Long before the storied demise of CCR forced Fogerty into becoming a solo artist, he was already headed in that direction. As he told GP in 1985, “In a sense, I was able to have my solo career with the band because I was doing so much. We were basically a four-piece band, where every guy would do his part, and then I would add whatever was necessary to make a record out of it. I had no inspiration to do anything outside of Creedence, but because the other guys were frustrated by me taking up so much space, I guess there was always a conflict.”

By the time CCR’s pinnacle album, Cosmo’s Factory, was released in the summer of 1970, the heyday of Creedence was already over. The band wrestled with artistic and financial issues, rhythm guitarist Tom Fogerty exited shortly after the release of Pendulum in 1970, and with CCR’s final album, Mardis Gras, barely registering a blip in spite of two hit singles—“Sweet Hitch-Hiker” and “Someday Never Comes”—Creedence officially called it quits in 1972.

The labyrinthine legal problems that followed in the wake of CCR’s breakup left Fogerty in the utterly bizarre situation of having to avoid recording anything that sounded like a Creedence song. Fogerty forfeited his future royalties in order to cut his ties with his former label, Fantasy Records, and he vowed to never again play Creedence songs live. After releasing The Blue Ridge Rangers in 1973—which yielded the Top-40 hit “Jambalaya”—Fogerty delivered his first official solo album, John Fogerty, and was subsequently sued by his former music publisher, who deemed that the singles “Rockin’ All Over the World” and “Almost Saturday Night” sounded too much like CCR songs. The guitarist then went to work on an album to be called Hoodoo. The record was never released, however, and, in 1976, Fogerty moved his family to a farm in Oregon, and would not make another album for eight years—a period during which his songwriting also took a hiatus.

The last time Fogerty graced Guitar Player’s cover was for the April 1985 issue, just as his career was back on track with Centerfield. Fogerty still had some of his biggest court battles to fight following its release, but there was light at the end of the tunnel, and things have only gotten better since that time. Fogerty released the Grammy winning Blue Moon Swamp in 1997, and he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He even started playing Creedence songs in concert. In 2005, he also re-established ties with Fantasy Records after 30-something years of estrangement with the label, subsequently releasing the appropriately titled CD, The Long Road Home and a companion DVD, The Long Road Home—In Concert. November 2007 saw the debut of his latest album, Revival—a collection of songs that even includes a number titled “Creedence Song.” How far things have come. Clearly, Fogerty has made peace with the past, and he can once again revel in the spirit that has made him one of America’s preeminent songwriters.

Some of the songs on Revival sound as if they could have been recorded in 1970. Did you consciously want to make an album that rekindled that classic Creedence vibe?
There were really several things going on. For much of my solo career I’ve made albums that kind of went off on tangents, and after Deja Vu All Over Again, I perceived those tangents as perhaps being a problem. I had gotten into fingerstyle and flatpicking, and those things were exciting to me, but hearing that people weren’t getting it made me think I’d gone too far in that direction. Some artists might just go, “Well, I’m in my blue period now,” but even with Blue Moon Swamp—which got a Grammy—I felt I had leaned too much toward country. Together, all these things made me think, “Gee John, why don’t you just make an effort to get back to playing rock and roll?” But on the way to being my true self again, I came up against something that I’ve been dealing with for years and years, and it was caused by my early association with Fantasy Records and [co-owner] Saul Zaentz, as well as my former bandmates around the breakup of Creedence. It really started when Centerfield came out—I was criticized for sounding too much like Creedence, and Zaentz and Fantasy actually sued me for sounding like myself. Even though I won that case—and blessedly so, because we’d all be living in a different world if I hadn’t—what happened to me personally was that every time I’d get into a songwriting groove by playing something I’d just do naturally, a little gremlin would pop up on my shoulder, and, looking very much like a lawyer, would go, “No, no, no. You can’t sound like that or I’m going to sue you.” Inevitably, that would piss me off, and whatever inspiration I had would just wither and die. It happened to me dozens of times since the ’80s, and it was like an affliction.

How were you able to push that aside and write the songs for this album?
I was working on a song for the new album one day—just sitting there doing my swampy thing on guitar—and the idea of calling it “Creedence Song” suddenly came to me. I started to have a very warm feeling about my early days, and I was getting into this cool groove, and, this time, when the gremlin popped up like it always did and started saying to me, “Creedence song? You can’t say that or I’m going to sue you.” I just shouted out, “Go away! I don’t want you here anymore. Get out of my life.” And for the first time it just went poof, and was gone. I went forward, and I completed the song with a real feeling of conviction and assuredness.

“Creedence Song” was a watershed moment, and looking back on it now, it was a real victory for me. My soul was healed from all the garbage I’d been through, and it was sort of like I was 23 again, and none of the bad stuff had happened. All I can say is I’m really tickled. I was like the first guy who was kind of going, “Wow, this sounds like me!”

On Blue Moon Swamp you played lap steel, Dobro, electric sitar, Irish bouzuki, and mandolin. Why did you go back to just playing guitar on Revival?
For me, two guitars, bass, and drums has always been the ultimate rock-and-roll lineup. I wanted to get back to that idea by going into the studio with four guys and recording the songs very much like the old days of a quartet band—meaning early Elvis, the Beatles, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and Creedence. You set up in the studio, the band plays, the tape recorder rolls, and you’ve basically got your record. When I listen to Booker T. and MGs—either by themselves, or backing people like Al Green or Wilson Pickett—it’s such magic. You can never get that by layering parts. Even some of those technically impressive records by Yes and Mahavishnu Orchestra from the ’70s never approached the wonderful mojo the great old bands had. I wanted to try for that kind of vibe, and I think there are certainly times on Revival where we’re really playing like a band.

Your double-stop solos are as definitive as your rhythm playing. What was the inspiration for that style of lead playing?
I don’t really know. I was a contemporary of Clapton and Hendrix, and I used to envy their ability to get a great lead sound and just sit there and pick. I couldn’t do that, of course, because my role in my band was basically to play rhythm along with my brother, Tom, who, by the way, was a fantastic rhythm player. My whole double-stop thing probably came from what I’d heard from the Beatles and Buddy Holly, where you’ve got two guys strumming on guitars, and, at some point, you’ve got a solo. I’d take my solo in “Proud Mary” or “Bad Moon Rising,” and it was just kind of an extension of what I was already doing as a rhythm player.

You’ve used lowered tunings a lot in the past, and on “Long Dark Night,” it sounds like you are using a D tuning for the rhythm parts and the lead break. How did you arrive at that tuning?
I made that D-to-D tuning part of my style way, way back. I think that “Proud Mary” was the first song I used it on. Also, “Bootleg,” off of Bayou Country, and, of course, “Bad Moon Rising.” One of the things I can say that I discovered was tuning a Les Paul down a whole step, and playing it in standard position. That just gives you this great huge sound.

Did you use heavier strings on that guitar?
I do now. I started to find as I toured in the ’80s and ’90s that songs such as “Fortunate Son” didn’t sound right with the light-gauge strings I was using, so I started playing with a slightly heavier gauge. But on those old Creedence records, I always used Ernie Ball heavy-bottom/Slinky-top sets, and then tuned down. Lordy, how did I ever do that? What I’m using now is a special Ernie Ball set that goes .054, .044, .034, .017, .013, and .011. That set finds its way onto any detuned Les Paul that I have. Now there’s one song that doesn’t fit that whole thing, and that’s “Run Through the Jungle,” which is in D, but I play it in a dropped-D tuning. All of the other songs from the Creedence days that were in standard tuning, I played on my other black Les Paul that had the Bigsby on it—the one that’s on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I have several black 1968 Les Paul Customs, and one of them I’ve had since 1969. The first one I got and used on “Bad Moon Rising” had its neck broken by the airlines pretty quickly on—probably about 1970. It was repaired and turned into a e-sized neck. In those days, I used to think I needed a small guitar because my hands were small, but that was a cop out, because what I really needed to do was practice more. So I bought another Les Paul Custom, and that’s the one I still have. I used that guitar for “Grapevine,” “Feelin’ Blue,” and some other things, and I played most of “Long Dark Night” [from Revival] on it, too.

On the new album, you’re holding an Ernie Ball Music Man guitar. Is that an instrument you’re also playing a lot now?
That’s my blue Axis, which I use in my live show for “Keep on Chooglin,’” “Travelin’ Band,” and “Sweet Hitch-Hiker.” The Ernie Ball company makes really great guitars. I’m not an official endorser, but I use their guitars because they’re built well and they sound great. I’ve got some old Strats, but I hardly use them anymore because Ernie Ball made me a beautiful Strat-like guitar—which is what you’re hearing on “Gunslinger” and “Broken Down Cowboy.” Ernie Ball’s Dudley Gimple helped me design that guitar, and Seymour Duncan wound the pickups for it. I explained to him the kind of sound I wanted, and Seymour just knew from experience what I was talking about. That guitar also has a Callaham vibrato bridge [callahamguitars.com], which is made from a type of stainless-steel that I think just sounds better than the metals Leo Fender was using in the ’50s and ’60s. The result is that it plays beautifully, and it really delivers that wonderful cluck sound like you get from an old Strat.

On “Summer of Love” you get this great fuzz sound. Did you get that from an amp, or did you use a pedal?
I’ve got a wonderful Cornford amp that I use a lot for those kinds of sounds. The one I recorded that song with is the 50-watt MKII model. I plugged in a PRS Singlecut Trem into the Cornford’s overdrive channel, and I even goosed it a bit with a Keeley Katana Boost pedal. There’s a certain force to tube overdrive, and when I go into the solo on that song, you can hear all this energy and low end. It’s not like an ’80s big-hair sound—it’s kind of rude. I really like that.

On the live Premonition album, right after playing “Green River,” you tell the audience that you’re playing though your original Kustom amp. What is it about the Kustom’s sound that’s so special to you?
It’s been said—and I’ve said it myself—that I was the only guy who ever got a good sound from a Kustom amp. In the Creedence days, that was the only amp I had. I didn’t know a lot back then, but I knew that when I plugged a Rickenbacker into my solid-state Kustom, I got a sound I liked. Rickenbackers from the ’60s had that chimey acoustic tone, and my brother Tom and I were both playing Rickenbackers in a very acoustical way with a lot of open chords. Through our Kustom amps, they just sounded beautiful. These days, you have to search far and wide to find a tube amp with a clean channel that actually lets you be clean. My old Kustom 200 stayed very clean—no matter how hard I’d hit it. Well, unless I activated its “harmonic clipper” function—which was basically a built-in fuzztone with several degrees of tone and fuzz. I’d kick it on for lead, and with the semi-hollowbody guitar I was using, it would go easily into acoustic feedback. That’s what I used on “Susie Q” and “I Put a Spell on You,” where I got it to sound very much like an EBow. The guitar is feeding back, the string is resonating, and it was infinite. You could stand there all day holding that certain note, and by using some whammy or finger vibrato, it would sustain forever.

How long did you continue using the Kustoms for live playing?
In 1998, I was touring in Australia, and on the very last gig somebody rolled the amp off the stage while it still had a guitar cord plugged into it, and the faceplate was cracked. When my tech, Andy Brauer, came up and told me what had happened, it broke my heart. The amp still worked perfectly, but that’s when I decided I’d better retire it. I pulled it out for this album, but I ended up using a Bogner Shiva for my clean sound. It’s an 80-watt amp with EL34 tubes, and I ran it into a 2x15 cabinet that is made exactly like an old Sunn bass cabinet. I’m using Eminence 151 Legend speakers in that cabinet, and for rhythm guitar—if you want really clean—it sounds great. I used that setup for my big rhythm sound with a Les Paul Custom, and those 15s give a nice full sound with lots of bass. After the record was done and I was out touring, I discovered the Diezel Herbert—which is a 150-watt tube amp that has a fantastic clean sound. Like most modern amps, however, you can bring some gain in if you want a little hair on your tone. Diezel has another model called the VH4, which is 100 watts and has four distinctly different channels. Its clean channel is a little different in personality than the Herbert’s, but they both deliver a sparkling clean sound. I know that recording-wise from now on I’ll be referring to those Diezel amps because they sound great.

How do the Cornford MKII amps fit into your live setup?
For some players, there’s nothing like a Les Paul plugged into a Marshall. But, for me, the killer sound is a ’68 or ’69 goldtop Les Paul with P90 pickups though a Cornford MKII’s overdrive channel. If I had one tone to live or die with, that would probably be it. That’s the setup I use onstage for “Green River,” which has a nice long outro to it, and also “Old Man Down the Road,” where I get into my soloing mode. Because the P90s have a bit more treble, it’s just a very musical sound with the neck pickup on. I also love playing my PRS Singlecut into the Cornford for a little thicker sound. Cornford made me some 100-watt MKIIs that I’ve been converting from 6L6s to EL34s, and that’s what I use live though a 4x12 cabinet loaded with either Celestion Gold or Eminence Wizard speakers. For my clean tones, I jump back to the Sunn-style 2x15 cabinet—which the Ampeg company was gracious enough to build for me. I found the Diezel amps to be the best sounding though those cabs, and that’s what I use for “Bad Moon Rising,” “Proud Mary,” and the intro to “Born on the Bayou” with some tremolo going. I also need an in-between sound, say, for the opening riff on “Green River,” where I want to be chucking along with a little bit of crunch, and I’m using the first channel of the Cornford for that sound.

How do you control everything when you play live?
I have a Bradshaw switching system that can be programmed for an infinite amount of stuff. For instance, I sometimes want to go to channel one of my Cornford, but I also want to have a tremolo or reverb pedal on, too. When I play “Keep on Chooglin,’” I do this sort of tapping shredder thing as an intro, and I’ve got a little bit of slapback echo along with a really deep reverb setting that I only use for that part. I also have a couple of boost pedals that I like to be able to kick on for certain things—an Xotic Effects RC Booster and a Keeley Katana. I also have my own self-designed tremolo that I had built back in 1982 by Zeta Music in Berkeley, California [zetamusic.com]. I went there one day and explained to them how my old Kustom amp allowed me to have tremolo or vibrato, or a blend of the two. I wanted to be able to combine those effects, so they built me a box that does that. Unfortunately, that pedal—which we called the “swamp box”—went on the fritz back in 1997, and I just gave it to my tech, Andy Brauer. I went on and just started using modern tremolo units, but, meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, he got it fixed, and started renting it out as part of his business for six or seven years. I was recording a song called “Wicked Old Witch” for the Deja Vu All Over Again album and I said, “Hey Andy, remember that old tremolo pedal I used to have?” So he brought it back to me and I used it for that record. It’s the only pedal in my collection that I have to take home and put in my closet every time I’m off the road. I’ve found someone who is willing to reverse-engineer it, and build another for me with modern parts. Hopefully, it will sound the same.

Have you heard Kustom’s new ’36 Coupe and ’72 Coupe amps—both of which have blendable tremolo and vibrato?
Yes. Somebody turned me onto those amps, so I contacted [Kustom amp designer] James Brown and spoke to him about it. They sent me a ’72 Coupe to try, and its vibrato/tremolo sounds absolutely great. There’s another amp out there from this company called Juke [jukeamps.com], and when I heard a description of its vibrato/tremolo, I bought one just for that reason. With the tremolo going—and just touch of vibrato—it’s really nice on the high strings when you hit a chord. But if you use too much vibrato, it starts sounding like that old Lonnie Mack song, “Wham.”

Do you practice much to keep your technique evolving along with your sound?
I’ve been practicing like a mofo. For a long time, though, I was kind of practicing in the dark—in the sense that I would just plug in and start playing things. But around 1992, I got bit by the Dobro bug, and I discovered Jerry Douglas—to whom I must give a big thanks for his inspiration. All roads to Dobro eventually lead you to Jerry, and as I started collecting his records and being in awe of his playing, I said to myself, “This guy is great, and you’re not, John.” So I took that realization as a challenge to try and get better in a very disciplined and structured way. I spent several years living with the Dobro—which meant that my fingers were getting really involved—and, eventually, I got to the point where I can now play lead guitar using just my fingers. One of the songs I did that way was “Blueboy” on Southern Streamline. I also played “Natural Thing” off the new album pretty much with just my fingers. In 1994, I finally got to meet Jerry Douglas. It’s funny, because it turned out that his birthday is the same as mine, and he was in the sixth grade when Green River came out. Jerry was already playing Dobro, then, but all his friends were listening to rock and roll, and they used to rib him because he was playing a “stupid” Dobro instead of an electric guitar. So he goes and buys Green River, and he takes it to school just to be able to tell his friends, “Look, Creedence Clearwater Revival—they play dobro! So I ended up influencing Jerry, and, all those years later, it comes right back around, and he winds up influencing me.

Did the dexterity you achieved from ’shedding so hard on Dobro give you the improvement in your guitar playing you were looking for?
It led me to trying to do what I call the “free hand” thing. It’s what all the old jazz guys did, and it’s what mandolin players have to do—Bill Monroe is a wonderful example—and also bluegrass flatpickers. Basically, you’re not resting your picking hand on the guitar—which I had always done. To really get flying the way jazz guys and bluegrass pickers do, you have to learn to roll your hand and do alternate picking—down up, down up. It has been nearly ten years now since I first started trying to play that way, and I can finally rip off a free-hand flatpicked solo now. The best example is probably on the Deja Vu album on a song called “Sugar Sugar,” which has a pretty nice flatpicked solo that I did on acoustic guitar.

You’ve been playing Dobro since the late ’60s. How did you first get introduced to that instrument?
A pivotal moment for me as a musician occurred back in 1969, when we were playing the Johnny Cash Show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Not only was it meeting Johnny—who was an idol of mine from the old Sun Records days—but also Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Norman Blake, who was part of Johnny’s TV band. So I’m sitting there with these guys who can really play, and I’m this dumb 23-year-old guy who is strumming open E and G chords. But they had no attitude toward me, and they were willing to show me stuff. Dobro master Tut Taylor was there, too, and he starts telling me about “them old-time guys” who used to bend the bar backwards, instead of holding it straight like modern steel players do. I only knew about half of what he was talking about, but I was getting interested in the Dobro. Then, I noticed this skinny kid with a beard and glasses hanging around, and he’s kind of watching me and Tut talking. I started saying how I’d like to get a Dobro, and this guy offers to go and find me one. I said, “Yeah, cool.” So he goes off to some house where there were supposedly dobros laying around everywhere, and he picks out the best-sounding one and brings it back to me. It turns out to be a Regal, and it cost me $200. The guy who got it for me was George Gruhn, the future owner of Gruhn Guitars in Nashville. I may have been his first customer. That’s the guitar I’m standing with on the cover of the Green River album. My hand was covering its headstock, so no one could tell what brand it was. I played it on “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” [from Cosmo’s Factory].

Can you talk about what inspires you to write a song?
Boy, this is that world where I don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes, it feels like an idiot savant kind of thing—like the character Dustin Hoffman played in Rain Man, where the box of matches falls on the floor, and he goes, “171.” In kind of the same way, I wrote “Proud Mary” immediately after reading my notice that I’d been discharged from the army reserve. Sometimes, after I write a song and record it, I look at it and go, “How the heck did I do that?” This time, “Broken Down Cowboy” was the first one I thought was a good song. And it came out of no-where. Minutes before I wrote it, I had no idea that I was going to suddenly connect with something from 20 years ago. You might say it’s a confession—that broken down guy is who I was when my wife Julie met me. And I’m happy to say that because of her, I’m not that guy anymore. “I Can’t Take It No More” was literally this punk energy thing that came out of me in reaction to something I heard on the news, but “Long Dark Night” is a little more mysterious. It’s that old swampy thing that I used to do back with “Grapevine” and “Feelin’ Blue.” But as I was grooving on the feeling, through my mind went the phrase “long dark night,” which sounds epochal—like the black plague coming to the people in one of those old Charlton Heston movies. It’s how I feel about the Bush administration. The song won’t change anything, but it does mark what I think is a dark chapter for this country.

Was the song “Bad Moon Rising” similar in that sense?
That’s another sort of epochal thing, but, on that song, I was only thinking in terms of the natural and supernatural. It was inspired by an old movie I saw called The Devil and Daniel Webster, where the lead character, after promising his soul to the devil, benefits from many things—including surviving a huge storm that left his corn crop standing, while his neighbor’s crop was flattened. I just thought at the time, “Wow, that’s spooky.”

What about “Tombstone Shadow”?
Some of the tales in the song were true. We were playing in San Bernardino, California, and I did go to see a gypsy—he happened to be a gypsy man, though. He had me cut a deck of cards, and when I came up with a 7 and a 6, he told me I was going to have 13 months of bad luck. He also told me not to travel in airplanes. If I’d taken his advice, I guess I’d be like John Madden [former Oakland Raiders coach and TV announcer who is famously fearful of flying].

The imagery you speak of in “Green River” also seems very real and tangible.
Well, that’s very much a true story—other than the fact that the stream was called Putah Creek, which is up by a Northern California, town called Winters. We sometimes called it “our green river,” and there was a descendant of Buffalo Bill Cody who owned the property and the cabin my family always rented there. This was about 1949, and I’m about four years old, and this guy Cody, who looked to be about 90 years old, quite likely could have been the son of Bullalo Bill Cody. I never talked about “Green River” much, but all that stuff is true. There was an old Cody Junior, and that creek is where I would swing from a rope, and where I learned to fish and swim and skip rocks. It’s a very idyllic memory for me.

Then there’s “Keep on Chooglin’”—which had a meaning that no one has been able to define.
“Chooglin’ is a word I made up because I wanted to be able to play a shuffle-beat groove. In the late ’60s, there were a lot of rock festivals, and I was hearing a lot of live bands. It was the emergence of big amplifiers and amplified bands, but they still played American roots music—a lot of blues and rock and roll. But it was all kind of being re-melded, like an evolution from, say, the Elvis Presley era. Many of the bands, such as the Grateful Dead, would play these boogie grooves, and jam on them for ten minutes or more. Creedence didn’t have anything like that to jam on, so I came up with something that sounded suitable to me, and it was “Chooglin.’” Of course, I had to make up a scenario for what it might mean—so I just invented my own definition. It was a lot of chutzpah on my part, but it came natural to me back then. I’m not sure I would have the guts to do that now.

Fogerty’s Pick Tricks

“Try as many different picks as you can,” says Fogerty. “Go down to the music store, and get yourself a bunch of different picks in various thicknesses, and you’ll be amazed at how that can help you. You’ll find a pick that you really like for a while, and then, as you get better, you’ll move on to something else. You might even try a thumbpick—that’s a cool style of playing that’s associated with Chet Atkins, but even Brent Mason incorporates a thumbpick, and it gives him a lot of versatility. In the old days, I used a Fender thin pick, but for live playing now I mostly use a celluloid Fender medium. I happen to believe that the white ones sound better, but maybe that’s just my little thing. The only other pick I use a lot is a Wegen BigCity [wegenpicks.com], and that’s for my fast, alternate-picking stuff. It’s basically a jazz pick with a bunch of holes in it, and it is made from some mysterious composite material. A new pick can spur me on to practice, and that’s always a good thing.”