John Fogerty's Musical Revival

After Years Of Inactivity, Sixties Star Returns To Forefront

(CBS) 
In a frantic three years, Fogerty wrote six platinum albums, 10 gold singles and made Creedence a rock legend.

Creedence, for a brief time, was maybe number one in the world. Certainly a close two to the Beatles, Blackstone opines.

But success created strains. Creedence broke up and Fogerty discovered the recording contract he'd signed as a teenager turned out to be very lucrative.

"And a lot of money was made. You know, most of which went somewhere other than myself," Fogerty claims.

Fantasy Records claimed it owned all the songs Fogerty wrote for Creedence. The result: Fogerty had to turn his back on the band as well as all the music he recorded as a member of Creedence.

Fogerty spent years in angry court battles with Fantasy. In the meantime, because his songs were musical shorthand that spelled out "The Sixties," many moviemakers put them in their soundtracks, like "Bad Moon Rising" in "The Big Chill."

"Born on the Bayou" in "Born on the 4th of July," his anti-war anthem "Fortunate Son" turned up in "Forrest Gump" and even in a commercial to sell jeans. All the time, licensed without his approval.

"I'm saying that very delicately, or nicely. You know, I was cheated. But somebody got a huge amount of money," Fogerty says.

For years he couldn't or wouldn't make any more music. Then finally in 1985 he made a comeback with a homerun. His joyous ode to baseball, "Centerfield," quickly became a staple in most ballparks and a natural for the baseball-loving movie "Bull Durham."

But Fantasy Records sued Fogerty for copyright infringement with the novel claim that he sounded too much like himself.

"The fact that I would somehow survive and then flourish after 15 or 18 years or whatever, drove them crazy," Fogerty says.

Eventually Fogerty won the right to sound like himself, but consumed by anger, frustration and lawsuits he bottomed out. "I turned around and looked at the prison I'd been held in for 15 years, and I got really pissed off until about 10 minutes after I met my wife," Fogerty intimates.

Julie, 15 years younger, barely knew Fogerty's music when they met in an Indianapolis restaurant.