A Conversation with John Fogerty – HuffPost 9.30.13

Mike Ragogna: Hey John, how are you?

John Fogerty: I’m good Michael, how are you?

MR: I’m pretty good. This looks like the year of John Fogerty, what the heck is happening?

JF: [laughs] That’s funny. I’m just staying busy, I guess.

MR: You are staying busy, sir. You have a major tour schedule, kicking off part of at the Nokia Theatre in LA. You’re focusing performing full Creedence albums in addition to your own. Where did the idea came from to perform the Creedence catalog?

JF: Doing the old albums probably came from my wife. The idea is to play the entire album from first cut side one to last cut side two, which is interesting to even think about in this day and age. You know how nowadays, things come through the ether. The idea of trying to explain to somebody that there was one side and another side, they’d probably just stand there with their eyes glazing over. So it sort of focuses on that group of songs and it’s a concept of a place to go with most of the songs I play in some form or another. What this does is sort of ensures that you also play what they call “deep album tracks.”

MR: What’s nice about this approach is that for people who don’t know the full LP, they’ll be introduced to the album in a special way, and for fans who have already experienced it as the vinyl or CD, they get to see it in another light.

JF: We’ve done a little bit of this in Canada and I did it in Australia last year. Even for myself, you tuck these things away into a little compartment in your memory or in your brain and you really think you’re dealing with it through your life, but you really don’t. You kind of leave it in that compartment.

MR: Which was your favorite Creedence album?

JF: My favorite from the Creedence albums was Green River, certainly up until that point in time anyway. But there were many things about it that I had left back in 1969 that really didn’t come out until I started touring and playing that whole album again. It’s just funny. We worked with some production people to have video, there are other people helping me bring this up into a production for the stage, but on a lot of the stuff, I had to correct people, because I’m the only guy that knows a lot of it. I found myself kind of going, “No, no, no, that’s not…” and my memory would take over because I was the guy that created it in the first place. It’s just really interesting how that works because there’s a fan that was alive at the time, then there’s somebody that comes along that was a much more casual fan. In a professional sense, they’re trying to work up a program and they’re just seeing it in a completely different way and sometimes it’s right on, but sometimes, it’s kind of general and missing the point. For me, to hear something like that, especially if it’s way far off from my recollection, then you just have to kind of take over. It’s interesting. It becomes really important, if you can imagine.

MR: Yeah, and you’ve kind of got the luxury of re-learning what the song was originally about by performing it in context again.

JF: Yeah, that’s really what happens. When you do a whole album, you’re much more likely to feel that way about it because you’ve got all the surroundings. I know when we did Bayou Country instead of a song out of context like “Proud Mary” which has spun off into so many different realms of the universe, I mean Gerald Ford dancing to “Proud Mary” at his inauguration, every other wedding you’ve ever been to, Tina Turner, just a million things, and then when you put it back into Bayou Country and think about it that way, it becomes a lot more pure, how it was intended in the first place without all that extra cultural bling that happens over the years. You know what I’m saying. I like that phrase, “cultural bling,” I hadn’t ever said that before.

MR: [laughs] Nice. So one of the stops along your way in addition to performing live is that you’re going to be doing this “Wrote A Song For Everyone” project with the Grammys. Can you go into what that is?

JF: I talked to the moderator a little bit already, we’re going to do sort of a museum display of artifacts from my life, I guess you’d say. It’s kind of weird to stand there like Theodore Roosevelt or something. I saw Night At The Museum with my kids too many times, maybe thirty times by now. But besides having that, there’s also “An Evening With…” so I will be asked questions and I will be prompted to tell stories from certain areas of songwriting and recollections of my life. I don’t know what that is right now, I did a little bit of on-camera stuff because that’s going to become part of the presentation that they’re having, but I’m sure the moderator has a script or a path that he wants to go down, though I don’t know what that is. So it’s going to be pretty spontaneous, but I’m not making it up. Since I’m recalling it from real life, I tend to be able to get there pretty quickly when people press the right button. That’s always kind of fun and I’ll probably sing a couple of songs, acoustically anyhow.

MR: Can we rehearse that a little bit, then? Like what is one of your favorite stories or memories from your solo career or Creedence days?

JF: I’ll tell you one of my favorites, just because it’s precious. They opened the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall Of Fame, and there was the whole process and, of course, I had gone to almost every ceremony starting in 1986 in New York and watched the thing take its course. The city of Cleveland lobbied really heavily and finally got the actual building built, so they not only had a grand opening but they also had a big concert and I was lucky enough to get to perform with Booker T & The M.G.’s backing me up. At that time, I was in the middle of working on an album and I didn’t have a band per se…this was 1995, I think. By this point, it was Booker and Duck [Dunn] and Steve [Cropper]. Al Jackson, Jr. had passed away and they had someone else for the drums. We met and had a couple of rehearsals back there in Cleveland. I went with my family and my children with Julie [Kramer] were quite young at the time, but this was a proud thing we were all doing together. It got to be quite late at night by the time I actually performed, it was about ten or eleven or something like that. All I know is we did our spot in the show, there were many, many, many very talented musicians as you can imagine, and my little children had fallen asleep and my wife and I went back to our hotel. The next morning, I was up at probably ten-thirty or eleven or something like that because it had gotten late and I’m brushing my teeth, and my two little boys come running in and they start jumping up and down pointing at me and shouting “I ain’t no fortunate! I ain’t no fortunate! I ain’t no fortunate!” because they had seen how I perform the end of “Fortunate Son.” It’s almost exactly what I just said–I stop and I say that over and over as the band does a big vamp–and my little boys who must have been, who knows how many hundreds of yards away from me, somehow knew it was me and could perhaps see me on a screen and saw it. It was just so sweet. That was the first thing out of their mouths. They were probably three or four years old at that point. It was just an amazing daddy moment. My rock ‘n’ roll life and my real life sort of got synched together forever in that one little moment.

MR: Beautiful. Now the name of this exhibit is Wrote A Song For Everyone, which backdoors us into your latest album. On this album, you celebrate your catalog through duets on almost all of the songs. What was the inspiration for that approach?

JF: Actually, it came out of the blue, at least for me. My wife and I were sitting in our family room with our kids just having family time, probably more than three years ago now, when suddenly, out of the blue, she says, “Why don’t you get a bunch of the people you love and sing your songs?” She’ll do that, but I’m usually able to dial the station back in and say, “Oh, you’re talking about professionally,” because the next sentence could have been about one of the kids in school, you know? If you’re in a family, that’s how things work. The next moment might have been, “The dog needs to get his shots renewed.” So she said that and I instantly knew what she meant and it sounded delightful to me. Instead of some abstract career move that maybe some agent or a record company would suggest to you, she was saying something that was very personal because she said, “The people you love,” meaning the artists that I love, the people whose records I buy, that I’m a fan of, and have them sing my songs with me along them. At least I think that’s what she meant, gosh, maybe I should go back and ask her if that’s what she meant. [laughs] What that seemed to mean to me was when I call up Bob Seger or Brad Paisley, I’m going to say, “Here’s this idea, would you like to do something with me?” You just follow your nose, kind of. When a person said yes, I’d say, “Why don’t you pick a song?” It’s not that I had a plan, but it kind of felt like by saying that, I was allowing that person to have their influence rather than me telling them.

You used that phrase “duets,” and we’ve all seen that thing, and most of us kind of cringe at the whole idea because they’re sort of put-up jobs, usually the people aren’t even in the same room; one sends an email file to another person and then they open it in their computer and then they sing along or they play a little piano solo on it and send it back. It’s not organic and it’s really not very musical, at least the things that I’ve heard about. I certainly didn’t want that to happen, so I was kind of following my heart. I just said, “Well, what would you like to do?” and then when a person would suggest a song, I would say, “Okay, why don’t you figure out a treatment, a vision, an arrangement because I don’t want to redo the same old record again, I want to experiment and do something musically new to us so we can really enjoy this.” One of the first people I talked to was Keith Urban, who happens to be a friend. He’s somebody I’ve known for several years now. Rather than the concept that I’m using Keith like a feather in my cap, that wasn’t my emotion. My emotion was, “Here’s this guy I know that I really love,” and I mean personally; we’re really good friends, “and he’s a whale of a guitar player and singer, I love his records,” So what would we do if we were going to do something really fun? Let’s have something that’s really intriguing for us. So he sort of suggested some sort of back porch attitude with “Almost Saturday Night,” and I said, “That sounds really interesting Keith, that sounds fun.” I had seen Keith a couple of times live as opposed to seeing him on TV. In his live show, he does banjo. He’s always had that banjo on quite a few of his songs but you’d probably never realize that’s actually Keith playing that part. I said, “Man, why don’t you bring that banjo? I think there’s a place that would be pretty cool.” Of course, he did. I’m just knocked out about how it turned out. My song was done one way and this came out completely different from that, just because I kind of encouraged the musician, and his personality is different from mine. Every parent tries to do that with their kid; instead of controlling them, you try to get them to where they actually open up and use their own creativity. This was what happened.

MR: And your boys, Shane and Tyler, actually made it onto the album, too!

JF: There you go, see that’s a wonderful moment. I knew this album was going to be a pretty special thing in my whole career. I’ve got all these wonderful people and I’m kind of revisiting my catalog, so who knows if it will ever happen again. My boys do have a band and they play and we’ve kind of grown up playing guitars and singing together. They’d run and get something online–this is the world we live in–and they’d say, “Dad, dad, come upstairs. Do you know how to play this?” and they’d have “Back In Black” by AC/DC going. “I want to know how to play that!” It was so intriguing because perhaps I had never actually played that myself. I love the record but I never sat down and actually learned it. Why would I do that? I’m not playing in a bar anymore, so I didn’t have to learn the song note for note, but now my kids are having me do it, so we would learn those things together. It became a grand opportunity for me and my boys to make music together on one of my songs. As it turned out with that track, we actually recorded it at Abbey Road, so it’s got quite a story to it all by itself.

MR: Wow. John, look at the people on this project. These are, for the most part, people that I believe probably grew up on your music. There’s something iconic about both your music, both solo and with Creedence, that I think became a foundation for what would become coined “Americana.” How do you feel about leaving a mark like that?

JF: I really try not to think about stuff like that. I’m a fairly humble person. When you finish a song and you’ve worked really hard on it, then you kind of say, “Yeah, that’s a pretty good song, I like that song.” You do have your own standard because you throw away a lot of things, so when you find one that’s a keeper, you realize you’ve gotten up to the standard that you’ve set for yourself. I try not to get full of myself, if I can say it that way. But every once in a while, I’m taken by surprise when something happens.

I’ll tell you two stories quickly. One was with Brad Paisley. When he said he would do it, I said, “Okay, will you pick a song?” He said, “I know what I want to do,” and I said, “What would you like?” He said, “I want to do ‘Hot Rod Heart.'” That just really surprised me because it was off of Blue Moon Swamp, which was kind of a later album and the song itself I didn’t feel had real high visibility. My wife and I had wanted that to be the lead single, by the way, off that album, but the record company went in other directions. We always thought that song got kind of overlooked, but here was Brad Paisley picking “Hot Rod Heart.” I said, “Oh, that’s interesting, Brad, I didn’t think many people knew about that,” and he said, “John, when I was a little kid, I played Centerfield at the Wheeling Jamboree,” or something like that. Twelve years old playing Centerfield. And he said, “Blue Moon Swamp, I really love that album, that’s one of your best records and I loved ‘Hot Rod Heart.'” So he’s kind of telling me things that I didn’t know. He’s giving me what it meant to him. I’m a huge fan of Brad Paisley, I’m in awe of his immense talent, and since I’m a guitar player and a musician, I tend to revere people like that and I also want to learn from them. Even though he’s younger than me, I kind of look up the mountain to him. It sounds weird, but that’s the way it is, in my mind at least, so to have him relaying a story like this where he’s gone way inside and he knows my career…

Another time, I was at the Grammys here in LA a few years ago and for some reason, they put me in the front row. I’m sitting right next to Tom Hanks and I think one of my albums had just been out for three weeks or so. Tom said, “Oh, I love your album,” and I looked at him and said, “Oh, you have my album?” He says, “John, I’m a fan!” I was just kind of shocked that this great cinema star–can you get what I’m trying to say? I’m not trying to be cute, I was just surprised that somebody liked me, especially somebody important like that. He put it very clearly, “John, I’m a fan.” I was like, “Oh, oh, I get it!” If it was an old album, I would’ve gone, “Oh yeah, he knows ‘Proud Mary.'” but since it was a new album, I was just very surprised. Those kinds of things do make you feel very humble and honored for sure.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

JF: Oh, wow. Well, the first thing is listen to your heart. You are sensing that you have a talent and you should listen to that talent. Listen to your heart, meaning do everything you can to follow that, to develop that talent. Never trust anyone who says something to you like, “Oh there are millions of people that want to do that. You don’t have a chance!” Never listen to that. Always follow that inspiration because it’s what you love to do. I’m going to leave it at that. The other things you will learn along the way. Sometimes the people you meet will be unkind to you, but if you listen to your own voice and try to stay true to your own voice, things will pretty much work out.

MR: That’s beautiful. Like Tom Hanks and so many others, I really am a fan. I think you’re a powerhouse, and it’s really great to see that you have it in perspective and you’re a nice guy. I love that. Thanks again for everything, I really wish you all the best.

JF: Thank you so much!

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne