John Fogerty
The 100 Greatest Rock Stars Since That Was A Thing
Three of the 100 are in this picture! The Rolling Stones, in 1964, from left to right: Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Brian Jones. The problem with lists like this is they are invariably bullshit. So our prime objective was to make sure we didn’t do a bullshit list. I’m not saying we did a scientific one either. Because that isn’t possible — actually, it is, if you wanted some compilation of who sold the most records/concert tickets/has the most fans/got the most death threats, etc., and someone could come up with a bunch of very empirical metrics and create a “heat index” or something, and could deliver an actual scientific ranking! But we, um, didn’t do that. In fact we didn’t even, technically, do the “we...
John Fogerty Is Still Trying to Get the Country to Understand His Lyrics
Last March, John Fogerty could sense there was trouble up around the bend. The songwriter was set to play a string of West Coast casinos as part of his My 50 Year Trip tour, along with a Las Vegas residency at the Wynn. The first show was canceled. The second concert took place about two hours south in Laughlin, Nevada, which he tells SPIN was”so spooky” due to the looming pandemic. For the third casino gig, Fogerty said, “The whole time [before the show], I was thinking about how much I don’t want to [play it].” A few hours before taking the stage, he found out the show was canceled due to COVID-19 restrictions. “You could just tell that something was afoot, and we didn’t have a cure,” he says of the pandemic. “When you have that scenario, it’s just really going to get worse until yo...
John Fogerty Rips Trump for Playing ‘Fortunate Son’ Before Michigan Rally: ‘Confounding’
In what should come as no surprise to anyone, John Fogerty has denounced the Trump campaign for playing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” ahead of a rally in Michigan on Thursday. Fogerty posted on a video on Facebook where he said he found Trump’s use of the song to be “confounding to say the least” and went on to explain the song’s 1969 origins from the Vietnam War. “By the time I wrote the song, I had already been drafted and served in the military,” he said. “I’ve been a lifelong supporter of our guys and gals in the military.” He went on to talk about the draft, which was around back then, and said how it upset him how “people of privilege — rich people” could avoid the draft could use that to avoid having to serve in the military. “I found that very upsetting that such a...
