Joining “Who’ll Stop The Rain” as one of the band’s best ballads ever is the closer, “Long As I Can See The Light”. Other standouts range from the ominous “Run Through The Jungle” to the raucous “Travelin’ Band” to the rockabilly “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” to the obligatory killer riff that launches “Up Around The Band”. Perhaps most audacious is the eleven-minute rendition of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”, which had very recently been a hit for both Gladys Knight and Marvin Gaye. Fogerty and band gave it a signature stamp and somehow made it their own.
Here end the glory years, a phenomenal run of artistic progress and commercial dominance within a compression of 24 months. Released in December 1970, five months after Cosmo’s, the aptly-titled Pendulum saw the band moving in the opposite direction, including more filler. Tom Fogerty jumped ship two months after the album’s release, signing with Fantasy as a solo artist to record his own songs (with John providing guest guitar).
Maybe John Fogerty had too much on his mind besides music. He thought his record company had agreed to tear up their contract and reward the band in the wake of its success. Though such renegotiation is common — as the power shifts from a fledgling band that had none to a commercial powerhouse increasingly valuable to the label — Fantasy refused. And his brother’s departure was just one sign of the band’s discontent.
“I’d just kept coming up with more and more music, thinking this would unite the band and that Fantasy would appreciate it,” he says. “But the absolute opposite happened. I realized the record company is screwing me, that they’re not gonna do what they said they were going to do. And the band mutinied.”
Perhaps Mutiny would have been a better title than the party-free Mardi Gras for the band’s last album, released after an eternity (by Creedence standards) in the spring of 1972 — some fifteen months after Pendulum. Stories continued to swirl. Fogerty had refused to record without renegotiation. Cook and Clifford wanted more of a say. Fogerty insisted (or the other two demanded) that they each write a third of the album. The results suggest that democracy does a band no favors, at least so far as consistency of material is concerned; only Fogerty’s wistful “Someday Never Comes” compares with Creedence’s best.
Rolling Stone critic Jon Landau savaged it as “the worst album I have ever heard from a major rock band.”
With Revival, Fogerty renews the spirit of the band’s creative peak. In addition to the title, he reinforces his connection to his former band’s music with the generically labeled “Creedence Song”, a little jukebox story with the chorus hook, “You can’t go wrong if you play a little bit of that Creedence song.”
“As is usually the case, I was sitting there with a guitar and kind of chunkin’ away at some sort of rhythmic thing, trying to figure out some sort of lead riff,” he says. “And at some point it just came out of my mouth, ‘You can’t go wrong if you play a little bit of that Creedence song.’ And I thought to myself, well, what does that mean? And this is how it usually happens with me. I’ll say something, or sing something, and don’t know what it means, but it’s full of direction. It’s almost like the rest of the song is already there; I just have to wait for it to come through.
“So I played around with that line and that feel, and I began to invent a scenario where I’m not really talking about my true story, but that is likely true in many cases.”
The irony here is that Fogerty spent a quarter-century following the band’s dissolution disassociating himself from anything Creedence, refusing to perform in concert any of those hits he had recorded with the band. His feud with Fantasy had intensified when he had to make even greater concessions in royalties to terminate his contract with the label, and then his estrangement from the band (including his brother) deepened when all of them seemed to take the label’s side. With the four founders equal partners, any decisions requiring a band vote went three-to-one against John.
Even Tom Fogerty’s death in 1990 did nothing to heal the breech, with Tom’s estate continuing to side with the others. John later told The New York Times, “I dearly loved my brother Tom. As time went on, though, Tom insisted that Saul [Zaentz] was his best friend, which he said many times to me, and, of course, in the press. So Tom basically took sides with my worst mortal enemy. That was hurtful.”
For those of us who interviewed Fogerty during his solo re-emergence of the mid-’80s, there was a stark contrast between the happiness his music had brought to so many and the bitterness he felt toward that legacy, the songs he said it hurt him too much to play because Fantasy reaped the benefits. In contrast with the easygoing conversationalist who now seems at peace with himself, Fogerty back then seemed awfully tightly wound.
“You had to wonder, how tortured was that guy?” he admits. “Words were said, as they say. It used to be that when somebody pushed the right button, I would be happy to give them 20 minutes worth. I wasn’t going to play those songs ever again. I was bitter and confused. It was a bad and wrong career move, but I don’t feel that way anymore. My music is all one thing to me.”
For Fogerty, an integral part of the process of making peace with his past was his return to Fantasy Records, after the label’s sale by Saul Zaentz to the Concord Music Group, which sweetened his royalty deal to welcome him back into the fold. The first release under the deal was a 2005 compilation titled The Long Road Home, a 25-song retrospective that blended Fogerty solo highlights with Creedence classics. The title suggested that the artist was a prodigal son, and that Fantasy was the home where he belonged. To now have a new album of his music on the Fantasy label goes beyond Fogerty’s wildest conjecture.
“It’s basically surreal to me — an episode from ‘The Twilight Zone’,” he says. “Once Saul Zaentz and all those people sold the company and took their sacks full of money, they’re not in the picture at all. So nothing I do benefits them. And the new people turned out to be quite delightful and very receptive. So that’s part of why I’m feeling so good artistically, feeling so clear and free of negativism. I’m kinda over all that.”
