Videos by American Songwriter
There’s a lot of country talent on this album. What influence has country been on you?
It was always part of my musical life. I was in preschool when my mother gave me a record of [1800s songwriter] Stephen Foster. She explained to me Stephen Foster wrote these songs. One side was “Oh Susanna.” The other was “Camptown Races.” And I listened quite intently. Why my mother thought that was important, I have no idea, but it was an amazing piece of information, life changing, really.
Stephen Foster, like myself, was not from the South, yet he’s so heavily identified with the South. He wrote many songs that were very southern in point of view, much like me, and yet, when he wrote a lot of them, he’d never been to the South. I did not know that during my career with Creedence, writing songs like “Proud Mary” and “Bad Moon Rising” and “Green River,” which are so very southern in their story-telling and imagery. I knew I had a great debt to Stephen Foster, but I didn’t know much about him. He was America’s first songwriter, the first guy who was actually earning a living being a songwriter. He was also the first guy who had his songs stolen, and the royalties from those songs probably doled out at a much lesser amount than they should have been. Anyway, you asked about country, and Stephen Foster, to me, sort of goes down that road.
My parents were pretty eclectic in what they liked, I think because they both came from rural America. Dad was from the Dakotas, but he moved to Montana and met my mother. They drove to California in the late ’30s; they were still kids. They settled in El Cerrito, where I was born. Right between Berkeley and Richmond. That’s basically what made me. Those who came in the Great Migration – all the Okies from the Dustbowl, like in The Grapes Of Wrath, looking for the Promised Land in California – a lot of them settled in Richmond. They brought their music, rural country blues and country music. My mother referred to these people as Okies. She was calling somebody a hillbilly. It was a bit demeaning, but my parents weren’t bigots; they certainly had no racial prejudices. I took that to mean country music. Whenever you heard fiddle or twang, which I loved and they loved, that’s just what they’d call it.
The other side of that coin was Berkeley, the college. Both my parents aspired intellectually. They read a lot; I think they spent time in college. My mom became a teacher; my dad admired writers. He used to read poetry to us all the time. One of his favorites was John Record, the poem about dangerous Dan McGrew and the Yukon. A lot of bravado and hyperbole. My dad would bring them to life.
Woody Guthrie had popularized the term Okie on the radio in California back then.
At some point, my mom started piquing my interest in folk music, probably the early ’50s, before the official folk boom. But when it did get going, it exploded onto the mainstream, and then there were folk festivals. Particularly in Berkeley. My mom took me to all that. So I met Pete Seeger and listened to Pete talking about Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly and all those people, and he brought them all to life. It was about music, so I darned sure listened. That was totally fascinating to me. Because it had my mom’s approval, that was all okay.
Rock and roll was just tolerated by my mom. She didn’t quite close the door, she just didn’t think that was quite respectful; it was like, “What are you going to do for a real job, John?” So I had what every other rock and roll kid had – I got to like it even more because my parents didn’t like it.
Country music is actually even more rebellious than rock and roll. It’s just that some of the rock and roll crowd doesn’t know that. [They] will look at you like my mother looked at me when I was loving Elvis Presley. Country is one more step removed as far as being politically correct. A lot of my friends who really love rock, they’re not invitin’ Hank Williams to the party like I would. Hank was as rock and roll as you could get.
People pegged you as southern; in fact, everyone thought you were born on the bayou. How did you develop the Creedence sound – the swamp pop, the accent? Was that intentional?
It was quite intentional, but in the precocious way that young people just know they’re doin’ the right thing. As when I heard the Ventures or Duane Eddy, and got such a clear vision of, “Yeah, that’s what I want to do.” Or seein’ Elvis on TV, and finding myself in front of a mirror with a broom, mimicking Elvis. You were taking that as your own because you thought it was cool. I had a couple of guys that I was in a band with. We’d get a job at a bar somewhere and we’d cover the songs on the radio ‘cause that was the cool thing to do. But I was trying to write music on my own and with my brother, Tom. At 14, I met a rhythm ‘n’ blues artist named James Powell, and he enlisted us to help him record some songs. We recorded a song called “Beverly Angel,” in the same studio that ten years later, I’d record my version of “Suzie-Q.” That song was played on the radio. I’m 14 years old and I’m playin’ on this record that’s on the radio. Unless you’re with Disney nowadays, how does that happen?
So how did this southern thing happen? The sound started when I was in the Army, in 1967, marching around in 115-degree heat on a parade ground that was mile square, a huge asphalt thing. Marching around endlessly, ‘cause they don’t know what to do with you while you’re at boot camp. They can’t just have you go eat and then fall asleep under a tree. They gotta keep you moving. This was at the height of the Vietnam War. I would go into a delusional state. I’d be walking along, hyperventilating, probably one step away from heat stroke because you’re in full battle gear. And I started writing this narrative about my childhood.
When I got off active duty and reconnected with my brother and the other two guys who became Creedence, that narrative became “Porterville.” That was my first cool song that was about something real that affected me rather than just I love you, you love me, why you treat me so bad? All those songs that I’d been writing ‘cause that’s what was on the radio.
I moved to an apartment with my first wife and my child, who had been born while I was in the Army. And I began to stay up and try to write songs. There was hardly any furniture, nothing on the walls. I would stare at the walls and go into a trance. It was quiet, the lights were low. There was no extra stimulus, no alcohol or drugs. It was purely mental. And I had this realization. I had a blank sheet of paper and a pencil, and that wall. I could go any place. Whatever I wanted to dream or fantasize about, I could do it and write about it. I wasn’t schooled in transcendental meditation. I just accidentally stumbled upon what worked for me.
It really came together after the first album [Creedence Clearwater Revival]. Because of “Suzie-Q” being on the radio, we were invited to play at more important places. We’d been a bar band, but after “Suzie-Q,” there was a pivotal engagement at the Avalon in San Francisco. We were the opening act, the last people getting our soundcheck. And then right after, they’d open the doors and we’d play.
But something important happened. I plugged in to my amp and I started hearing an E7th chord with that swampy vibrato that I was making on my little Kustom amp. It just turned me on to be standing there – I was so excited that I was playing in front of a real audience in San Francisco; I was just charged. And suddenly, I was inspired. I turned to the band and said “just start playing E.” And I started screaming at the top of my range, just a melody and vowel sounds and consonants. By the way, this is exactly how I write songs. Then suddenly, right in the middle of having this burst of inspiration, it went silent. The stage manager had pulled the plug out of my amplifier. I looked at him and said, “Why’d you do that?” And he said, “Don’t worry about that. You’re not going anywhere anyhow.” This was about June of 1968. I looked at him and said, “Not going anywhere? You give me a year, pal, and I’ll show ya who’s not goin’ somewhere!”
The next time I was sitting in front of that little wall, I had that burst of inspiration on my mind. Right at that moment, it collided in my brain with the phrase, “Born on the bayou.” And I just rolled with it. I pulled everything I knew about it – which wasn’t much, because I didn’t live there. Every bit of southern bayou information that had entered my imagination from the time I was born, it all collided in that meditation about that song. And I knew that sound and that story went together; I can’t tell you why. I was a kid, and I said, “This is powerful.” It’s like the first time you’ve been allowed to drink from the holy nectar of the gods, whatever that is.
In just a few years, you wrote so many indelible classics. Do you have any explanation for why these songs have endured for so long?
I look at my wife pretty near every day and say I’m the luckiest man in the world, because I found her. And the fact that this music is accepted the way it is, I feel the same way about. I wrote some songs and everybody still remembers them. [One-hit wonders, like “Tossin’ and Turnin’” singer] Bobby Lewis, that could have been me. The part that I could control, when that inspiration – the narrative, the meaning and the story – collided with the sound, the musical part that I understood, I would keep pushin’ till I had them connected in a way that I felt satisfied. You’re looking for just the right word and for that word to occur at just the right place, so you’re saying what you want to say with as few words as possible and yet, have the coolest-sounding word you could say because it was just a really cool word to say at that spot in the song. Like, “Big wheel keep on toinin’, Proud Mary keep on boinin’.” What in the world is that? I really don’t know, other than perhaps I’d been made aware of Howlin’ Wolf and he pronounced some of his words that way.
As a songwriter, I try not to be sloppy; same with the music. You can be very lean, very efficient, so you’re not wasting a lot of time gettin’ to the point. You’re saying it with as pure a word or phrase as you can. That’s the part that was craft. You refine and refine and refine. Maybe that’s why the songs still hang on, because they’re very pure. For one thing, they’re very short. “Bad Moon Rising” is like 2 minutes and 12 seconds. I would try to do everything as quickly and with as little extra as possible. It was a challenge.
You were among the first wave of rock and rollers who recognized that music also could be a political force. Songs like “Fortunate Son” became anti-war anthems, and still resonate. How do you reconcile your politics with your music today?
If I can go back a little bit, through Pete Seeger’s guidance, I started to hear about Woody Guthrie, and the idea that there was such a thing as a song with a message. Pete made it heroic. I also was aware of Pete having to testify before Congress, and having his very being questioned by a bunch of old men. At the same time, there were protests in Washington. I was very young; I was just seeing headlines and newsreels, but I saw my government hosing people with fire hoses. They were people of the United States, being treated like dogs, and all I knew was, those are Pete Seeger’s people.
That’s where I got the nobility of rebelling. I’m a very minor character in the shadow of a Woody Guthrie or a Pete Seeger or even a Joe Hill that I got to know about because of wonderful union songs. And closer to my generation, a young guy named Bob Dylan. Bob is a very iconic and gigantic stop along the way in the tradition of songs that tell a story and have a message, certainly a message I resonate to.
Bob became very mainstream to all us kids in that generation who are at the same time rebelling against the government, the war in Vietnam. Probably 99 ½ percent of people under 25 in 1967 had remarkably similar cultural and political views. You will never be able to overstate Dylan’s importance, his cultural impact at that time. If any one guy was responsible for ending the war in Vietnam, it’s Dylan.
“Fortunate Son,” by the way, is one of the quickest songs I ever wrote in my life. When I felt it was about ready to hatch, I went into my bedroom and just sat down to write. The whole thing happened in about 20 minutes. That just poured out.
“Déjà Vu (All Over Again)” I wrote in ’04, and I’d been thinking about the sentiment for probably a year. In some sense, I’d been thinking about it for 40 years. When the Vietnam War officially ended, I was driving and listening to the radio, and they said, “America has declared that we are withdrawing from Vietnam.” I looked at the radio and said, “Let’s make damn sure we never do something that stupid again.”
Years later, when George W.’s government decided we were gonna invade Iraq, I’m shaking my head and going, “No, no, no, no, no.” The little [alarms] in my head are going back to the Vietnam War, so I gave it a narrative, a cultural and political narrative.
I had a separate residence that was my songwriting place, and one day I had gone there to write a swamp-rock song, an escapist thing. And I was thinking about what was going on in America. We hadn’t entered Iraq yet. It was just saber-rattling. As I walked up to the door, this melody entered my head. This sound just grabbed me. It was tapping me and saying, “Come with me.” What I heard was [sings], Did you hear ‘em talking about it on the radio? And I heard that terrible, mournful sound that tugs at your heartstrings. I went right to my acoustic guitar. Something was pulling me, and it was so overwhelmingly sad. I sensed later it was a mother’s mournful cry for her child. I started to write words that were just coming out of the sky. I didn’t know what I was writing about until I wrote It’s déjà vu all over again. And then I thought, “My God, is that what this is about?” I was writing about the war that was coming and the unnecessary deaths that were gonna happen all over again. I was overcome with feeling that emotion. I guess I was guided there. I did not create that song. It was handed to me. Probably the only time that’s ever happened.
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