(Credits: Far Out / Fantasy Records)
Fri 14 November 2025 23:15, UK
There are acrimonious splits, and then there’s being sued for plagiarising your own work. Poor old John Fogerty found himself falling foul of the lesser-known crime of sounding too much like John Fogerty, but he certainly won a lot of sympathy along the way – perhaps too much, in fact.
The classic counterculture band mirrored the decade, culminating in a fever pitch in 1969 when they were pretty much the most popular band in the world for a year, and then, just three years later, finding themselves torn apart beyond repair.
Alongside inter-band tensions, a business dispute with the heavy-handed Fantasy Records – who ultimately claimed control over John Fogerty’s output and sued him for misdemeanours such as ‘The Old Man Down the Road’ sounding too much like ‘Run Through the Jungle’, despite John Fogerty writing both – brought about the end of Creedence.
But it also brought about a lot of trauma for John Fogerty. He fell out with his former bandmates, including his brother Tom Fogerty. He felt unsupported and spurned by the industry. But he had firm allies in the fans that he had garnered over the years – fans who knew that he was always the creative driving force behind the band, writing the songs in their entirety.
So, somewhere along the line, amid understandably clandestine legal disputes, a rumour arose that John Fogerty not only wrote every element of the songs, he also played every element, too. It came to be gospel in certain circles that essentially throughout the group’s tenure, Tom Fogerty, Stu Cook, and Doug Clifford had been nothing but touring musicians.
John Fogerty in the 1970s. (Credits: Far Out / Press)
In a strange twist, it was even implied that their kindly leader recorded with the group, before returning to the studio later that evening to dub himself over their apparently substandard work. This claim became so widespread that it eventually made its way around to the former plaid-shirted frontman.
And in 1993, he readily dismissed it. “Probably ninety-nine percent of the tracks we did as a quartet are played live with all four guys playing at the same room,” John Fogerty told Rolling Stone. “I’ve heard the rumor over the years that ‘after they left the studio, John went in and re-recorded all the parts.’ No. I think the charm of what you hear on those records is four guys really playing.”
In truth, that’s even part of the magic of the band. They have a mercurial sound on record that separated them from the sanitised recordings of the era – an unfortunate side effect of Pet Sounds’ display of studio mastery that many later bastardised. If anything, it’s to John Fogerty’s credit that he always tried to harness this.
As for his bandmates’ take on the myth, Cook told Bill Kopp that they were much more of an ensemble than people imagine. “We didn’t always play the parts we were given. John showed us lots of stuff he wanted specifically in songs; songwriters often do that,” he commented.
Concluding, “They come up with a song, they have an arrangement they want to hear. Some things are important, and other things are less important. We had a sufficient amount of latitude in writing and arranging our parts.”
So, while there was no doubting that John Fogerty was by far and away the leading creative force, a factor borne out in the unfortunate decades since their ugly split, one of the finest facets of his bandleadership was that he recognised the invigorating zip in their sound that separated them from the crowd in the late ‘60s and made them the biggest American force of the day.
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