I wasn’t going to do this one, since so many others have already beaten me to the punch. But I reference Creedence Clearwater Revival so many times in this series and the circumstances that led to their demise, I figure I’d do this one for completion’s sake. So here we go…
In April 2004, there was a regular season NBA game between the L.A. Lakers and the Sacramento Kings. At one point, the two teams had been heated rivals and their contentious 2002 Western Conference Finals series remains one of the best-played, and most controversial, of all time.
Ever since the rivalry began in 2000-2001, Kings/Lakers games were always a big deal. Between the exhilarating on-court play, the physicality that often led to fights (even in preseason games) and the non-stop trash talk from both sides, their matches were must-see TV and generated tons of headlines and highlights around the country. This game was no different — but not because of anything that had happened on the court. Instead it was all about what had not happened.
Namely, Kobe Bryant, the Lakers superstar guard who had never met a shot he didn’t like, suddenly had a ton of shots on his enemies list and spent most of the game refusing to shoot the ball. The team was in a bit of turmoil at that point — between Bryant’s rape case, Shaquille O’Neal’s demand for a new contract, and problems integrating superstars Karl Malone and Gary Payton into the team, there was non-stop drama all season. Add to that, the long-simmering feud between Kobe and Shaq over whose team it was and who should be the focal point of the offense finally exploded, as the two stars went to war with each other.
Kobe refusing to shoot the ball, even with Shaq on the bench with foul trouble, was widely interpreted as a form of sabotage, as well as a not-so-subtle way of telling coach Phil Jackson and the rest of the Lakers brass: “See? This is what happens when you don’t do things my way.” Sure enough, the Lakers lost the game. Afterwards, two unnamed Lakers’ players accused Kobe of screwing over the team and questioned his motives.
Why do I bring this up? Because John Fogerty had done, pretty much, the same thing when Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded their seventh, and final album, Mardi Gras.
Creedence Clearwater Revival had a very clear hierarchy and division of labor. John Fogerty wrote the songs, sang lead, played lead guitar, produced the albums, and managed the band’s affairs. Rhythm guitarist (and John’s older brother) Tom Fogerty, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford cashed the checks, accepted their platinum records and other awards, and stood in the background so that John could do his thing.
That formula had led to tons of success. From July 5, 1968 to December 9, 1970, CCR released a whopping six albums — all of which went at least platinum. The middle four albums all went multiplatinum, with 1970’s Cosmo’s Factory selling 4 million and 1969’s Green River shipping 3 million. In fact, from August 1969 to July 1970, they released three albums that combined for 10 million units shipped.
As much success as they had on the albums chart, CCR was, at their heart, a singles band. From 1968 to 1971, they had 10 Top 40 hits on the Billboard 100, with five songs hitting #2 (“Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Green River,” “Travelin’ Band/Who Will Stop the Rain” and “Lookin’ Out My Back Door/Long As I Can See the Light”). Curiously, they never had a #1 single. But they did have an era-defining song with “Fortunate Son,” an anti-Vietnam War piece that almost always gets played whenever there are documentaries or movies looking back on that time period (as Family Guy pointed out, it’s always either that song or Buffalo Springfield‘s “For What It’s Worth”).
So, with all of that success in such a short amount of time, the members of CCR must have been rolling in dough, right? Actually, no. John Fogerty, in his infinite wisdom, had negotiated a bad deal with label Fantasy Records — one that was later described as “the worst record deal of any major American recording artist” and was so one-sided and unfair that it’s used as a study tool today.
Money might have been able to smooth over some cracks in the foundation. Without it, the house was ready to collapse as Fogerty’s supporting cast became upset and dissatisfied with John’s iron fisted rule.
According to John, the problems had always been there, but they really started to take over the band during the recording and release of the band’s previous album, Pendulum (1970). After they finished recording that album, Tom, Stu and Doug gave him an ultimatum, demanding creative input on the next album and John, not wanting to break up the band, went along with it (Tom ended up leaving anyway). Calling the incident “The Night of the Generals,” John noted that, overnight, CCR had gone from dictatorship to democracy and there was nothing he could do about it. So he figured he would sit back and watch Doug and Stu sink or swim on their own, and if and when the album flopped, at least he could say “I told you so.”
Cook and Clifford, however, have a different recollection of events. They claim that they just asked to be able to write a few songs for Mardi Gras only for John to flip out and declare that each of them would be responsible for one-third of the album. Fogerty also refused to sing on his bandmates’ compositions, forcing them to get behind the mic. That extended to lead vocals, as Fogerty refused to sing on his bandmates’ compositions, forcing them to step up to the mic. Cook and Clifford even alleged that Fogerty refused to play lead guitar on their compositions (rhythm only), forcing them to learn how to do it on the fly. Fogerty has denied this, and he and others have recalled that he did, indeed, play lead guitar on some of his bandmates’ songs.
Either way, Cook and Clifford weren’t ready for that kind of responsibility — they had hoped to ease into the new arrangement. Instead, they believe that Fogerty set them up for failure, sabotaging the album and band. “John made us run the hundred-yard dash before we could walk,” Clifford said in Bad Moon Rising: The Unauthorized History of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
In his 2015 autobiography, Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music, Fogerty took issue with statement, recounting that Cook and Clifford thought writing songs was easy and were convinced they were coming up with hit songs during the recording sessions for Mardi Gras.
“Doug and Stu thought their stuff was really great,” Fogerty wrote in Fortunate Son. “They were saying ‘man this is really cool — listen to that!’ They were high-fiving each other in the studio.”
Because Doug and Stu were novices and were now expected to write two-thirds of an album, the time between Pendulum and Mardi Gras ended up being about 16 months — an eternity for the band. For context, that gap was almost equal to the 18-month gap between Creedence’s first album and their sixth.
Things always slow down in a democracy, and everything would have been fine if Stu’s and Doug’s songs were good or even great. Unfortunately, they were neither. To be clear, their songs were not terrible– but were hardly worth giving up nearly two years of your career for. And certainly not what you would expect to hear on a CCR album.
Cook has three songs on the album, as well as a song he co-wrote with Clifford (“Need Someone to Hold”). Two of them have a bit of bite and are full of passive-aggressive shots at a certain unnamed individual who had done him and his friends wrong. “If maybe you’d move over/ Gave someone else a chance to try their luck/ Instead, you run up close/ Trying to grab a page before they close the book,” he sings on “Take It Like a Friend.” And on “Sail Away,” he talks about how he’s “spent a long time listening to the captain of the sea, shouting orders to his crew.”
Who could he be talking about? Maybe Richard Nixon? He was President at the time…
His third song is “Door to Door,” a song about a door-to-door salesman. The lyrics are oddly literal: Cook sings about selling spot remover and how to use it properly. “First, you pull the curtain while I spread some here/ Wipe the surface gently, try to use a circle motion,” he sings. Of course, he could be talking about something else entirely — perhaps he was trying to make the whole song a double entendre but lacked the skill to do so? The song was deemed good enough to be the B-side to lead single “Sweet Hitchhiker.” But that’s just what the song seems like: a throwaway recording done as a joke and relegated to B-side status — not an album track.
Ultimately, Cook’s music is fine and the lyrics are mediocre but not the worst I’ve ever seen. Maybe going after that certain someone was a source of inspiration and creativity for him? The problem is he’s not a good singer. He lacks range and he has an odd growl-like delivery that is pretty off-putting. It’s the kind of voice that’s really only good for novelty songs and diss tracks. Hence, his main contributions to the album.
As for Clifford, he has two songs, as well as the aforementioned piece he wrote with Cook. Clifford’s stuff sounds a bit more like Fogerty and it was clear he was trying to imitate him as much as possible. He’s a slightly better singer than Cook and has a natural twang in his voice, as such, he skews towards country. “Tearin’ Up the Country,” “What Are You Gonna Do” and “Need Someone to Hold” are decent filler tracks and might have benefitted from having John sing on them.
Indeed, Fogerty believed that Cook and Clifford were counting on him to come to their rescue. “I shouldn’t have been asked to prop up this thing I didn’t believe in in the first place,” Fogerty wrote in Fortunate Son about Cook asking him to make his songs sound more like typical Creedence fare. “That wasn’t what the agreement was. This whole thing, this insurgence, was about you guys getting to do your own stuff. And now you want me to fix it for you and then you take the credit? It’s not fair.”
As for John, his third of the album, unsurprisingly, is quite good — albeit with some caveats. Lead single “Sweet Hitchhiker” and second single “Someday Never Comes” are classics, but not nearly as good as some of his prior stuff. Meanwhile his version of Ricky Nelson’s “Hello Mary Lou” is another in a long line of good CCR covers, but it will never stand alongside their better-known ones like “Suzy Q” or “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”
Then there’s his fourth song, the country-tinged “Lookin’ for a Reason.” The song which opens the album, is a real downer and pretty much sums up his mindset at the time: “I’m a-lookin’ for a reason to stay/ I’m all wound up and tied in knots today/ I’m a-lookin’ for a reason not to go/ When the morning comes, I’ll be on my way/ Every night I ask myself again/ Just what it was that made our dream begin/ It seemed like a good idea way back then/ But I’m wondering now what daydream took me in.” When he was making the press rounds to promote Mardi Gras, a reporter asked him, point blank, if the song was about the band breaking up. Fogerty, who still had to play the good soldier given that the band had an album and tour to promote, hemmed and hawed and came up with a BS response about wanting to write a honky-tonk type of song. “I didn’t put up a very good facade,” he recalled in Fortunate Son. “I think he knew.”
With things falling apart and feeling stuck in a situation he did not want, Fogerty clearly did not give his best effort on Mardi Gras, something he later copped to. In his book, he admitted that he didn’t quite finish “Someday Never Comes” and it did not turn out the way he really wanted it to, but at that point, he just wanted to be done with it. He said that the re-recorded version he did on his celebrity duets album, 2013’s Wrote a Song for Everyone, was superior to the one he recorded with Stu and Doug.
As for Stu or Doug, Fogerty did not think much of them as songwriters and believed their songs were not worthy of the band. In his book, he used an analogy of what happens when you get a cut of meat and there’s too much fat on it. “‘Looks like there’s something extra in there,'” he quoted his then-girlfriend as saying. “That’s what we said about Doug and Stu’s tracks: ‘Sounds like there’s something extra in there.'”
Ultimately, the album was overshadowed by the ongoing turmoil in the band. Many saw it for what it was — Fogerty trying to prove a point to his bandmates, even if it meant sacrificing the band. Jon Landau of Rolling Stone famously called it “Fogerty’s Revenge” and “the worst album I have ever heard from a major rock band.” Rolling Stone didn’t spare Fogerty the rod, saying his songs on Mardi Gras were marginal compared to his previous stuff. Meanwhile, Hank Bordowitz called the album a “death rattle,” which turned out to be fairly prescient.
Not everyone hated this album. Robert Christgau, on the other hand, loved Mardi Gras — although he could be a contrarian, at times. In his review, he said CCR sounded like a brand new band with Cook and Clifford writing.
He meant it as a compliment (he even said that CCR 2.0 had the potential to be better than the original), but others made the same point and used it as a negative. Simply put, Mardi Gras did not sound like CCR; instead, it seemed like an awkward combination of three solo efforts. If Cook and Clifford had put together a side project and released their songs along with some others (maybe they could have worked with Tom and used some of his songs, too), then it would have been a perfectly fine effort. Instead, their songs came out on a CCR record, and because of the band’s track record of success, they were never going to measure up.
“Soon enough, it all fell apart in my eyes,” Fogerty said in Bad Moon Rising. “[T]he guys have spent the next 27 years proclaiming ‘It wasn’t our idea. John made us do that!’ Baloney! All you have to do is go back and read the articles. The guys had seized the reins of power. Critics at the time called Mardi Gras ‘Fogerty’s Revenge.’ Revenge for what? God forbid we had a world class outfit with a name that was revered and honored.”
Sure enough, the album was a commercial disappointment, becoming the band’s lowest selling studio album. They fared a bit better on the singles’ chart, as “Sweet Hitchhiker” hit #6 on the Billboard 100 and went gold while “Someday Never Comes” reached #25.
But the fissures were now plain for all to see, and the band was on borrowed time. After a contentious, uncharacteristically decadent tour, the band split up and never reunited outside of a one-off performance at Tom’s wedding in 1980. Interestingly, John, Stu and Doug did reunite for a performance in 1983, but it was at their high school reunion and they used their pre-CCR band name.
In the years following CCR’s implosion, relations between John and the other three deteriorated even more. To get out of his recording contract, John signed over the rights to his CCR songs to Fantasy Records label head Saul Zaentz. After a long period out of the public eye, John came back in 1985 with Centerfield, which became a massive success. However, his lead single off that album, “The Old Man Down the Road” got him in trouble his old label, which sued him for copyright infringement alleging that the song plagiarized the Fogerty-penned CCR hit “Run Through the Jungle.” The long-running lawsuit eventually landed before the Supreme Court, which issued a precedent-setting opinion in relation to attorneys’ fees under the 1976 Copyright Act.
Fogerty prevailed at trial and subsequently moved for attorney fees pursuant to the 1976 Copyright Act. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled against him, finding Fogerty had not proven that Fantasy had brought the suit in bad faith as required by the statute. The 9th Circuit affirmed, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. “I told John if the Supreme Court granted cert, then that means they’ll change the law,” says Kenneth Sidle, Fogerty’s lawyer and a partner at Gipson Hoffman & Pancione. Sidle pointed out that the rule was illogical—Fogerty could have recovered had he been the plaintiff and brought a declaratory action saying that his song did not infringe on the earlier work, but not if he was the one getting sued. A unanimous Supreme Court ruled in Fogerty’s favor, finding that courts have discretion to award fees to either party.
“My takeaway is that if you represent the defendant, you can threaten the plaintiff for attorney fees,” Sidle says. “It creates leverage.”
Victor Li, “Lawyers, Songs and Money: Music that Changed the Law,” ABA Journal, July 1, 2019
Fogerty felt betrayed by his former bandmates, all of whom had expressed support for Zaentz and/or helped him during the years where they were in court (according to testimony, Stu had been the one who convinced Zaentz to sue over “Old Man Down the Road”) and never forgave them.
There were other lawsuits that poisoned the well even more. At one point, Zaentz sued Fogerty over two songs on Centerfield he alleged were defamatory “Zanz Kant Danz” and “Mr. Greed.” Fogerty changing the former to “Vanz Kant Danz” did not shield him from potential liability (the two sides eventually settled). Then, when Stu and Doug formed tribute act Creedence Clearwater Revisited, Fogerty sued, accusing them of trying to pass themselves off as the real CCR. Fogerty won at the trial level, but lost on appeal. There were more trademark and copyright suits between Fogerty and Stu/Doug. Fogerty even noted in his autobiography that he was being sued by the two at the time of his book’s release.
All of that has led to a steadfast refusal from Fogerty to reunite the band. When the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, Fogerty would not play on stage with Clifford and Cook (Tom had died in 1990), choosing instead to perform with Bruce Springsteen, Robbie Robertson, Jim Keltner and some others. That led to additional accusations and insults between the camps, with Clifford and Cook claiming they had been blindsided while Fogerty countered that he had informed them of his decision well in advance of the ceremony.
The years have seemed to mellow Fogerty somewhat. He went through a long period where he refused to play Creedence songs. Now he tours playing CCR albums in their entirety. He once said he would dance on Saul Zaentz’s grave. When his old enemy died in 2014, Fogerty said he felt nothing and didn’t think much of it (although he also Tweeted out a link to the “Vanz Kant Danz” video). He once paraphrased The Eagles and said CCR would reunite when Hell froze over. Now he says he wouldn’t rule it out.
Of course, it takes two to tango and Stu/Doug don’t seem willing to get out on the dance floor with their onetime captain. “No, absolutely not,” Clifford said to Forbes in 2018. “It would have been great 20 years ago. “But who cares now, anyway? We have no real relationship with John. We talk to him through his lawyers.”
Looks like if there is a next reunion, it will be in court. Knowing these guys and their history, it could be any day now…
