John Fogerty’s Turn to Revisit Creedence (Part 2 of 3)

Continued from Part One…

You created the album Fogerty’s Factory in 2020, during the pandemic. That album was a rethink of the 1970 Creedence Clearwater Revival album Cosmo’s Factory, made with your family. In what way did that project eventually lead to Legacy?

That’s a wonderful thing, and I’m so glad that we ended up making the recordings that became Fogerty’s Factory. It really was my wife Julie’s idea. It all started with the pandemic. The lockdown had hit: “Boom. You’ve got to stay home.” “What?” And so we’re all there, and under those conditions. I’m just trying to be a good American, a good citizen taking care of myself and my family. And one day Julie said, “I think you should do a recording, a video of ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain,’ And we’ll post it [online]. I just looked at her, completely not understanding, and said, “Honey, there’s got to be 150 versions online already of me singing ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain.’”

And she said, “No, it’s important that it comes from you now.” Yes, she was getting it, and I wasn’t. I was like everybody else, just sort of dazed and confused. And she was thinking of me and that song as being curative and soothing. So she set it all up.

And I mean, gosh, there I am in my plaid shirt, with my guitar and my dog, sitting there by a little farm fence right on our property, totally living up to the whole lockdown ethic. I was so happy that the dog and I did a good job, but, you know, that was it.

Then a week later, Julie had another song in mind! And I’m kind of that sitcom husband, you know: “Yes, dear, okay.” And I don’t recall what the song was, but we did it, and I had my whole family [involved]. And it wasn’t until three or four [songs] down the road I began to see that she had a plan.

And it was so cool, because what were doing had to live up to the lockdown ethic. We couldn’t go outside, we couldn’t go to a studio. We totally had to make do with what we had at home, and get it recorded that way. It was symbolic, I guess, and yet [we were] trying to make good music. Those tended to be different, unique versions of my songs.

The best part was that it involved my family; here we all were doing this together. And other people seemed to [relate to it]. Everyone was in that same boat: we were lost, but with our family. So it was just a really cool window into all of us, I suppose.

And in the end, Julie ended up packaging it and making it available. And certainly that’s part of what happened with this album Legacy, because that was really part of my legacy too, in a way.
In the 1960s and early ‘70s, you worked with a tight, self-contained unit in CCR. What was it like recording the songs on Legacy with your family band?

I applied those [same] very high standards, working this time with my family, especially with Shane and Tyler and many times with Julie, just talking things over. Of course all my kids were there from time to time at the studio as it unfolded, and I saw and realized how well that worked.

If you work hard and you have those high standards, it can be disappointing in the beginning. But if you stick with it, you get to the finish line, and it is truly rewarding. It really is a wonderful feeling to have. That’s what Legacy feels like to me; I’m really proud of it.

I know we worked hard, but I also know that there’s some extra ingredient. And I think it’s joy. It’s an unlocking or unleashing of those emotions, having done it truly together. There were those great moments with me as a father getting to show the inside of a guitar lick or whatever to my sons in the studio: “It goes this way, and then you shake the string right there.” That sort of thing is really rewarding to a dad, because that’s what we do as parents: We get to work with our kids and pass it on. And I realize that’s what happened. That’s another big ingredient of Legacy.

The new album has 20 songs. CCR has such a large catalog of classic tracks. Was it tough to decide which ones to include and which ones to leave out, or was it obvious which songs needed to be on Legacy?

Perhaps 15 of them were pretty obvious. And then you start to look around after that for the next five or so. For instance, “Run Through the Jungle” was a later addition to things, I rather imagine. I’m not sure if “Porterville” was there in the beginning, but it rose very high on the radar, particularly my own vote, my own choice of things.

I wrote that song while marching in the army. while I was on active duty. I was off on a base somewhere with thousands of other guys.

There was a lot of marching in the late ‘60s in the military. There was so much mobilization because of the war. There were far more members – especially in the army and the Army Reserve – than they really knew what to do with at any one time, so they would just march us all afternoon after lunch. The sun was hot, and you had just eaten. You know, they’d give you about half an hour [break] and you’re gonna fall asleep. So for the next two or three hours, they had you marching out on this asphalt parade where it was 130 degrees.

Coming off marching on that pavement, I would go into hallucination, basically, and I literally started to look forward to it. I went into this meditation thing, and I began to write this song, this narrative about my own childhood. Some of it was true; some of it certainly was how I felt, and that was true. And then some of the facts here and there were embellished, you might say, by the poetic license ingredient.

And there I was making this song when I came home. I had a song; it didn’t even have a title. And eventually I decided to call it “Porterville,” because it seemed to fit. It was [the name of] a small town, kind of a mysterious, small, rural town in California that just sounded like my song.

So now in the present, I really wanted that song to get a second chance at life. I do believe the recording came off better than the original one, just because I’ve learned a lot about how to do things since the time that original was recorded.

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