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Credit: Far Out \/ ceedub13<\/p>\n
Tue 15 September 2026 21:30, UK <\/p>\n
Spend long enough orbiting the upper echelons of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll<\/a>, and it seems eventually you\u2019re bound to cross paths with one Beatle or another. <\/p>\n John Fogerty\u2019s moment finally came in 1987 when Taj Mahal descended upon the Palomino Club in Southern California: a smoky, unpretentious room where legends occasionally wandered in unannounced. <\/p>\n Keen to finally have his own meet-cute, when he caught wind that George Harrison was in the building, Fogerty snuck his way into a makeshift cloakroom, peeked his head inside and found he was hiding away as celebrities do; the \u2018quiet Beatle\u2019 spotted him immediately and called out, \u201cOh, John!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI said, \u2018Hey man, how you doing?\u2019\u201d Fogarty recalled, \u201cWe got to talking, and suddenly George blurts out, \u2018Well, the band really loved Creedence\u2019. I was kind of stunned; I\u2019m really not doing this to drop names, I think I\u2019m trying to lay on you how impressed I was with that sentence, which I\u2019ve carried ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n And it\u2019s easy to understand why. The Beatles, after all, were the band every other act of the era measured themselves against, consciously or not. Fogerty had spent years writing songs like\u00a0\u2018Fortunate Son\u2019<\/a>\u00a0and \u2018Bad Moon Rising\u2019 in the shadow of that comparison, carving out a sound that was proudly unglamorous next to the\u00a0psychedelic sprawl coming out of Abbey Road. <\/p>\n Where The Beatles chased that psychedelic zeitgeist and captured imaginations on both sides of the Atlantic, Creedence Clearwater Revival stood out as a swamp rock counterpart to the British invasion, stripped back, minimalist songs that felt carved out of oak rather than painted in kaleidoscope colours. <\/p>\n The Beatles might not have overtly influenced CCR sonically or thematically, but they did shape Fogarty\u2019s understanding of what an exciting four-piece rock band could achieve. And so, bolstered by the Fabs\u2019 success, Fogarty set about writing of small towns, bad weather, war and working-class America, and while resultantly CCR would never quite break Britain, it did lead them to outsell The Beatles outright in the US in 1969. <\/a> <\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n But by the time Fogarty found himself hiding in a cloak room with a Beatle, that legacy had become as much a burden as a badge of honour<\/a>. For a musician who had spent much of the 1970s and \u201980s locked in bitter disputes with record labels, bandmates and his own back catalogue, it must have been a strange kind of relief to be greeted so warmly by one of the most famous men in music. <\/p>\n It was an evening that would imbue Fogarty with such a restored sense of pride in his work that he would eventually try to reclaim his catalogue, too, but that\u2019s a story for another time.<\/a><\/p>\n The compliment also says something about Harrison himself, who, by 1987, had little left to prove and even less reason to flatter anyone without reason. His solo career had also weathered its own turbulence, and he was, by most accounts, allergic to the trappings of fame that came with being an ex-Beatle; so, when Harrison told Fogarty that the band loved Creedence, he absolutely meant it. <\/p>\n And perhaps that\u2019s why Fogarty never forgot it; he had finally met a Beatle, only to discover that his own songs had found their way into Harrison\u2019s world too.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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<\/a> The Far Out Beatles Newsletter<\/p>\n