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Though John Fogerty once sang that he was "Born on the Bayou" in one of his classic Creedence Clearwater Revival songs about America's promise and possibilities, the California native never actually visited the Deep South until 1990. When he finally did go, the experience helped him begin to make peace with one of the most painful parts of his past -- his two-decade legal struggle with Saul Zaentz, the owner of Creedence Clearwater's label, Fantasy Records, and the copyrights to Fogerty's songs from that time. Standing at the gravesites of blues greats like Robert Johnson, Fogerty realized that no matter who owns the legal rights to his early songs, he will ultimately be remembered as the man who wrote them.
\\That revelation eventually led him to break a 25-year embargo on performing his Creedence songs live and begin work on "Blue Moon Swamp," his strongest album since that band broke up in 1972. The Delta also had an aesthetic influence, and Fogerty's pilgrimage to the birthplace of the music he's always loved resonates on tracks like the bad-boy blues romp "Bring it Down to Jelly Roll" and "A Hundred and Ten in the Shade," which features vocals from the gospel group the Fairfield Four. He's also in fine form on more obviously Creedence-like songs such as "Southern Streamline" and "Hot Rod Heart," and a fiery New York concert and a taping of VH1's "Storytellers" proved he can still deliver the goods live. The day after that taping, in the business center of Manhattan's posh Essex House Hotel, Fogerty sat down to talk about "Blue Moon Swamp," the trip that got him back on the right track and why he finally decided to write a love song after all these years.
\\Rollingstone.com: Everyone's been asking you about playing the Creedence songs again. One thing I haven't seen anyone ask is how it feels to play them.
\\John Fogerty: It feels great. It feels like you would think it feels. I'm really proud of those songs. I'm the parent. I'm the father ...They came out of my body is what my wife says ... I had a lot of trouble with the ownership being somewhere else since I created them -- it was like having your children stolen away from you and watching someone live off their efforts. [But when I] sing them now, none of that is in my mind. Now it's the connection of the creator to his art ... I'm proud of those songs and it feels good.
\\Has playing them again made you feel less angry at [Fantasy Records owner] Saul Zaentz and your former bandmates?
\\Lets say it this way: What the owner of Fantasy Records did to John Fogerty is terrible, horrible, I would say inhuman ...[He could do what he wanted] with all those millions of dollars and I was treated like a prisoner, like a slave. The other people in Creedence Clearwater Revival never, ever once stood up and said, 'What that guy did to John Fogerty was really wrong.' In fact to make matters worse, they eventually turned around and joined sides with Saul.
\\Have I softened how I feel? No. They're still wrong and they're still very evil people. Have I softened how I feel about doing my songs? Absolutely ... I'm actually very happy and proud that I'm giving life back to these things that I denied for so long 'cause of what happened later. But that happened later. Now I've just sort of slid that stuff into another compartment, the bad stuff. It's still bad, I just don't go there ... The bad stuff is not an obsession -- it's not what I choose to use my life for anymore.
\\At the "Storytellers" taping, you talked about how some of your Creedence songs were inspired by politics. Why haven't you done much of that since?
\\There was a lot of that on the album that came out after "Centerfield," "Eye of the Zombie." [After that], which I sometimes call "I am a Zombie," I decided, 'John, you got a little too preachy, you got a little too highfalutin' about politics and about how this and that upsets you. Why don't you lighten up and make a record that's more fun, a record people actually want to play again?'
\\I understand you had been working on "Blue Moon Swamp" since 1992. Not to be ungrateful, but what took so long?
\\It was a lot of work trying to make this record. [It took] longer than Creedence's [original] career -- you can say it that way ... I was recording tracks in the studio every weekday but I wasn't getting the music that I wanted to capture. A lot of it was having the wrong musicians for the job ... [I went through] close to 30 drummers -- I stopped counting at 20. When it got right, though ... man. This record feels great to me.
\\Unless I'm mistaken, "Joy of My Life" is the first real love song you've ever written. Why none until now?
\\I swore off love songs. Anytime you look at the charts, 80 percent or more of the hit songs at any time are love songs ... [Most are] sappy love songs. Bless their hearts, I know the Carpenters were very talented way back when [and] ... Karen Carpenter actually had a great sound -- [hums in falsetto] -- but if you've got three guys out on the ballfield and one of them started humming that, the other two guys would pants him. So I made a conscious decision around 18 or so: I'm not writing any more love songs. So I wrote about feelings. I wrote about things. I wrote about events. [That] just seemed to have more depth to it.
\\But then I met my wife, Julie, and the way she made me feel was so profound. It was an evolution in my emotional well-being that I was able to discuss how I feel about her without any embarrassment. I love her. I adore her. I worship her. She has saved my life. When you feel that way, you say, I'd like to be able to describe that, 'cause I'm a songwriter.
\\But [I said], 'John, you've never written a love song before -- it's probably going to sound pretty stupid.' And I was right -- [my first efforts] did. Finally one day, after I had come back from a week-long songwriting trip and I was laying awake in bed -- I had been working on trying to write a song all week and I had failed -- "Joy of My Life" just came into my mind.
\\How does it feel that a lot of "No Depression" alternative country artists like Son Volt and Wilco have cited you as an influence -- not just musically but in the way you evoke a mythic America?
\\It certainly is flattering. I didn't know all this was going on -- no one told me and I wasn't hearing those musicians, so I didn't know I was influencing anybody. Now that I think about it, I suspect we both resonate to the same things -- we both like the same things -- but it's not anything that I invented. [With] Americana, if you want to use that phrase -- it used to be simple enough to say American [since] rock & roll was American until 1964 -- all you have to do is go back in time and you've got Mark Twain and Stephen Foster, two people in two different fields, and they both, at least in my mind, evoke a