Ready To Rock

A Revived John Fogerty Puts Battles Behind Him, Returns To Top Form

May 27, 1997|By Greg Kot, Tribune Rock Critic.

LOS ANGELES — The tape for the nationwide radio broadcast is rolling, an audience of about 100 invited fans squeezes toward the stage, and John Fogerty and a four-piece band prepare to strike the first note of his first tour in 11 years, which brings him to the House of Blues on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Everything is as the rock 'n' roll history books once said it was: Fogerty's thick reddish-blond hair, the boyish face, the denim shirt, and most of all the voice like a thunderbolt. It's a gruff drawl, still capable of nailing the high, hard ones, but most at home messin' in the mud and gravel, a fierce, common man's cry of dissent.

Fogerty stomps on the floor with his black boots like he's doing a little jig. "One, two, three, fawwh," he snarls, and drummer Kenny Aronoff plays an ominous rolling tom-tom beat.

"It ain't me, it ain't me, I'm no fortunate one," Fogerty roars, the song's clarion riff pealing from his guitar. "Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes/Ohhh, they send you down to war/But when you ask them how much should we give/They only answer more, more, more. . ."

Fogerty's "Fortunate Son," a soundtrack for the winter of discontent that was 1969-70, remains one of the greatest rock 'n' roll songs ever written. It was one of 13 top-40 hits released in the brief life (1967-72) of Fogerty's San Francisco band, Creedence Clearwater Revival.

But the record industry has not been kind to Fogerty since those glory days. To get out of a contract that would have required him to make a dozen more albums for the Fantasy record label after CCR disbanded, Fogerty surrendered his artist's royalties on the Creedence songs. After a handful of solo albums, the last rejected by the Asylum label as unreleasable, he dropped out of the record business in the late '70s.

He returned to make two successful solo albums, "Centerfield" and "Eye of the Zombie," in the mid-'80s, but then spent the rest of the decade defending himself in a $142 million lawsuit brought by Fantasy owner Saul Zaentz. The suit accused Fogerty of slandering Zaentz in the 1985 songs "Mr. Greed" and "Zanz Kant Danz" ("Zanz can't dance, but he'll steal your money"). A separate suit accused Fogerty of plagiarizing the Creedence song "Run Through the Jungle," which Zaentz now owned, on the 1985 Fogerty hit "The Old Man Down the Road."

In 1988, a jury found Fogerty innocent of plagiarism, and in 1994 the Supreme Court ordered Zaentz to reimburse him more than $1 million in attorneys' fees. Zaentz and Fogerty settled the defamation suit out of court. But Fogerty still didn't own the rights to his Creedence songs, and in a sense the last 25 years have been about the long road to overcoming that outrage, to finally making peace with his past.

"I last played those songs on a tour in 1972," he says, after exchanging his sweat-soaked denim shirt for a fresh one in the dressing room backstage. Fogerty couldn't get past his resentment until 1986, when he finally performed several CCR songs at a Vietnam veterans' benefit. This is his first full-fledged tour since breaking that personal embargo.

On this night, with a crack new band in tow, he had performed nine songs from the Creedence catalog. The remainder of the 12-song set was drawn from his first album in 11 years, "Blue Moon Swamp" (Warner Bros.), a record with rhythms drenched in Southern soul, blues and R&B and melodies as crisp and instantly apparent as the crease on James Brown's dry-cleaned slacks.

"There was so much garbage I was going through, beginning with that last Creedence tour, which was a band falling apart," he says in the dimly lit dressing room, his eyes focused on his wife, Julie, sitting across from him. "Julie would say to me, `You've got to be the unluckiest son of a gun in the world.' Fantasy was just very bad people, and it was horrible. I made a lot of records that stunk up the joint after that, but when you're knee deep in quicksand like I was -- emotionally, it's a wonder I wasn't dead."

Fogerty doesn't come off as self-pitying so much as unsparingly intense as he says this. It's clear this is a man who craves total control over his life and art, and it eats him up to have anything less. He says he became better able to deal with those emotions after meeting the former Julie Kramer in Indiana. They were married in 1991 and have two sons.

"She opened my eyes to a lot of things," he says. "I handled my emotions very poorly, awkwardly. I couldn't say `I love you' to her if someone else was in the room. I didn't understand things like love, reciprocity, sharing, communicating. I've moved forward on a number of levels. For a while there it seemed like I was living in this cave and every time I thought I'd run away from the lawyers, I'd get sucked back in. But I'm out for good now."