:22:07
  truth to what you're saying. I want to ask you
• 1:22:10
  about Fortunate Son. How did you write that? Like, how
• 1:22:14
  did that come about? That is like one of the
• 1:22:16
  greatest rebellion songs of all time.
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: Appreciate that.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 2: It's an amazing song. I love it. It's also a
• 1:22:24
  fantastic workout song, by the way. That song gets you
• 1:22:26
  jazzed up. If you're doing like a treadmill or something
• 1:22:29
  like that, you're starting to get tired, crank that sucker up.
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: Well, first of all, I think the first thing I
• 1:22:37
  got to say about it is I was drafted, so
• 1:22:40
  I was in the military. I got in the Army Reserves,
• 1:22:45
  but was on active duty and all the rest, so
• 1:22:51
  I well understood the position of, you might say, the
• 1:23:00
  military mindset, right? Even though I was a young person,
• 1:23:05
  and this is right during the Vietnam era, and I
• 1:23:08
  think I really need to say that almost no one
• 1:23:11
  my age wanted to be in the army and go
• 1:23:15
  to Vietnam. I just that was something you, no, I
• 1:23:19
  don't want to do that. Right. So I got my
• 1:23:23
  draft notice, um, was, got into the army reserves. So
• 1:23:29
  I understood that side of the coin and that side
• 1:23:34
  of fate, you might say. Um, the deal, I think
• 1:23:39
  the deal being, okay, I'm in the military. So now
• 1:23:42
  I got to play by the rules. I got to
• 1:23:45
  do everything that's, This is what I am, right? There's
• 1:23:52
  a little bit of the whole idea of being American
• 1:23:55
  and serving your country. I'm trying not to say, oh, yeah,
• 1:24:01
  now I'm gung-ho and I'm John Wayne and I'm going
• 1:24:03
  to take on Iwo Jima or something. It was more like, yeah,
• 1:24:08
  but you've got to do this right. You can't just
• 1:24:11
  be some guy that's on– AWOL all the time and
• 1:24:16
  being a mess, you know, I wanted to do it right. So, um, I,
• 1:24:21
  I went through all of that and it's another story,
• 1:24:26
  but eventually got my honorable discharge, which led to another song,
• 1:24:31
  but it's a different song. Um, and that was just before,
• 1:24:36
  just as the Creedence career was getting started. But anyhow, um,
• 1:24:45
  During the Vietnam time, there was a lot of unrest,
• 1:24:52
  civil unrest in America and around the world. Those times
• 1:24:55
  were very volatile. But especially in America, there was a
• 1:25:00
  lot of protests and discussion about the war itself. Remember,
• 1:25:05
  there was a draft, so young people kind of by
• 1:25:08
  nature were against the war and against the draft because
• 1:25:13
  it seemed to be sort of, not logical as that.
• 1:25:19
  And in some instances, you would see on the news,
• 1:25:23
  you know, some senator who had the political clout that
• 1:25:27
  he could keep his teenage son from being drafted or
• 1:25:33
  get his teenage son into some cushy job. And you
• 1:25:37
  kind of saw it a few times. These guys were
• 1:25:41
  The fix was in, you know?
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: And that just really didn't seem fair, not just in
• 1:25:48
  my own case, but I'm more identified with the people
• 1:25:53
  that were protesting the war. No one had ever really
• 1:25:57
  explained why we were having that war. To my mind,
• 1:26:01
  we still don't know. You know, it's just somebody's ego
• 1:26:05
  decided they wanted to have a war and they had
• 1:26:07
  a war. Right. most of these things that have cropped
• 1:26:11
  up ever since have always ended kind of miserably. And
• 1:26:17
  we never, they never were one. They just sort of dissolved.
• 1:26:23
  So there was no marching band and all that stuff
• 1:26:26
  to get to, you know, like World War II ended
• 1:26:29
  with a decisive victory. Anyhow, that angst and anger within
• 1:26:36
  me about that situation was fueling my thoughts about the
• 1:26:46
  current times. This was 1969. So I started showing the band,
• 1:26:51
  all the songs that the band learned and played throughout
• 1:26:57
  the Creedence career, they literally learned them as instrumentals. They
• 1:27:02
  didn't hear the song. I didn't show them the song.
• 1:27:07
  So in other words, I would show the bass player
• 1:27:10
  his part. Here's how your part goes. Here's how the
• 1:27:14
  drums will be. Here's the rhythm guitar part. And the
• 1:27:18
  band wouldn't actually hear the whole song until I had
• 1:27:21
  gone into the studio after that recording process and added
• 1:27:26
  my vocal, sang the background vocal parts.
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: Played the conga drum or the shakers or tambourine or piano.
• 1:27:36
  you know, all the other stuff. Then they heard how
• 1:27:38
  the song went. So they learned their parts as instrumentals.
• 1:27:45
  And this was exactly that way. I showed them how
• 1:27:49
  to play what was the form of the song. And
• 1:27:54
  I don't think I had told them the name of
• 1:27:56
  the song yet. I thought I was writing a song
• 1:27:59
  called Favorite Son. Because starting in 1952 when they sent
• 1:28:06
  my second grade class, I think, home to watch the inauguration,
• 1:28:13
  I believe, of Eisenhower. I think that's what it was.
• 1:28:18
  And we had a tiny little TV. All I saw
• 1:28:22
  was big black limousines. That was my entire impression of
• 1:28:27
  the presidential thing. Right. and politics. So after that, I
• 1:28:31
  kind of would watch parts of the conventions in the summer.
• 1:28:37
  You know, there'd be these gigantic, you know, I didn't
• 1:28:40
  know what they were then, but these big rooms full
• 1:28:45
  of smoke. And every once in a while, somebody, your honor,
• 1:28:51
  the great state of Texas would like to nominate her
• 1:28:56
  favorite son Billy Saul Estes or whatever. Right. Right. And
• 1:29:02
  they all said that, you know, the state of Vermont
• 1:29:04
  would like to nominate her favorite son. And so that
• 1:29:08
  I had written that one down in my book and
• 1:29:10
  I thought I was going to write a kind of
• 1:29:12
  a political song. So the band was getting pretty solid
• 1:29:18
  in the, in the backing track. And that told me,
• 1:29:22
  you know, I was driving a career. I mean, I,
• 1:29:27
  There wasn't someone else telling me. I was the one
• 1:29:30
  deciding and pushing, and I think pushing pretty hard. I
• 1:29:34
  wanted a new single to be ready, and this seemed
• 1:29:37
  like it might be it. So at one point after
• 1:29:41
  the band had been rehearsing the music for that song,
• 1:29:45
  Fortunate Son, for a few weeks, it was getting pretty good.
• 1:29:49
  I said, all right, I got to write the words.
• 1:29:51
  I got to get the whole song together. I took
• 1:29:54
  a little yellow tablet like that, went in my bedroom,
• 1:29:58
  sat on the bed, and instead of what I thought
• 1:30:02
  it was going to be, the first thing I said,
• 1:30:06
  this idea of the red, white, and blue, and they're
• 1:30:10
  always super patriots, you know, all this stuff, bluster and
• 1:30:14
  all that, right? And I said, how do I get that?
• 1:30:19
  How do I get that? Well, they're waving the flag. Yeah,
• 1:30:22
  but what's going on now? They're pointing the cannon at you, right? Yeah,
• 1:30:28
  but it ain't me. And I realized, oh, wow, that's
• 1:30:31
  something I can repeat. It ain't me.
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 2: I ain't no, you know.
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: And literally, I mean, I just sort of did it
• 1:30:40
  in front of you. Almost the way it played out
• 1:30:43
  of me sitting on that bed. Literally walked in and
• 1:30:47
  20 minutes later walked out with the whole song.
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: Coming from, I didn't have anything other than Favorite Son.
• 1:30:56
  The rest was just the stuff that was boiling in
• 1:30:59
  my head at the time, of course. Basically because well-heeled
• 1:31:06
  people getting out of the draft, which kind of pissed
• 1:31:10
  me off. There were a lot of guys, now that
• 1:31:14
  I was in them or had been in the military,
• 1:31:17
  and I knew there were a lot of other guys
• 1:31:18
  felt just like me. I didn't grow up that I
• 1:31:22
  wanted to be a soldier and go do that. It
• 1:31:25
  was just fate that made that happen. So the unfairness
• 1:31:29
  of the situation made me want to talk about that.
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 2: Well, you nailed it. It's such a great song. So
• 1:31:38
  did you have the music all settled out when you
• 1:31:41
  went to the musicians and explained to them how the
• 1:31:43
  song was going to play out? Did you have that
• 1:31:45
  before the lyrics?
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: Yes. Almost always.
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 2: So what did you think the song was going to
• 1:31:51
  be about when you just brought them the music?
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: Well, as I said, I thought it was going to
• 1:31:56
  be Favorite Son.
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 2: So you kind of still had the theme in your
• 1:32:01
  head of how it was about people in the world.
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: It was something around that stuff.
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: I just didn't know what it was. And I also,
• 1:32:08
  you know, there's a T-shirt, the older I get, the
• 1:32:11
  better I was. You know, I was pretty good then.
• 1:32:16
  I guess what I'm trying to say is I didn't
• 1:32:19
  know what the song was going to be, but I
• 1:32:22
  I mean, now I would certainly have a little trepidation.
• 1:32:25
  I'd go in a room with a blank. I'm probably
• 1:32:28
  going to come out of there with some, you know,
• 1:32:30
  a smiley face that I doodle. There's no words, meaning
• 1:32:35
  somehow I was counting on myself to do it. But
• 1:32:41
  that's pretty precocious.
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's also that divine intervention of the muse.
• 1:32:48
  Like you put in the work and you called. You
• 1:32:52
  called upon it for inspiration and your mind started lighting up. Yeah.
• 1:32:56
  And then you started putting the pieces together.
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh, that's a wonderful, Joe, that's an amazing process when,
• 1:33:05
  because that's what I do. I'm not a prize fighter,
• 1:33:08
  you know. I'm not a baseball pitcher, let's say, because
• 1:33:11
  there would be an evolution in his work. Right. You know,
• 1:33:14
  or something that you can, I'm not those things, but
• 1:33:18
  I am a songwriter and that, that, it plays out
• 1:33:23
  over some, it isn't just once, you know, it plays
• 1:33:26
  out over some time. And that incidents where you suddenly
• 1:33:33
  get a hook into an idea and then the, the gods,
• 1:33:40
  the muse, they let you continue forward with something that
• 1:33:44
  is way better than you ever dreamed was going to
• 1:33:48
  be it. And suddenly it, wow, this is really cool,
• 1:33:51
  and you're excited, and you're happy, and it's coming to be.
• 1:33:57
  And you realize, as I said, that was, by the way,
• 1:33:59
  by far the quickest I ever wrote a song. And
• 1:34:03
  that's so quick, so fast, that, I mean, it's almost
• 1:34:08
  like instant replay. It was so fast that you, or
• 1:34:13
  at least I did, I go, man, this is really good.
• 1:34:17
  I mean, just like a minute ago, I was taking
• 1:34:21
  a breath hoping that something would happen. Yeah.
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 2: Well, that's what's amazing about great songs sometimes. Like John
• 1:34:28
  Mellencamp was telling me a story about I Need a
• 1:34:31
  Lover That Won't Drive Me Crazy. Like that song he
• 1:34:34
  wrote in the shower. Oh. Like all together.
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: You mean in one shower?
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 2: In one shower. He was just taking a shower and
• 1:34:41
  all of a sudden, I need a lover that won't
• 1:34:44
  drive me crazy.
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 2: And then... Next thing you know, he's got it.
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 2: And it's an all-time classic.
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 2: It's amazing.
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: Well, the songwriter, and especially when he's on his game, he.
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 2: Knows.
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: And it relates to your own personality, whatever it is
• 1:35:07
  you like, the stuff you have gravitated towards. And so
• 1:35:12
  when one of those comes along, it really makes you
• 1:35:15
  smile because you're going... yeah, this is, this sounds like me.
• 1:35:19
  This is the stuff I like. And you, you go
• 1:35:22
  with it. Cause I mean, you know, I, I am,
• 1:35:27
  I would say notoriously corny, you know, at least I
• 1:35:30
  think I am, you know, it's like they make all
• 1:35:33
  these jokes nowadays about dad bod and all those kinds
• 1:35:37
  of things. Yeah. I mean, I literally think that's me. Right.
• 1:35:42
  And some of this, I mean, center field is, corniest
• 1:35:46
  thing that was ever invented. I love it. I unashamedly
• 1:35:51
  want to be corny. That's who I am. I'm corny.
• 1:35:55
  In that song, that resonates. I'm glad I'm happy. I'm
• 1:36:04
  happy to be happy. I want to be happy. Right.
• 1:36:08
  In other words, I don't have to feel because rock
• 1:36:10
  and roll is all about dark colors and leather jackets
• 1:36:13
  and piercing and, you know, tats and scowl. You know,
• 1:36:18
  Elvis would all that stuff. That's good. I mean, you know,
• 1:36:22
  but I like, you know, well, it seems to be me.
• 1:36:28
  I can just be unashamedly. And I'm glad, you know, like,
• 1:36:32
  Centerfield is so optimistic and just great.
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 2: It's an awesome song.
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 2: I don't think rock and roll is all dark. I
• 1:36:39
  think there's aspects of rock and roll that people like
• 1:36:42
  that are dark because it's mysterious.
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 2: These guys are rock stars.
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 2: But, you know, rock's everything. It's like there's so many
• 1:36:49
  layers to it. There's so many different types of personality.
• 1:36:52
  And you happy to be happy is also an awesome
• 1:36:55
  part of rock.
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Clearly. Yeah. Well, because actually real people, all as humans,
• 1:37:02
  sort of have all those different.
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 2: Parts, right?
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 2: That's why we identify with it. And I think the
• 1:37:08
  brooding dark rock star is like, it's a fantasy idea
• 1:37:12
  that people want to, they want to believe that there's
• 1:37:15
  that part of them. You know, there's this just, you know.
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: What I mean? I'm going to say it's absolutely. And,
• 1:37:25
  you know, Marlon Brando on the motorcycle in, is it
• 1:37:29
  The Wild Ones, I guess?
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so.
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, that he's just so bad.
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: And so rock stars, well, other, I guess, but rock stars,
• 1:37:45
  because it was right in that era, they invented or
• 1:37:48
  gravitated to, in other words, one picture defines me. Yeah.
• 1:37:52
  This is my uniform. Yeah. You know, I sleep in this.
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: And so, you know, I've got a big chain, a
• 1:38:01
  leather jacket. I mean, it got more and more violent
• 1:38:04
  or dark. Right. Voodoo, voodoo, you know, and all that.
• 1:38:10
  And it's funny because it's basically I'm all this all
• 1:38:15
  the time.
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: This one picture does it. And I kind of, my
• 1:38:20
  wife and I joke about it because she'll kind of say,
• 1:38:23
  say something like, well, you don't dress like a rock star.
• 1:38:26
  And then, of course, I'll say, because I'm not, right?
• 1:38:32
  I always sort of... I mean, I have a leather
• 1:38:34
  jacket somewhere, right? Or two, even. And it... How can
• 1:38:43
  I say it? To me, it was a uniform. To me,
• 1:38:46
  it was a pose. And so... I tend to actually
• 1:38:50
  just put on clothes you can buy in the store
• 1:38:54
  when I get up in the morning. I take my
• 1:38:55
  kids to school. I didn't put on the whole like,
• 1:38:59
  just got off the stage at, I don't know, name
• 1:39:03
  some place, at the whiskey. And now I'm bringing my
• 1:39:07
  kids to school. Hey, Mrs. How you doing? Flip my
• 1:39:11
  cigarette over into the I guess I could be a
• 1:39:15
  sitcom or something, but That wasn't me. I kind of
• 1:39:20
  was normal dad to my... And I'm glad they saw
• 1:39:23
  me that way, to tell you the truth.
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. The idea is silly that everybody has to
• 1:39:29
  be one way.
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: It's ridiculous.
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 2: It's ridiculous. Well, clearly, when you look at what you produced,
• 1:39:34
  you clearly are a rock star, and you did it
• 1:39:37
  by being yourself.
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: Actually, I think you nailed it there. Here's a real truism.
• 1:39:46
  When you're making something... and we talked about this, and
• 1:39:49
  it's resonating with you. It just seems like in your wheelhouse,
• 1:39:53
  it's you. That's probably going to be really good. It's comfortable.
• 1:39:57
  It sounds like you. You relate. It's great. If you
• 1:40:02
  ever get yourself as a songwriter, singer, whatever, well, so-and-so
• 1:40:07
  is going to really like that I did this, and
• 1:40:10
  you're off on some weird thing trying to be a
• 1:40:15
  change or different or something. That's not going to work.
• 1:40:19
  Absolutely not going to work because you think somebody else
• 1:40:24
  sees it a certain way and you're doing it for
• 1:40:26
  them and God knows whatever that is, but it isn't.
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 2: You at all.
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: You probably are just out of your element, off the rails.
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 2: You might say. And guys do get off the rails.
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: Oh, I've done it myself. Oh, yeah, especially being preachy
• 1:40:44
  and that kind of thing. You know, there's some songs that, oh, God.
• 1:40:49
  Shut up, John.
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 2: Where does that come from? Does that come from just
• 1:40:52
  you have a big audience and all these people look
• 1:40:55
  up to you and you just start feeling you're important?
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: I think some of it, I don't know all the answers.
• 1:41:05
  Who does? But you're in a mood where you're, or
• 1:41:11
  a mode, you're, you want to get some material together.
• 1:41:15
  You want to make a record. You want to have
• 1:41:18
  some stuff finished and maybe you're not so inspired, right? Okay, well,
• 1:41:24
  I'm going to, how about if I talk about whatever
• 1:41:27
  and you start trying, it's almost like a square peg
• 1:41:30
  in a round hole. Yeah, I got to do something
• 1:41:33
  because there is some credence to that just work just
• 1:41:41
  start working just start moving you know don't just sit
• 1:41:44
  there do something sorry and keep grinding and maybe eventually
• 1:41:49
  it'll get to where it's natural you know the good
• 1:41:51
  part yeah because just sitting and doing nothing which i've
• 1:41:55
  certainly been accused of is that's nothing for no one
• 1:42:00
  right so you start moving your feet and trying to
• 1:42:04
  get the juices to flow and all that um But
• 1:42:07
  like I said, yeah, I wrote some songs, a whole
• 1:42:09
  album really, called Eye of the Zombie. It was the
• 1:42:13
  follow-up to Centerfield. And I think, well, I had some other,
• 1:42:23
  some ulterior, not that I did it on purpose, but
• 1:42:26
  some other ingredients came into my mix. I'll get there
• 1:42:31
  in a minute. But anyway, the album as a whole
• 1:42:34
  is pretty dark and pretty... doesn't ring true to me
• 1:42:40
  I think it's kind of misses the mark it's off
• 1:42:47
  that's a that album and that period of my life
• 1:42:50
  is a really interesting really interesting phenomena I think that
• 1:42:59
  I'm not the only one it's just that I consider
• 1:43:02
  myself lucky so I worked for you know I had
• 1:43:07
  this enormous band, number one in the world. Get screwed
• 1:43:11
  by the record company. Lose my life savings. Band breaks up.
• 1:43:16
  Bands in the newspaper saying nasty things about me, etc.
• 1:43:24
  I'm held kind of in a dungeon by the record
• 1:43:26
  company and I got to either give them my music
• 1:43:29
  or no one else. And I somehow managed to get
• 1:43:36
  through all that, and it's 15 years after Creedence breaking up, basically.
• 1:43:43
  Finally come out with an album called Centerfield. There's happy,
• 1:43:47
  joyful music on it. It goes to number one. It's acclaimed,
• 1:43:52
  which is a wonderful thing, and it's a hit. I
• 1:43:58
  think what happened is the story I tell about it.
• 1:44:01
  It's as if you'd been unjustly in prison, convicted of
• 1:44:06
  a crime, put in the penitentiary for a long time.
• 1:44:11
  And one day they decide, oops, you're right, we made
• 1:44:15
  a mistake. You're free because you didn't commit any crimes.
• 1:44:20
  We're going to let you free. And you're so happy,
• 1:44:24
  you walk out the door, that's center field coming out,
• 1:44:28
  and you come out into this big meadow where green
• 1:44:31
  grass and Bluebirds, you know, it's a Disney cartoon, right? Right.
• 1:44:35
  And then you turn around and you see frickin' San Quentin,
• 1:44:39
  the prison that you were in, and now you're angry.
• 1:44:43
  You look at that and you're just, well, what the?
• 1:44:47
  That's what happened. You know, when Centerfield came out, I
• 1:44:54
  should have, and was a success. In other words, I
• 1:44:57
  was exonerated or vindicated. I should have immediately gone to therapy,
• 1:45:03
  seen a shrink. But that wasn't raised anywhere near any
• 1:45:09
  of that kind of stuff. So I didn't know to
• 1:45:11
  do that. Instead, all that stuff that I was repressing
• 1:45:17
  so that I could do center field, it just came
• 1:45:20
  out like... Instead of being overjoyed, I was miserable, bitter, sad.
• 1:45:28
  And it happened all at once. It didn't like develop.
• 1:45:30
  It was bam. And for like two years, it was like,
• 1:45:36
  you could say Saul's name. I would implode like the
• 1:45:41
  werewolf in Werewolves of London or something. Or what's that guy?
• 1:45:48
  The Hulk.
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: And so I made that album, and that's all that stuff.
• 1:45:55
  I mean, I just didn't have the sense to see
• 1:45:57
  that it was nothing like Centerfield. Right. Not a good,
• 1:46:02
  this guy's not happy. It was not a good follow-up.
• 1:46:06
  How did you bounce back?
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 2: And then I met Julie.
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: Oh. You know, right in the middle of that tour
• 1:46:17
  in 86 for Eye of the Zombie, or as we
• 1:46:23
  So I am a zombie, you know. I met Julie.
• 1:46:28
  And even though I didn't know, I thought I was
• 1:46:35
  in perpetual binge mode. Basically, okay, I'm going to go
• 1:46:40
  out and tour now. I'm just going to be a
• 1:46:42
  rock star on the road and be everything I never
• 1:46:47
  got to do for 20 years, right? Now I'm like,
• 1:46:50
  I'm a little kid, musician again. That's what I thought
• 1:46:55
  I was doing. Obviously, that comes from some anger to
• 1:46:58
  talk like that. And so I just thought I was
• 1:47:02
  going to make my way through the Hollywood Hills, you
• 1:47:06
  might say. I think I actually said that in those days.
• 1:47:10
  And one day, just suddenly met Julie, not expecting to
• 1:47:16
  meet the love of my life, the person I feel
• 1:47:20
  that was that I was destined to meet and the
• 1:47:24
  person that would, through her good graces, help me find
• 1:47:30
  myself and help me enjoy and find the joy of
• 1:47:35
  life again. Um, and it all, it all changed.
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 2: That's awesome. That's awesome. It's great that you bounced out
• 1:47:45
  of that because a lot of people don't, you know,
• 1:47:47
  when something bad happens to them, they just go into
• 1:47:50
  a spiral. They get in, It's kind of amazing that
• 1:47:53
  you were joyful at first, but then you started getting
• 1:47:56
  resentful and thinking about it, which is totally understandable.
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: Well, you said a spiral, and that's just what it
• 1:48:02
  felt like. You're just kind of getting— it' s getting worse and worse,
• 1:48:05
  not better.
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 2: Alcohol as well, right?
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: And, boy, you know, they call it— it takes you a
• 1:48:12
  long time to figure out. It's a depressant.
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah. You're drinking.
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: You think you're drinking to forget stuff. but you're getting
• 1:48:21
  more and more depressed. Right.
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's weakening your resolve, your body. It's weakening
• 1:48:27
  your vitality. So you're tired and you're angry.
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: That too. Yeah. And your mindset. Yeah. You're just in
• 1:48:34
  a– Miserable mood.
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 2: And it's also that's also in the rock and roll
• 1:48:39
  stereotype You know the the drinking hard partying like one
• 1:48:45
  of my favorite songs when I was a kid it
• 1:48:47
  was bad company's shooting star and Every kid that used
• 1:48:51
  to listen to that thought they were Johnny like Johnny
• 1:48:55
  was a schoolboy when he heard his first Beatles song
• 1:48:57
  It's a sad song the guy dies young comes rock
• 1:49:00
  star and was up dead and everybody like was romanticizing
• 1:49:03
  and This song of this terrible lifestyle that this guy lived.
• 1:49:08
  This guy was super talented and had the gift.
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: Well, it's based on, you know, some reality there, of course.
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, yeah, we really romanticize the idea of
• 1:49:23
  dying young, burn bright, die young. And it's all cool until...
• 1:49:31
  They're pointing at you and you're the one that's going
• 1:49:32
  to die. I mean, at that moment in life, most people, no,
• 1:49:36
  I don't want to die. Up until then, it's just
• 1:49:40
  sort of a vague idea out there somewhere.
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 2: Right, right, right. But weird that it's a romantic vague idea.
• 1:49:48
  Johnny died one night, died in his bed, bottle of whiskey,
• 1:49:51
  sleeping tablets by his head. We just assumed this is
• 1:49:56
  how it goes. You know, like this is the rock
• 1:49:59
  and roll romantic story.
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: Well, you hear those words when you're young, of course. Right.
• 1:50:05
  That actually sounds kind of positive, you know, because rock
• 1:50:09
  and roll, man. Yeah. When you're older, you can hear
• 1:50:12
  the same words and you say, yes, that's real. But
• 1:50:18
  it's not a positive thing anymore. It's just sort of
• 1:50:21
  a statement of fact. Right. Yeah. I mean, there's a.
• 1:50:26
  I'm sitting here now talking about some parts of me
• 1:50:30
  that I'm certainly embarrassed about and probably ashamed of. I've
• 1:50:37
  let the shame part go. It just happened, right? I mean,
• 1:50:40
  I don't encourage anyone and I try to tell them, no,
• 1:50:43
  stay away from, don't do what I did. But I
• 1:50:48
  used to beat myself up a lot with the shame part.
• 1:50:51
  And I think that might be part of the healing,
• 1:50:54
  part of the getting out the other end um because
• 1:51:00
  the more and more solid you get in the resolve
• 1:51:03
  of the way you're going to really live your life
• 1:51:05
  yeah and not that the kind of more the shame
• 1:51:10
  dissipates and you you're not so it's not tenuous anymore
• 1:51:14
  like oh i might fall back you know You're not
• 1:51:17
  so scared that that could happen anymore.
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 2: I think the shame is an important element.
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 2: I think the shame of your past and the mistakes
• 1:51:24
  that you've made motivates you to never make them again.
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 2: As long as you don't think you're still that person.
• 1:51:30
  That's the problem. Some people, they'll do something in high
• 1:51:33
  school and they carry that for the rest of their life.
• 1:51:36
  Whatever it is, whatever stupid mistakes they made, whatever behavior,
• 1:51:39
  they think that's them forever. And that's what's crazy.
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: Oh, we should be able to grow up and, you know, kids.
• 1:51:49
  I got married the first time at 20. I mean,
• 1:51:53
  there just should be a law. You know, you're just
• 1:51:58
  too young. You don't know what you're doing. You don't
• 1:52:01
  know what all this really means. Certainly by the time
• 1:52:07
  I met Julie, you know what, though, that experience made me,
• 1:52:13
  shy away for a few years there from the whole
• 1:52:16
  idea of a marriage commitment. I was committed, but the
• 1:52:21
  marriage part scared me, you know, just, oh my goodness.
• 1:52:26
  And then one day I realized I was sort of, well,
• 1:52:29
  wait a minute, go back to square one. What's the
• 1:52:32
  most joyful, happy thing you can do? Well, I want
• 1:52:36
  to marry her. Right. And have children and have a
• 1:52:39
  white picket fence and a house and we go to
• 1:52:42
  kindergarten and all those things, you know. We bake cookies
• 1:52:45
  at the PTA. I want all that.
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: So, sure.
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 2: It's crazy because that's not what anybody thinks of when
• 1:52:53
  you think of a rock and roll life. Uh-oh.
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: Right? I suppose. See, I'm corny again.
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 2: It's not corny. I think it's authentic. I don't think
• 1:53:02
  there's anything wrong with the way you think at all.
• 1:53:04
  I think it's healthy.
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: You know, I just really, even though my mom, I mean,
• 1:53:12
  she was a warrior. Think of it. There were five boys.
• 1:53:16
  That was my family. My parents split up. It was
• 1:53:20
  kind of a long, ongoing thing, but somewhere around eight
• 1:53:24
  years old. And so it was my mom's job to
• 1:53:27
  raise these five boys. And at some point, being a teenager,
• 1:53:32
  a little later, I said, it's a wonder we're not
• 1:53:34
  all in San Quentin. You know, I mean, somehow she
• 1:53:39
  had enough of her. She gave enough of her to
• 1:53:43
  inspire us, all of us really, to be good people.
• 1:53:48
  I mean, you know, we all had our faults and
• 1:53:51
  foibles and fell down and all that. But yet the
• 1:53:54
  ideal was to try and reach up here and be
• 1:53:57
  a good person. And it was because our family wasn't
• 1:54:03
  in some sense to try and have a normal family,
• 1:54:06
  you know, leave it to Beaver and all that sort
• 1:54:08
  of thing.
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: So that was a big goal to me, a big
• 1:54:14
  inspiration to want that.
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 2: Well, it's a beautiful thing. There's nothing wrong with that idea.
• 1:54:21
  Speaker 1: Not at all.
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 2: Not at all. It's just the idea that there's something
• 1:54:24
  wrong with it is that that's the fake rock and
• 1:54:27
  roll vision. That's the vision of the dark artist, you know?
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: I think.
• 1:54:35
  I don't know if I talk with Julie about this.
• 1:54:37
  Sometimes we show up at stuff and there'll be a
• 1:54:40
  lot of characters. I'm talking about musical things. A lot
• 1:54:43
  of characters roaming around. I kind of look like Ward Cleaver,
• 1:54:51
  Beaver's dad. Mr. Boy Scout or something walking around. She's
• 1:54:58
  looking at me like, couldn't you have worn something a
• 1:55:01
  little more hotter?
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 2: A little more rock and roll.
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe. And I'm just not bothered. I mean, it
• 1:55:08
  is kind of funny, though. Actually, I've worn some cool
• 1:55:11
  clothes at some of the stuff. That would all be
• 1:55:14
  Julie's doing, of course. Yeah, I mean, it's almost like,
• 1:55:22
  you know, could you show up at a reunion of
• 1:55:28
  rock guys, you know, in their 50s or something, and
• 1:55:31
  everybody pull out their blotter, police blotter. Oh, yeah, I
• 1:55:35
  got busted for– and everybody would have.
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 2: A– A rap sheet.
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: I mean it would be a badge of honor, but
• 1:55:44
  I suppose to me I'm just really glad that it
• 1:55:48
  wasn't like that.
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 2: Well, it's just you being authentic. It's a powerful thing.
• 1:55:53
  It's great too because the influence is to not– the
• 1:55:58
  influence is to create an image of You know, and
• 1:56:01
  a lot of people cultivated that image.
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: Of course.
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 2: And they get kind of captured by it.
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 2: And then you have to be that person forever. You can't, like, switch.
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: Letterman to Pee Wee Herman on his show. Just think,
• 1:56:14
  Pee Wee, you're going to have to dress like that
• 1:56:17
  for the rest of your life.
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 2: That's true. Right? Right?
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 2: You become a character. And that's what people love. They
• 1:56:25
  don't love you. They love this fake thing that you've.
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: Presented to the world. It's the cowboy thing, the motorcycle. Look,
• 1:56:35
  I like all those too, actually. I like keeping it
• 1:56:41
  as a fantasy. I watch some TV shows and my
• 1:56:47
  favorites are the modern, like Yellowstone and all the other ones.
• 1:56:53
  After that, there's probably a lot of A lot of— what
• 1:56:58
  do you call that? Literary license, you know?
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: For imagery. But I love the imagery.
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: I mean, I can sit there and watch that river
• 1:57:06
  flowing past those rocks and the pine trees forever and
• 1:57:10
  some cows going over the— that' s okay.
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 2: I love it. And the stoic cowboys living this rough life.
• 1:57:15
  I like all that. Of course. Everybody does. It's very
• 1:57:18
  romantic when you're looking at it from the outside, especially.
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 2: I mean, how many people moved to Montana because of
• 1:57:24
  that show?
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: They're hoping not so many.
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 2: I bet a lot did, though. A lot did, and
• 1:57:29
  I think a lot left. Yeah, I think they realize
• 1:57:32
  how hard the winters are. They're like, all right, this
• 1:57:35
  ain't my romantic idea.
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's a long winter up there.
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 1: Oh, boy. Yeah.
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 2: Music is one of the most powerful things in American
• 1:57:47
  culture because a great song like Fortunate Son— Can inspire
• 1:57:51
  people to change their lives. It can inspire people to
• 1:57:53
  make decisions. It does things to people. It gives you fuel.
• 1:57:58
  Like I was saying, if I listen to that song
• 1:58:00
  when I'm working out, it's like I took an energy pill.
• 1:58:03
  like all of a sudden I have more energy like
• 1:58:05
  that's real it's a powerful thing that you've created it
• 1:58:09
  really is you know and the fact that you did
• 1:58:13
  it out of love and enjoyment speaks to why the
• 1:58:16
  music is so resonates so much with people.
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 1: Well you know especially with that song at that point
• 1:58:24
  in the career of my band remember I was writing
• 1:58:29
  all the songs. I'll talk about that after this, I guess,
• 1:58:33
  in a minute. But I wanted to have just an
• 1:58:39
  all-out screaming rocker, which we didn't have yet. You know,
• 1:58:45
  the career was about a year and a half old.
• 1:58:48
  And so, I mean, I commissioned myself to, I want
• 1:58:53
  to have that that absolutely loud screaming song with the
• 1:58:59
  guitars and all. And so that was sort of the
• 1:59:03
  commission I gave myself to create.
• 1:59:06
  Speaker 2: As opposed to something like, have you ever seen the rain?
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Or even down on the corner, which is a
• 1:59:11
  different vibe. Right. You know, I wanted to, cause I
• 1:59:14
  like that. I like when bands, you know, uh, the
• 1:59:17
  Beatles actually, I want to hold your hand or she
• 1:59:21
  was just 17 and saw her standing there, I guess. Um,
• 1:59:25
  You know, or it's not really fast, but it certainly
• 1:59:30
  had that vibe. You know, the instrumental Rumble by Link Wray.
• 1:59:37
  I see I've missed you. Cool.
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know that song.
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: Can you put that one up?
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, pull that one up. We'll get flagged. We'll remove it.
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: Do you do that? Do you play little snippets of music?
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 2: We can play snippets, but the problem is.
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: You know everything we've just been talking about?
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 1: Everything, including the guy. If there's a clip of him
• 1:59:56
  playing that.
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: The only problem is we can't put it on the
• 2:00:00
  podcast itself or we'll get flagged. But we can listen
• 2:00:03
  to it right now. And then we'll just cut that
• 2:00:04
  part out.
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: That was the musical scale right there. What is that?
• 2:00:10
  I took so much out of that. But anyway, he
• 2:00:12
  was the rumble. It's a song. Who's the guy? Link Wray. Oh, God,
• 2:00:19
  that's so cool. And when you saw him. Black leather jacket,
• 2:00:22
  skinny as a rail, probably had a suit. Yeah. Probably
• 2:00:26
  a motorcycle. I mean, it was the entire thing in
• 2:00:30
  one little two and a half minute song.
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 2: Wow. Look at him there. God, does he look cool.
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a little older there, but it's, yeah. He's bad.
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 2: Wow. He looks cool as hell. It's always fascinating to
• 2:00:45
  me where artists had like one incredible song. And then
• 2:00:52
  never made it. Like, and you'll find out about that
• 2:00:55
  song and you go, this is incredible. How did this
• 2:00:59
  guy never make it?
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: How am I?
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 2: Do you know what Johnny Thunder is?
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 1: I've heard the name. Okay.
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 2: Play I'm Alive for him. There's a song that my
• 2:01:08
  friend Brian Simpson told me about. God, it must've been
• 2:01:10
  like a couple of years ago now. And he played
• 2:01:13
  it for us in the Mothership, the comedy club, the
• 2:01:15
  green room. And he goes, you're going to love this song.
• 2:01:18
  And I went, who is this? We had to figure
• 2:01:20
  out who it was. It's a song from 1969 by
• 2:01:24
  this guy Johnny Thunder.
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 1: 69?
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 2: 1969. And it's fucking incredible. It's such a good song.
• 2:01:31
  And I'm like, if I didn't know any better, I'm like, oh,
• 2:01:34
  this guy must have been a huge star. I know,
• 2:01:38
  but if I heard that and someone said, this guy's
• 2:01:40
  a huge star, have you heard this song? I'm like, oh,
• 2:01:42
  my God, it sounds like a huge star. Like, this
• 2:01:44
  guy's fantastic. Listen to this. Listen to this. How good
• 2:01:47
  is that?
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 1: It's great.
• 2:01:49
  Speaker 2: How good is that? The song's phenomenal, right? Yeah.
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: Did he ever, like, under a different name or anything?
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 2: Nope.
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: Oh, my goodness.
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 2: Nope. Isn't that crazy?
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: Now we started playing that song. The attitude's great. He's
• 2:02:02
  saying a lot of great stuff. The name's great.
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 2: It's incredible.
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 2: The voice is incredible. The sound's incredible. We played that
• 2:02:10
  song on the podcast a couple years ago, and now
• 2:02:13
  the song's in commercials and all these different things.
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 1: Oh, is that true? Yeah.
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, cool. But he's dead now. He's dead. He died.
• 2:02:20
  I think he died in 2019 or something like that.
• 2:02:23
  He died in 2024.
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: 2024. Wow. Oh, wow.
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 2: So he probably died like right after we discovered him.
• 2:02:30
  Isn't that crazy?
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: Isn't that crazy? Yeah.
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 2: I mean, you hear that, you're like, how did that
• 2:02:37
  guy not be one of the biggest artists in the world?
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 1: Or at least have that song be a big thing.
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 2: That song wasn't even a big hit. Right. It's crazy.
• 2:02:47
  It's just, you realize the slippery nature of success. Especially
• 2:02:57
  with art. Like sometimes guys just catch lightning. They got
• 2:03:01
  that one.
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 2: And that's it.
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: You know, I think any artist that's been around a while.
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 2: He had another hit?
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was his biggest hit.
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 2: Loop de Loop.
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: Oh, I know that song.
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 2: Oh, Johnny Thunder featuring the Bobettes.
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: When did this come out?
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 2: That's 1963.
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's the song. I know that one.
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 1: I didn't know the name. Here we go, loop-de-loo.
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 2: Isn't that crazy? That song was Johnny Thunder's only top
• 2:03:30
  40 hit. That's incredible.
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: How high did it say it got?
• 2:03:34
  Speaker 2: It said number four. Number four on the U.S. pop charts.
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 2: Number six, U.S. R & B charts.
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 2: And the album in Canada reached number 14 two separate weeks.
• 2:03:47
  It's incredible because if you hear that other song, like
• 2:03:51
  that other song is, that should be gigantic. I'm Alive
• 2:03:55
  should be a huge hit.
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: Right. It's weird. Meaning a statement of, you know, it's
• 2:04:00
  like I'm a man or something.
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 2: I've played that for so many musicians and they listen
• 2:04:05
  to it and they never heard it before.
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 2: And so many guys are like, oh, oh my God.
• 2:04:09
  You hear them hit like, oh baby. It just cracks.
• 2:04:14
  It's a perfect song. It's an amazing song. But it's
• 2:04:17
  like the slippery nature of art. You know, it's just
• 2:04:22
  like sometimes.
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so why would something that good just, you know,
• 2:04:27
  there's something.
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: The week it came out was 9-11 or something.
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 2: Well, you know what my fear is? My fear is
• 2:04:35
  that he got. trapped up in the music business side
• 2:04:40
  of it. And they just decided not to promote him
• 2:04:43
  or something. He ran afoul with the music company or something.
• 2:04:48
  It just doesn't make sense that a guy who can
• 2:04:50
  make a song that good If you can make that
• 2:04:52
  song that good, you can make a ton of songs.
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 1: You would think so. Yeah.
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 2: You just need the right people with you.
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because he had the voice.
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 2: He had everything.
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: He could always do that.
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 2: The voice, the sound, the soul to his music, the
• 2:05:04
  way he sang. I'm a man.
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Hey.
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 2: Oh, my God. It's so good. It's so good. It's
• 2:05:12
  a very difficult thing to capture. And even capturing it
• 2:05:21
  only once doesn't ensure a long career of getting it right,
• 2:05:27
  of finding that thing.
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, we were talking about that a little bit
• 2:05:33
  a while ago, you know, that first blush when you
• 2:05:36
  realize you can do it because you've never done it before. Yeah.
• 2:05:40
  You know, when you cross that particular threshold, that's an
• 2:05:45
  amazing transformation, I guess, in an artist's the way he grows. Because...
• 2:05:56
  until you actually do it, it's all just a dream.
• 2:06:00
  You know? I mean, I... I had grown up writing songs.
• 2:06:05
  You know, they weren't great songs. I mean, I kind
• 2:06:08
  of knew it. I was watching all the people I loved.
• 2:06:12
  I'm talking about from being four or five years old
• 2:06:15
  all the way through growing up. And, you know, things happen. Elvis...
• 2:06:21
  Motown and Beatles and all these things happen. And wow,
• 2:06:25
  you really like all that. And meanwhile, you're having the
• 2:06:28
  dream of being in music somehow. But you never really
• 2:06:34
  know if you're going to be able to do that
• 2:06:38
  or not.
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: I mean, this, this sort of spreads out in a
• 2:06:43
  lot of strange ways in entertainment. I mean, I, I,
• 2:06:49
  I kind of make it similar to what if you're
• 2:06:52
  a baseball player and you dream of growing up and
• 2:06:57
  getting to the major leagues, right? Somebody becomes Willie Mays. Right.
• 2:07:04
  And a lot of people don't. And you just don't know.
• 2:07:09
  There's that realization. I mean, for Willie, actually, it was
• 2:07:14
  slow if you read about him. Him and DeRocher could
• 2:07:17
  see it. So if you're lucky enough and you become
• 2:07:26
  Willie Mays, I mean, God bless you, right? But there
• 2:07:29
  is that, for most of us, that moment that, well, sorry, kid,
• 2:07:35
  you know, you're average, but we don't need average.
• 2:07:40
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: And that just happens a lot. In music, there was
• 2:07:46
  people like me. When the four people that became Creedence
• 2:07:52
  sort of got together in 1967 after I got off
• 2:07:54
  active duty. And we said, okay, we're gonna go for broke. Yeah, okay,
• 2:08:03
  we'll have a democracy. Yeah, we'll vote on everything. Yeah,
• 2:08:09
  we'll all write songs and everything, right. One of the
• 2:08:14
  things that happened going along those lines I would show
• 2:08:19
  up at the rehearsal. At that point, we said, we
• 2:08:24
  got to do this all the time if we're ever
• 2:08:25
  going to get any good. So every day during the week,
• 2:08:29
  we'd meet at noon, or actually a little before that,
• 2:08:32
  maybe 11 and sit and talk. And then noon was
• 2:08:36
  rehearsal time. And so I'd say, okay, anybody got any songs?
• 2:08:43
  And people started looking down. All right, well, look, I
• 2:08:47
  got something in We'd work on my song, right? I mean,
• 2:08:51
  we're just sort of getting organized. I've just come off
• 2:08:54
  active duty. I've been away from the world, you might say.
• 2:08:59
  And next day, same thing. You know, at home, I'd
• 2:09:02
  work on some stuff. Anybody got any songs? I mean,
• 2:09:08
  it was the weirdest quiet. A week later, you know,
• 2:09:12
  same thing. And finally, I just, well, look, I began
• 2:09:16
  to feel this thing inside that, I got to push.
• 2:09:20
  I mean, I think I can do this. And so
• 2:09:25
  eventually I got the idea, the songs I'm working on
• 2:09:31
  aren't quite there. How about if we take an old
• 2:09:34
  song and I'll just trick it up, like psychedelicize it,
• 2:09:41
  because I'll pick a song I already know is good.
• 2:09:44
  It's got good stuff in it. And that's what I
• 2:09:46
  did with Susie Q. It just kind of really arranged
• 2:09:50
  it and had all this cool stuff going on. It
• 2:09:53
  wasn't something I wrote. It kind of relieved me of
• 2:09:56
  the pressure of having to do that and was able
• 2:10:00
  to just, hey, just that blank page turned into a
• 2:10:06
  different rainbow full of, nobody can fault me because it's
• 2:10:09
  not my song. Did all this great stuff, this cool
• 2:10:13
  musical stuff to it. The whole point was to get
• 2:10:20
  that tape on a local underground station that was actually
• 2:10:25
  playing unpublished tapes by certain bands. The most famous one
• 2:10:32
  you ever heard about, there was a tape of Janis
• 2:10:34
  Joplin singing Hesitation Blues and Jorma's playing guitar. But in
• 2:10:40
  the background, somebody's typing their term papers. It was done
• 2:10:44
  in their kitchen. And so it was just an amateur,
• 2:10:50
  unauthorized thing, but they played it on this one station.
• 2:10:53
  It became a hit on that station. People requested it.
• 2:10:56
  There were a couple other bands that had tapes like that.
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 2: And you could hear the typewriter in the background?
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. She's singing hesitation blues.
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 1: So that became the, let's do that. Let's do an
• 2:11:10
  end run around record companies and just bring the thing
• 2:11:13
  straight to the station. Well, they loved Susie Q. They
• 2:11:17
  started playing it probably eight times a day. Each different
• 2:11:20
  disc jockey would play it. It's eight minutes and 20
• 2:11:23
  seconds long or whatever.
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:11:26
  Speaker 1: And that was really the true beginning. Um, finished that album.
• 2:11:33
  My songwriting was, you know, wasn't great. It was competent.
• 2:11:42
  But somewhere right after the album came out, oh, I
• 2:11:51
  wanted to make that point. Everybody had ample opportunity to
• 2:11:56
  write a song. And it just kind of wasn't coming.
• 2:12:00
  I would show up at the rehearsals. Well, anybody got
• 2:12:04
  a song, and everybody got real quiet. And so I said, well, look, okay,
• 2:12:11
  let's work on this. And I began to realize inside
• 2:12:16
  that it was going to be up to me. It
• 2:12:19
  wasn't I want to control everything. It was I got
• 2:12:26
  to start rolling this boat or we're going to sink
• 2:12:29
  in the middle of the ocean. So I started pushing
• 2:12:32
  myself harder and harder. The first album comes out on
• 2:12:38
  my birthday, 1968. I'm 23 years old. And within, sometime
• 2:12:47
  shortly after that, I can't really pin down the, I'm
• 2:12:49
  still in the army, right? But I'm working on getting released,
• 2:12:54
  getting out. Somewhere, I think in June or July, I
• 2:12:58
  don't exactly know, my honorable discharge shows up. I open
• 2:13:05
  this package that's been sitting there for a couple of
• 2:13:07
  days because it said official government business. Who's that for?
• 2:13:12
  It was for me. It was an apartment house. I'm overjoyed.
• 2:13:18
  I mean, this is the biggest struggle has been of
• 2:13:20
  my life. Wow. Wow.
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 1: Wow! I turned a little cartwheel on the lawn because
• 2:13:26
  I want to remember that I turned the cartwheel and
• 2:13:30
  ran in the house and picked up my guitar and
• 2:13:32
  started playing these chords that are somewhat like Beethoven. Oh!
• 2:13:38
  I start strumming this beat. I start hearing... This chorus. See,
• 2:13:56
  the first thing I said was, left a good job
• 2:13:58
  in the city. That was getting out of the army. Wow,
• 2:14:04
  working for the man every night and day. Wow, what
• 2:14:07
  is this? Eventually I arrive at this thing where I say, rolling, rolling. Oh,
• 2:14:13
  I like that. Rolling, rolling on the river. That's starting
• 2:14:22
  to be beyond me. me, out of me, right? I
• 2:14:28
  look in my book because I said, what is this
• 2:14:30
  thing about? What am I doing here? The very first
• 2:14:33
  thing I had written in my little book of song
• 2:14:36
  titles was Proud Mary. It's the actual first line, first thing.
• 2:14:43
  I looked at that and I said, wow, this is about,
• 2:14:48
  Proud Mary is a riverboat. This is a boat named
• 2:14:51
  Proud Mary. That's what we're doing here. And I finished
• 2:14:55
  the song, right? I mean, it was kind of Mark Twain,
• 2:15:01
  kind of Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, you know, had a
• 2:15:07
  little bit of kind of gospel flavor and the Old
• 2:15:10
  South in it. It's wow. When I got done, which
• 2:15:15
  was about an hour, I was about an hour from
• 2:15:18
  when I'd opened my Honorable Discharge, I'm actually holding the
• 2:15:24
  little yellow tablet I'd been writing on. I said, John,
• 2:15:29
  you've written the classic. I realized that this song was,
• 2:15:33
  I had evolved. It was way better than anything I'd
• 2:15:38
  ever done before. And so those meetings I'd been having,
• 2:15:42
  going to see the band, and was anybody got anything,
• 2:15:45
  and no one ever did. And I'd show my little
• 2:15:48
  piece of something I was working on. That kind of
• 2:15:51
  led to, can I say it, to the confidence to
• 2:15:56
  do something really great by just doing it, right? And
• 2:16:02
  the knowledge, I mean, I was self-aware. I'm looking at
• 2:16:06
  this thing, Proud Mary, and it's got Americana in it,
• 2:16:10
  although I don't think I had a word then. It's got,
• 2:16:13
  I knew it was Mark Twain and the river and
• 2:16:16
  all this soulful stuff. Wow. Wow. this for sure is
• 2:16:22
  the best thing I'd ever done. I knew it was
• 2:16:24
  a great song. The next, God, I hope I get
• 2:16:30
  to do this again because you just don't know. Right. Right.
• 2:16:36
  But that, that was how that came about.
• 2:16:38
  Speaker 2: A bolt of lightning and inspiration.
• 2:16:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:16:40
  Speaker 2: Charged up from the discharge.
• 2:16:42
  Speaker 1: Yep. Right. Yeah. But, but yes. And, and something led
• 2:16:48
  me to be better than I was. I mean, I
• 2:16:52
  think what my point was, it was kind of the
• 2:16:54
  Willie Mays thing. I never knew if I would be
• 2:16:57
  able to do that or not. Right?
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:17:01
  Speaker 1: You're going along, you're just plunking along clubs, whatever, learning
• 2:17:06
  a chord here and there, learning something off a record,
• 2:17:10
  hoping you have a career in music because you like music. Me,
• 2:17:15
  because my mother had focused, had kind of pointed out songwriters,
• 2:17:24
  it put me in that realm. It made me at
• 2:17:28
  least realize that that was one of the functions of music.
• 2:17:35
  That's another story I could tell you. I don't know
• 2:17:37
  if you want to hear that.
• 2:17:38
  Speaker 2: I want to hear every story. That's a fantastic story, though,
• 2:17:42
  because you just getting that notice that you've been relieved
• 2:17:49
  and you no longer in active duty, you've got an
• 2:17:52
  honorable discharge, you're free, and then the inspiration comes and
• 2:17:57
  you write your greatest song of all time like that,
• 2:18:00
  or at least the greatest song to that moment, and
• 2:18:02
  realize this can happen. You really have it. You really
• 2:18:08
  have it because you don't know until you try.
• 2:18:10
  Speaker 1: You don't know until it happens.
• 2:18:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you don't know.
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 1: You know, until Willie Mays one day did something on
• 2:18:16
  the field. Right. He didn't know.
• 2:18:18
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:18:19
  Speaker 1: And there was a point, as I alluded to, I've
• 2:18:21
  read about, DeRocher knew when he saw him and Willie
• 2:18:24
  wasn't so sure yet.
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy. Bad Moon Rising is another great,
• 2:18:31
  fantastic song, another huge favorite of mine. But also because
• 2:18:37
  it's in one of my all-time favorite movies, American Werewolf
• 2:18:40
  in London.
• 2:18:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:18:41
  Speaker 2: That scene.
• 2:18:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:18:42
  Speaker 2: That song. That must have been cool to have that
• 2:18:45
  song play in that movie.
• 2:18:48
  Speaker 1: It's very cool to me now. I don't even know
• 2:18:52
  if I saw the movie at the time it came out.
• 2:18:57
  That was during the time I was still, you know,
• 2:19:01
  away from music and kind of angry and pissed off
• 2:19:05
  about my situation. So when something would get done with
• 2:19:08
  my music, it kind of made me mad because nobody
• 2:19:12
  asked me.
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 2: Oh, really?
• 2:19:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:19:14
  Speaker 2: Oh, right. Because you didn't have the rights to it.
• 2:19:16
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 2:19:17
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow. Still phenomenal song. Phenomenal song. So did you
• 2:19:23
  write all the songs?
• 2:19:24
  Speaker 1: I wrote all the songs from Creedence.
• 2:19:27
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:19:27
  Speaker 1: Until the last album, the seventh album that was basically
• 2:19:33
  a result of the guys saying, we want to, you know,
• 2:19:36
  there was a big band meeting. We want to write
• 2:19:39
  the songs and we demand that we get to write
• 2:19:41
  the songs and sing the songs and make up our
• 2:19:44
  own musical parts. And I had been resisting that because
• 2:19:49
  I just, I thought it was going to really, I
• 2:19:53
  literally thought it would be career suicide. I, you know,
• 2:19:56
  change everything now. Yeah. Cause well, here's, here's another part
• 2:20:00
  of it. You're, you're struggling in the early days of
• 2:20:05
  your career and all your life getting to that point,
• 2:20:08
  you're trying to figure out what works.
• 2:20:10
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:20:11
  Speaker 1: Right. I mean, it's just everyone goes through that because
• 2:20:13
  clearly you don't know what works yet. I haven't figured
• 2:20:16
  it out. And one day when some stuff starts happening, well,
• 2:20:20
  that's how you do it. This and this and this.
• 2:20:23
  This works. And I got very good at that.
• 2:20:26
  Speaker 2: And you had put in that work and they hadn't.
• 2:20:29
  So they weren't really contributing. And I They must have
• 2:20:32
  gotten resentful that you were the one who wrote all
• 2:20:34
  these big hits. And eventually they're like, we want to try.
• 2:20:37
  We're Credence too.
• 2:20:39
  Speaker 1: Well, especially because two of them had never written a
• 2:20:41
  song in their life.
• 2:20:43
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's crazy. And then they wanted to write a
• 2:20:45
  song for Credence while Credence was huge. Yeah.
• 2:20:49
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's a bit of, what's the word, boulder
• 2:20:54
  dash into that. I mean, it's wow. But maybe you should,
• 2:20:59
  you know, rehearse a little bit. I mean, I've been
• 2:21:02
  writing songs since I was eight. Not that they were good.
• 2:21:05
  Speaker 2: They could have jumped in in the beginning. Yeah. When
• 2:21:09
  you were writing all the songs and they weren't coming
• 2:21:12
  up with anything. If they did, you probably would have
• 2:21:14
  did their songs as well if they went on a
• 2:21:16
  similar path to you.
• 2:21:16
  Speaker 1: It would have been like, yeah. My songs weren't that
• 2:21:21
  good at that time, but they were, how can I say?
• 2:21:25
  They were maybe better than average. They weren't great songs yet.
• 2:21:29
  they were album songs or something, right?
• 2:21:32
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:21:33
  Speaker 1: But what I'm getting at is that the other guys,
• 2:21:35
  there was no songs. So, that's that thing in, I
• 2:21:44
  keep using the Muli Mays, you know, metaphor, if that's
• 2:21:48
  what it is. You know, that example, at some point,
• 2:21:54
  you're working with the elements in the field that you love,
• 2:21:57
  and then, you realize how to put it together and
• 2:22:02
  to make it happen, if you're lucky. And then comes
• 2:22:06
  the time when you actually make something that's good, right?
• 2:22:10
  And that, I mean, but that, I can't think of
• 2:22:13
  anyone that the first song they ever wrote, boom, was
• 2:22:17
  Ave Maria or something, you know? Right, right. It's, you know,
• 2:22:22
  so I just thought it was a journey and I mean,
• 2:22:27
  I have been on the journey myself and seen it come.
• 2:22:30
  But I think now I look at it, I was
• 2:22:34
  probably destined. It was what I loved, and that was
• 2:22:37
  what was calling me. I mean, that was my motivation
• 2:22:45
  the whole time since I was a child. I just
• 2:22:48
  loved it and wanted to do that, whatever it was.
• 2:22:52
  Speaker 2: Well, that's why it worked.
• 2:22:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:22:54
  Speaker 2: You put in the work, and you loved it. and
• 2:22:57
  you worked at it and you try to get it better.
• 2:22:59
  And you've also got inspiration. You were also open to
• 2:23:01
  that inspiration. It's just funny that the band members didn't
• 2:23:06
  contribute until the seventh album and they wanted to jump in.
• 2:23:08
  It's kind of crazy, but understandable. I mean, it's human
• 2:23:13
  nature to be resentful, especially if you've got a huge
• 2:23:16
  band and one guy is the lead singer. And that
• 2:23:19
  guy's also writing all the songs.
• 2:23:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I, well, I walked around for, uh, many months,
• 2:23:28
  you know, mulling over this whole thing. Because right after
• 2:23:31
  that meeting, shortly after that, my brother Tom decided he
• 2:23:36
  just left. You know, even though I kind of gave
• 2:23:40
  in to all the demands, okay, we'll do it that way.
• 2:23:43
  I could see that the band was going to disintegrate
• 2:23:46
  unless I acquiesced, right? I mean, up until then, I'd
• 2:23:50
  managed to keep it, don't do that, don't do that,
• 2:23:54
  it's going to wreck us. So when I agreed, I mean,
• 2:23:58
  it was literally a couple months later, Tom left. And
• 2:24:02
  so now, oh, God, what's going to happen now? So
• 2:24:05
  I didn't know if I was just going to call
• 2:24:08
  it quits. The image in my mind was of when
• 2:24:14
  Elvis got taken by the colonel, just kind of pulled
• 2:24:18
  out of the other guy's. And they left them an alert,
• 2:24:21
  you might say. That's the way it looked to me.
• 2:24:24
  It's like Elvis got all new guys. And it was
• 2:24:28
  readily apparent because I had already seen Elvis' comeback special,
• 2:24:33
  the part where they sat around in a circle and
• 2:24:37
  did the old songs. And he had the old guys,
• 2:24:40
  Scotty and Bill. Maybe Bill was gone by then. But J.D. Fontana,
• 2:24:48
  or D. JD Montana. Um, and it was just apparent
• 2:24:53
  that that was the best thing. Everybody loved that part
• 2:24:55
  of his special. Most people, he's just forget that anything
• 2:24:59
  else was on that thing other than Elvis singing those songs.
• 2:25:04
  And I, that sort of was in the back of my, well,
• 2:25:06
  maybe they deserve a shot. Maybe they should, you know,
• 2:25:09
  maybe I should do this. And so that's kind of
• 2:25:13
  why I went forward with it. It almost like flipping
• 2:25:16
  a coin, like, well, the, The odds, I think my
• 2:25:22
  own sense tells me this isn't going to work, but
• 2:25:25
  maybe they deserve a chance. So I kind of went
• 2:25:28
  at it blindly that way.
• 2:25:30
  Speaker 2: What was it like in the studio when they started
• 2:25:32
  bringing the songs?
• 2:25:36
  Speaker 1: Well, that's, I mean, that's it. I mean, everyone can
• 2:25:38
  hear that. All of us can, you know, you just,
• 2:25:42
  the album's called Mardi Gras and in the press, it
• 2:25:46
  was Rolling Stone said, this is the worst album ever
• 2:25:52
  made by a major group. And I read that and
• 2:25:56
  I said, I know. I mean, I literally, I felt
• 2:26:00
  that it wasn't like I was trying to defend it.
• 2:26:02
  It was, you know, it was just.
• 2:26:06
  Speaker 2: How did the band react to that?
• 2:26:09
  Speaker 1: Here's the deal. Instead of going, yeah, that was a mistake. Instead,
• 2:26:14
  they said, he made me do it. And so, yeah,
• 2:26:20
  they said I made them do it, whereas it was
• 2:26:23
  their idea, of course. I didn't want to do that.
• 2:26:30
  And after that, you know, I think we did a tour. Oh, right.
• 2:26:37
  We did a tour. One by one, their songs dropped
• 2:26:45
  out of the set. The songs that they had done
• 2:26:48
  on Mardi Gras, the other two guys. Yeah, I don't
• 2:26:51
  want to sing that anymore. And so we, of course,
• 2:26:54
  went back to Proud Mary and Fortunate Son and all that.
• 2:26:57
  And there was a point that I could tell that
• 2:27:00
  the fans were kind of upset with this whole premise.
• 2:27:07
  Speaker 2: Which whole premise?
• 2:27:09
  Speaker 1: Of them singing songs and... kind of struggling along with equal,
• 2:27:14
  equal time for everybody.
• 2:27:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, I see.
• 2:27:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And so finally it was time to, there,
• 2:27:22
  there wasn't enough, there wasn't any way to put it
• 2:27:26
  back together that I could see.
• 2:27:28
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:27:28
  Speaker 1: That was, it was beyond me. Now in later, later,
• 2:27:32
  later years that I, you know, I'm a much older guy.
• 2:27:35
  I mean, there were, you know, there's some decisions that, uh,
• 2:27:40
  I made. One of them was the decision to not
• 2:27:44
  be in the movie Woodstock. They sent a tape of
• 2:27:49
  the band doing Bad Moon Rising. It was okay. Okay.
• 2:27:56
  But what had happened at Woodstock was the Grateful Dead
• 2:27:59
  was on before us. Grateful Dead had all taken LSD.
• 2:28:05
  We were supposed to be on at 8 o'clock. It's
• 2:28:08
  now 2 o'clock, 2.30 in the morning by the time
• 2:28:11
  we get... Grateful Dead goes on, kind of loses their way.
• 2:28:16
  But they're on stage for an hour and a half
• 2:28:19
  or something with nothing going on. So that poor audience
• 2:28:22
  has been through rain and all the rest and muddy.
• 2:28:25
  They just... they just crashed a half a million strong
• 2:28:29
  just boom you know and that's what i get right
• 2:28:33
  we come running out on stage and then we playing
• 2:28:36
  a few songs that all i see is sleeping people
• 2:28:41
  and eventually the last i think 20 minutes of our
• 2:28:45
  set finally got them up we warmed them up for
• 2:28:48
  janice that's the way i always say you know they
• 2:28:50
  got going again but that was a That was a
• 2:28:53
  struggle all through that. So I get sent, and it
• 2:28:58
  was a bad taste in my mouth about that evening
• 2:29:01
  because we'd gone to so much trouble. And at that moment,
• 2:29:05
  we were certainly the number one band in the U.S.
• 2:29:09
  and probably on our way to being number one in
• 2:29:12
  the world. And so I just, you know, here's this
• 2:29:15
  kind of ordinary tape of Bad Moon, and I just thought,
• 2:29:19
  I don't know, this doesn't help us. It doesn't. further
• 2:29:23
  us at all. Nah, I'm going to pass. By the way,
• 2:29:28
  the Grateful Dead is not in Woodstock either. I didn't
• 2:29:32
  really see that until about a year ago. Just assume
• 2:29:37
  the Grateful Dead was in Woodstock, right?
• 2:29:39
  Speaker 2: That's probably unusable.
• 2:29:41
  Speaker 1: So if there'd been an older guy around us, a
• 2:29:44
  manager that was like 50 instead of me with my
• 2:29:48
  bad taste about the evening, the older guy might have said, hey,
• 2:29:53
  you know, your version of Susie Q Live, even though
• 2:29:57
  those people were sleeping, the band was cooking. You know,
• 2:30:01
  you guys played good. You can't hardly see anything anyway,
• 2:30:05
  the crappy old, he said, but that recording's good. Maybe
• 2:30:10
  we should demand that, look, you put us in the
• 2:30:12
  movie and give us eight minutes, not two minutes. Or
• 2:30:16
  by then it was probably 15 minutes long, you know, um,
• 2:30:21
  I think that was a decision that could probably, I
• 2:30:25
  could reassess, you know, if it was someone else, but
• 2:30:28
  that's not what was on my plate at the time.
• 2:30:32
  I was only offered Bad Moon. You know, and at
• 2:30:35
  the time I felt I was right because we went
• 2:30:37
  on and did great. And by the way, the band
• 2:30:41
  broke up before Woodstock came out anyhow. So it kind
• 2:30:46
  of was a mute point.
• 2:30:47
  Speaker 2: Did it feel better for you when you were on
• 2:30:49
  your own? Did you like that better? Or it was
• 2:30:52
  just the John Fogerty band? You didn't have to have
• 2:30:56
  all those guys and all the bullshit?
• 2:30:59
  Speaker 1: Well, you're asking, you know, we're all human beings and
• 2:31:02
  we've got a lot of years behind us. If you're
• 2:31:06
  asking me right now, yeah. Because I play in a
• 2:31:11
  band with my sons. Oh, that's awesome. Yep.
• 2:31:15
  Speaker 2: That's awesome.
• 2:31:16
  Speaker 1: And I don't know, there might be a picture of
• 2:31:18
  that somewhere. Um, and so, and all the other guys
• 2:31:25
  in the band are their age. Oh, wow. And so it,
• 2:31:31
  how can I say it? You don't, you don't have
• 2:31:35
  a whole bunch of people trying to prove something like
• 2:31:39
  their record deal or, you know, because you asked the
• 2:31:43
  question kind of caught me by surprise after, well, after Credence,
• 2:31:47
  I didn't, play for a long time.
• 2:31:50
  Speaker 2: How long?
• 2:31:50
  Speaker 1: But the first band, huh?
• 2:31:52
  Speaker 2: How long? How long did you not play for?
• 2:31:55
  Speaker 1: I went on tour in 86 with a bunch of
• 2:32:02
  hired hands, they call it, right? Studio guys. And that
• 2:32:06
  was behind, number one, I didn't play any Credence era songs.
• 2:32:13
  I was so mad at my situation, I just played
• 2:32:17
  new songs.
• 2:32:20
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:32:22
  Speaker 1: Everyone on the left, that's Shane. That's me. That's my son, Tyler.
• 2:32:27
  That's my daughter, Kelsey. And then that's Jesse Wilson back there,
• 2:32:32
  our bass player.
• 2:32:33
  Speaker 2: That's awesome.
• 2:32:34
  Speaker 1: And so, um, yeah. And there's a, right then that
• 2:32:39
  might be a moment in Chuglin where we all do
• 2:32:41
  a riff together and all that. And it's just so
• 2:32:44
  cool to all be standing there.
• 2:32:46
  Speaker 2: That's amazing.
• 2:32:47
  Speaker 1: So, yeah. Um, I mean, you know, don't get me wrong.
• 2:32:50
  The beginnings of Credence was magical and wonderful, right? I mean,
• 2:32:56
  it truly, look, what you waited and planned for your
• 2:32:59
  whole life. And it stayed that way for about a year,
• 2:33:04
  I think. And then other stuff that I never understood.
• 2:33:08
  I mean, it was beyond, it was unpleasant. And I
• 2:33:11
  didn't understand why, right? So after that, that was difficult.
• 2:33:20
  Then when I first started playing again in 86, and
• 2:33:26
  much more in 97 after Blue Moon Swamp came out,
• 2:33:30
  and I had a series of bands that were, I
• 2:33:35
  can say, trying to put people together, parts from here
• 2:33:39
  and there and there. So it kind of never really
• 2:33:41
  was one solidified thing. And you would find that a
• 2:33:48
  lot of people had personal agendas, you might say. They
• 2:33:54
  were working on their own career and all that. And
• 2:33:56
  there was sort of, believe it or not, even at
• 2:33:59
  that level, different jealousies and things. Again, there I was.
• 2:34:04
  I could sense it sometimes. People were jealous. Oh, my God.
• 2:34:09
  When you see that picture, there's no jealous. I mean,
• 2:34:13
  this is really fun for me now.
• 2:34:15
  Speaker 2: Well, that is the problem with so many bands is
• 2:34:18
  the conflicting personalities. It's always a miracle to me that
• 2:34:21
  any band stays together and that they could stay together
• 2:34:24
  like the Stones, where they're still touring now after all
• 2:34:27
  these years.
• 2:34:29
  Speaker 1: The Stones are a lesson in how everyone should be
• 2:34:34
  because we've all heard the stories of about the stones.
• 2:34:37
  We know there's problems here and there and everywhere and
• 2:34:40
  all that, yet they rose above that. They just decided that,
• 2:34:44
  you know what, yeah, okay, I don't like that guy
• 2:34:48
  over there tonight, but I'm just going to do this,
• 2:34:51
  and they're all brothers when they're out there doing that.
• 2:34:54
  And that's great. I mean, there's times, let's say, in
• 2:34:59
  war or whatever where you have to kind of subjugate
• 2:35:03
  your personal stuff for the greater good.
• 2:35:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:35:06
  Speaker 1: Right? And that's kind of what they do, the Stones.
• 2:35:09
  God bless them.
• 2:35:10
  Speaker 2: I just think the thing is everybody wants to be
• 2:35:13
  the man. And when you've got so many egos and
• 2:35:16
  there's one guy like you who's writing all the songs,
• 2:35:19
  all these other people, they're just like they feel less,
• 2:35:23
  you know, and they get resentful.
• 2:35:25
  Speaker 1: Yep. I think that's pretty normal human nature. And then
• 2:35:30
  that has to be dealt with. Yeah.
• 2:35:34
  Speaker 2: Sometimes you can't, though. you know some people can't be
• 2:35:37
  reasons with some people just they're not rational they see
• 2:35:41
  things in a distorted lens especially if they're not the
• 2:35:44
  people that created everything but yet they've been along for
• 2:35:47
  the ride they don't feel like they're getting what they
• 2:35:49
  deserve that's what it seems like I.
• 2:35:51
  Speaker 1: Wanted to tell you a story about how I got
• 2:35:54
  into this in the first place okay I told you
• 2:35:58
  about my mom noticing the music coming out of me
• 2:36:03
  one day she brought me home from nursery school where
• 2:36:07
  she was one of the helper teachers, I guess, one
• 2:36:10
  of the moms, you know, of the staff. She brought
• 2:36:13
  me home and sat me down on a little chair.
• 2:36:17
  Now I look back, it was a little ceremony. She
• 2:36:20
  had a little yellow record, a kid's record. And basically
• 2:36:25
  what she did was she played both sides of this
• 2:36:28
  little record. One side was Oh Susanna and the other
• 2:36:32
  side was Camptown Races. Do-da, do-da, you know, that one.
• 2:36:38
  And then she asked me, well, do you like this music?
• 2:36:42
  I said, yeah, Mom, these are cool songs, or whatever
• 2:36:44
  a kid says. I really like these. She says, well,
• 2:36:47
  I'm going to play them again, Johnny. She plays both songs,
• 2:36:51
  and she says, do you know that Stephen Foster is
• 2:36:56
  the man that wrote both of these songs? What do
• 2:36:59
  you mean, Mom? I said, well, Stephen Foster is a
• 2:37:03
  real person that wrote this music, and I wanted you
• 2:37:07
  to know that these are his wonderful songs and that
• 2:37:11
  people do write songs. And then she gave me the record.
• 2:37:15
  That kind of became my little possession, right? And I
• 2:37:19
  have reflected on that moment in my life. I mean,
• 2:37:23
  I used to tell people, why did she do that?
• 2:37:25
  What in the world was she thinking, right? And all
• 2:37:28
  through the years.
• 2:37:31
  That I was living at home with my mom, you know,
• 2:37:33
  there'd be somebody on TV, there's Irving Berlin. And I'd go, yeah, mom, hey,
• 2:37:38
  he's a songwriter. Or she'd let me know Hoagy Carmichael
• 2:37:41
  was one of her favorites. So he became one of
• 2:37:44
  my favorites, right? And of course, on into the rock
• 2:37:48
  and roll era, as you notice the The Beatles, Lennon
• 2:37:51
  and McCartney were writing these songs. I mean, it just
• 2:37:55
  became a thing, a part of me. And it all
• 2:37:58
  started back there with my mom and Stephen Foster. And
• 2:38:04
  number one, he was a great songwriter. So that lilt,
• 2:38:09
  that sort of kind of songwriting, he's also very corny.
• 2:38:15
  I mean, that voice, that personality, certainly became, it got contributed,
• 2:38:25
  it got lent to me through the records, the recordings,
• 2:38:30
  as Stephen didn't make any records, as far as I know.
• 2:38:34
  And those songs just sort of got infiltrated into my personality.
• 2:38:41
  I mean, my mom, put it this way, I think
• 2:38:44
  I even talked it over with mom. I feel like
• 2:38:47
  Stephen Foster could have written Proud Mary. it seems like
• 2:38:52
  that territory.
• 2:38:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Wow. That's awesome.
• 2:38:56
  Speaker 1: Right. I don't know what my, my mom was giving
• 2:38:58
  me a gift, you know, and that you just never
• 2:39:02
  know how powerful those little moments with your kids are.
• 2:39:06
  But that, that was a big one for me.
• 2:39:08
  Speaker 2: That's awesome. That's awesome. Listen, John, it's been an honor
• 2:39:12
  having you on. Thank you very much. I'm a gigantic fan.
• 2:39:15
  So for me, it was a real pleasure. to get
• 2:39:18
  to talk to you same here the story's fantastic thank
• 2:39:21
  you very much and you're on tour tell everybody where
• 2:39:24
  they can see you.
• 2:39:25
  Speaker 1: Oh wow well you know we are the legacy tour
• 2:39:29
  you may know I've just re-recorded a lot of my
• 2:39:32
  old songs from the Creedence time and I'm having a
• 2:39:36
  ball we're just all.
• 2:39:37
  Speaker 2: Over look at that well there you go wow.
• 2:39:41
  Speaker 1: That's awesome that's a picture from back in the day
• 2:39:42
  of course.
• 2:39:43
  Speaker 2: What a cool album too does it really look like
• 2:39:45
  that yeah oh nice That's sick. I love it. Beautiful.
• 2:39:52
  Thank you, sir. Really, thank you very much. Bye, everybody.