Episode 392 - John Fogerty
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fucking rock and rollers?
Marc:Yes, this is Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:This is a big day on the show.
Marc:It's a very exciting day on the show.
Marc:And I will tell you why in just a minute.
Marc:It has to do with our guest and it has to do with his importance in my life.
Marc:Well, obviously that's secondary.
Marc:L.A.
Marc:people and Pasadena people.
Marc:L.A.
Marc:area.
Marc:I'll be at the Ice House in Pasadena.
Marc:doing some time on June 2nd, trying to integrate some new stuff.
Marc:I don't know if you see me there in the last six months.
Marc:This is the beginning, the beginning of the new work, but I can't say it's all going to be new work.
Marc:But if you want to see me and hang out, I'll be there.
Marc:All right, it'll be nice.
Marc:It'll be fun.
Marc:Dave Anthony's opening for me.
Marc:Okay, that's that.
Marc:John Fogerty, my friends.
Marc:John Fogerty is on the show today.
Marc:I went to his home.
Marc:And sat with him for a long time and talked about stuff.
Marc:And I had to think a lot about John Fogerty when I was driving to his home.
Marc:But I think about John Fogerty a lot.
Marc:I think about Creedence Clearwater Revival a lot.
Marc:I'm amazed at how fucking great their music is and was and forever will be because it's some timeless shit, man.
Marc:I mean, how often do you really listen to music that is timeless?
Marc:I mean, there's only a few.
Marc:There's only a few.
Marc:There's some country stuff that, you know, Neil Young has a certain element of timeless.
Marc:You can't hinge it to any time.
Marc:I mean, I've got all this great stereo equipment here at my house, and if somebody comes over and they want to hear something, I put on Creedence's first record.
Marc:I've got, like, the first... I think I have all their albums on Fantasy Records, and I've had them a long time.
Marc:I somehow inherited them.
Marc:I think I got them from my aunt and uncle's collection when I was like maybe 13.
Marc:But more importantly, Credence Clearwater Revival was pounded into my head at a very early age as some of the first rock and roll music I ever really took in that ever really moved me, man.
Marc:I mean, there's some shit that just sticks in your craw in a good way and then digs like a mole right into your heart, man.
Marc:Man.
Marc:I'm going to be manning it up.
Marc:Man up to the man.
Marc:But here's the deal.
Marc:I mean, when I was like...
Marc:I got to be eight years old.
Marc:I don't have a lot of music recollections.
Marc:I remember listening to some Bobby Sherman on a close and play or something with them briefcases, briefcase turntables, but not really having a selection.
Marc:I remember doing that in Alaska.
Marc:So I had a selection.
Marc:I had some tapes.
Marc:That apparently my parents weren't using.
Marc:They were junk in this Iowa.
Marc:That was mine now.
Marc:And had detachable speakers.
Marc:Which was pretty cool for 1970.
Marc:Whatever the hell it was.
Marc:When was this record put out?
Marc:It was probably 71.
Marc:Because the record was put out in 70.
Marc:But I had a cassette down there.
Marc:I had a few cassettes.
Marc:I had Johnny Cash live at San Quentin.
Marc:Great thing to put in an 8 year old's head.
Marc:I had Bobby Gentry.
Marc:I had Jerry Vail's.
Marc:Greatest Hits, God Didn't Make Little Green Apples was on there.
Marc:And on the Bobby Gentry album, Ode to Billy Joe was on there.
Marc:That was kind of, I didn't quite understand that song I found after later I saw the movie.
Marc:And I had Cosmos Factory by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Marc:And one of the first guitar licks I ever remember plowing its way into my brain and sticking was the opening riff to Up Around the Bend.
Thank you.
Marc:It just cuts in, man.
Marc:It just cuts into your head and stays there.
Marc:There was a purity to his guitar sound and a purity and earnestness to his singing.
Marc:And I'm driving out to his house.
Marc:I'll tell you how into Fogarty I was and am.
Marc:When he came out with Centerfield after we hadn't really heard from him in a long time in a big way, I was excited that he got a hit and he sounded so fucking great.
Marc:I was excited.
Marc:All those great Creedence songs, you know, he didn't have ownership of them because he got screwed on a deal when he was a kid by his first manager.
Marc:And from what I understand, legal problems went on for years and years.
Marc:But I didn't really want to get into that with him.
Marc:I just didn't want to.
Marc:I want to talk about music.
Marc:I got into it a little bit, but I wanted to talk about music.
Marc:I know when you talk to somebody about a lawsuit that you might get into a conversation, not unlike talking to somebody about a divorce.
Marc:If the anger is still there, the intensity changes and you go down a rabbit hole of injustice.
Marc:So I didn't want to do that.
Marc:He's got this new album out, wrote a song for everyone, and it's a collaboration album.
Marc:He does Fortunate Son with the Foo Fighters, which is outstanding.
Marc:There's a couple of new tunes on here, which are great.
Marc:But he does Long As I Can See the Light with My Morning Jacket.
Marc:Spectacular.
Marc:He does Who'll Stop the Rain with Bob Seger.
Marc:Great.
Marc:Hot Rod Heart with Brad Paisley.
Marc:That guy can play.
Marc:Have you ever seen The Rain with Alan Jackson?
Marc:This is the thing about it.
Marc:There's a country to it.
Marc:There's a rock to it.
Marc:But none of the songs are dated.
Marc:And this album, this new album is fucking spectacular.
Marc:All right, so I was nervous, but I think I did okay.
Marc:I love this guy, and there's something about the rawness of how he sings and the music of how it holds up that you just, you know, you want him to be a great guy, and he was a great guy.
Marc:He's kind of a firecracker, you know what I mean?
Marc:He's kind of a, I could feel that if you pushed it, you know, you'd get a little bit of, he'd go at you, you know what I mean?
Marc:He's a live wire.
Marc:So let's talk to John in a minute.
Marc:And by the way, he asked me to introduce him at the El Rey tomorrow night.
Marc:And I'm nervous about that.
Marc:I felt about just bringing the guy up on stage.
Marc:I'm like, I better write something down.
Marc:I better get something together.
Marc:John Fogarty.
Marc:I'm going to bring John Fogarty.
Marc:One of the greatest rock and roll artists that ever lived.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:John Fogerty, man.
Marc:John fucking Fogerty, you guys.
Marc:Let's talk to the man now at his home.
Marc:I got to tell you, it is an amazing honor for me to be here with you.
Guest:Well, thank you.
Guest:It's an honor for me, too.
Marc:I actually had a moment at the Burbank Airport.
Marc:I flew on a Southwest flight with you.
Marc:Where were we going?
Marc:I don't remember where we were coming back from, but I remember we were coming back from somewhere, and it was one of those situations where I'm sitting there, and I'm like, well, that's John Fogarty.
Marc:Maybe I should say something.
Marc:And then I have to think, well, what am I going to say to that guy?
Marc:And I think I said, I love your work.
Marc:And you said, well, thank you.
Marc:Oh, did you?
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:That was our big moment.
Guest:Yeah, you probably overthought the whole thing.
Marc:I definitely overthink everything.
Guest:A lot of people do say, you know, people are pretty cool.
Guest:They don't bug you.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, they don't like, well, my cousin in Peoria, you know, loves your music.
Guest:Can I get your autograph?
Guest:First, let me go find a pin.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Do you have a pin?
Guest:How do you handle that?
Guest:You kind of go, I'm double barred.
Marc:I've got to go.
Marc:Well, you know, it's interesting because I just bought a bunch of stereo equipment.
Marc:You know, for vinyl.
Marc:I'm going back to vinyl.
Marc:And I got a tube up, you know, to play the vinyl through.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And somehow I had about, I had the first five Creedence albums since I was a kid.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:And they're all in pretty good shape.
Marc:And the reason I'm telling you this is when I have people over and I want to show off my record player in my new system, I put on the first Creedence album.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Marc:And I just blast that up, and to me, somehow or another, that thing sounds perfect.
Marc:Do you have a good recollection of how you produced that stuff?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:Why does it sound so clean and so good?
Marc:Was it just pure?
Guest:Well, I think the real answer is it's pretty simple, straightforward arrangements.
Guest:I mean, in other words, there's...
Guest:What I discovered was that long before the records I made with Credence, the stuff that sounds great in your car on the radio, I mean, that's really the litmus test.
Guest:If you can do something that sounds great in your car on the radio, you are in a high echelon of the Holy Grail.
Marc:Of producing.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:And so what I did learn, basically, in a car with a speaker that's about that big, but then it resonates all throughout your passenger compartment, I guess.
Guest:You want that voice.
Guest:The thing that's, it's a song with singing.
Guest:You want the voice.
Guest:You want to be able to hear the voice.
Guest:And the next thing you want to be able to hear, at least to me, is the drum, backbeat, right?
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:And then the next thing, if there's a guitar solo, which would be true heaven for me, you want to be able to hear that.
Guest:So that was basically, and everything else is sort of supportive.
Guest:And so that was kind of how I rolled.
Guest:I wanted that to be the stuff, I guess, that was coming through in your car.
Marc:And you can hear everything.
Guest:And it turns out, yeah, and it's still true now.
Guest:I think it'll be true for all of time because those things are all roughly in the same frequency register.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Kind of what we used to call mid-range.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You can have a heck of a rock and roll record if those three things are very apparent and also good.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, if you got 19 rhythm guitars and all these little things going on back there and chirps and a violin section and yada yada, you know, it's just like getting too esoteric.
Guest:So, I mean, and it's still true.
Guest:The best stuff is where the voice and the drum and the guitar are.
Guest:Right up front.
Guest:Where you can tell.
Guest:Yeah, you can hear it.
Guest:And basically, so you kind of intersperse them.
Guest:You don't have them all happen at the same time.
Guest:It's either the vocal and the drum or the guitar and the drum, but not all of them.
Guest:hitting at the same time because they're all in the same frequency well that explains it perfectly because when I listen to it I can hear everything you know there and it's everything is its own thing and it just kind of hangs together and they really stand out you know think of Suzy Q I mean the guy oh Suzy Q and then they get up right they're not at the same time right and then Chuck Berry kind of taught us all that thing a long time ago he did right yeah
Marc:were those the ones that moved you the most go johnny go go na na na na na go you know just hear that guitar that's it and just say he had a keyboard though he had the he had that's the extra stuff but that drum was amazing yeah what was it what were those the guys that moved you early on to to sort of start making records i mean what was this stuff because when you talk about that car speaker you're talking about back in the day when there was one speaker
Guest:and that was pretty much it yeah it was right on the dashboard and it had to get all the stereo was some sort of communist invention you know i didn't even know what that i did not know what stereo was when i made the record suzy q was it i had not heard stereo i thought i was inventing stereo yeah yeah yeah um if you listen to suzy q now it's very apparent it's not in stereo right stop on the left right stop on the right there's nothing in the middle does some stuff move
Guest:Am I remembering it right?
Guest:Yeah, it goes from this one to that one, but there's nothing staying in the middle, because it really wasn't mixed into a place with a middle.
Guest:It was basically from the four tracks, and there was only four tracks at that thing.
Guest:We had a lot of overdubbing and ping-ponging, where you're playing back something and adding to it, and that all goes onto a track together, the way we had to do it then.
Guest:But what I'm getting at, there's only left and right information.
Guest:And after living through that, I thought to myself, man, it'd be really cool if you could have something in the middle.
Guest:There ought to be a knob that, like, combines the left and the right.
Guest:And then you could, like, dial that, like, at 9 o'clock, 10 o'clock.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Right?
Guest:It could go across, what do you call it, field of vision, except this is field of hearing.
Marc:Hearing, yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:I thought I was creating this.
Guest:I even had a little, I wired a little box with some jacks, you know, in it.
Guest:And then the next studio I went to that was kind of an upgrade, I, oh, they've already got that.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:I guess I didn't invent that thing.
Marc:No.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So I can't take credit for it.
Marc:So when you started playing, what was the guitar you used on that first one?
Guest:that's the rickenbacker little 325 yeah that's on susie q yeah a lot of people call that the john lennon model i'd always hope someday they might call it the john fogarty model there's still time yeah i don't know i gave mine away at the fullmore east oh really yeah you just gave it to a dude uh yeah a kid that was a 12 year old kid that uh was hanging out all the time i don't know
Guest:why he got to do that but at the end of the last show we were going to do you know that run i called him out on stage said i'm going to play one more song on this guitar then i'm going to give it to this guy um my issue was the the whammy bar on it the vibrato system was just really uh it had a leaf spring like an old car right and that was how the tension was done and it wouldn't come back in tune very well
Marc:So it'd pull it out of tune every time.
Guest:Yeah, kind of.
Guest:I mean, you know, you could do a little bit of this stuff, but it was very iffy.
Guest:And the bridge itself was something kind of, it had all these little Allen screws.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And it looked like it'd been kind of punched out on a, like somebody in metal shop, because I had a high school shop.
Marc:Was it a Bigby or Bigsby?
Guest:Yeah, but it had all these little sort of kind of World War II looking fixtures.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:I mean, I don't, I'm not really putting it down.
Guest:It's just, it was, you know, I was the next generation kid coming along.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that just looked kind of old fashioned to me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Later I put a Bixby on there, which was probably from the same era.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But the engineering was a little better.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So that kid must've been happy.
Marc:I mean, what year was that that you give a kid a guitar?
Guest:69, I think.
Marc:And he was just a kid you saw through the whole run of your shows.
Marc:Well, he was backstage, he was hanging in the dressing room.
Marc:And you'll know who he was.
Guest:I know his name now.
Guest:I don't want to say it because it will put undue pressure on the kid.
Guest:I'll tell you his first name is Sean.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he was hanging out, you know, and he was talking about Clapton and who else would you name around those times?
Guest:You know, Jeff Beck.
Guest:And I was telling him stuff like, well, man, you got to listen to the guys that they listen to.
Guest:Yeah, the first guy.
Guest:Go back and listen to, you know, Muddy Waters and listen to Albert King and D.B.
Guest:King, you know, that kind of thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so...
Guest:The next time he showed up, he had those records.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or the next time we played New York.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I was really touched that he had taken the time to kind of delve.
Guest:Because he was a kid.
Guest:He was 10 years younger than me.
Guest:So he was just going with what's on the radio.
Guest:Right now.
Guest:And I was kind of giving him a little background.
Guest:And he had done a little due diligence.
Guest:So I thought I was moved to give him a guitar.
Guest:Then we saw him again about four months, three months later, whatever's the next time we played Phil Maurice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and it turns out, well, Eric Clapton had given him a guitar and Bebe had given, and Albert had given him a guitar.
Guest:They gave him guitars.
Guest:He'd gotten guitars out of all these people, you know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I get your con now, kid.
Marc:So you grew up not in the Bay Area, but not far, right?
Guest:Yeah, right in the Bay Area.
Guest:You could see the Golden Gate Bridge from roughly where my house was.
Guest:Although in those days, I was kind of in the flats and I couldn't see anything but the house across the street.
Guest:What town was it?
Guest:El Cerrito.
Marc:El Cerrito.
Guest:He said proudly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:When was the first time you started to really soak in music where it had an impact on you?
Guest:Right around then.
Guest:yeah and what was that music well i remember hearing red river valley and i'm not sure really who the artist was over the years i've said tex ridder other times i've said roy rogers all i know is i knew that song right and as a kid uh that really meant something it's like i discovered that yeah
Guest:And I mean, that's still one of my favorite songs.
Guest:You know, that's a great one to be exposed to early.
Guest:Maybe there were other ones and I just don't remember them.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:But that was the one that stuck?
Marc:I really remember.
Marc:And what made you want to pick up a guitar?
Guest:Well, you know, that's an evolution.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I'm sure I didn't know what a guitar was then.
Marc:But there must have been a band that made you jump and make you say that it was a doable thing.
Guest:Well, I'm sure like millions upon millions when it kind of connected to me was probably Elvis.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, because I wasn't playing yet.
Guest:When Elvis was on Ed Sullivan, I was 10 years old.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I remember finding myself in front of a mirror with a broom.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And making my lip go.
Yeah.
Guest:Sure, snarl it, snarl it.
Guest:Well, his was actually on the other side of his face, but it was a mirror image, so I learned to do this side, my right, but it was really his left.
Guest:No one called you on it, though.
Guest:I can't actually do it as a snare.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he would, you know, it was just totally, it was James Dean with a guitar.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:um i've skipped one of the things uh besides red river valley yeah when i was in preschool my mom yeah gave me a record uh and explained to me that that was stephen foster so you know it's a two-sided little record probably yellow or green or something right 45 i don't even know yeah i don't think they had 45 78 still probably yeah
Guest:But it was small, like a 45.
Guest:She explained to me that the writer of the songs was Stephen Foster.
Guest:One side was Oh Susanna, the other side was Camp Town Races.
Guest:And so...
Guest:I mean, over the years, I've just wondered, well, why did she do that?
Guest:Because until I got to be 11, 12, and she would talk about Irving Berlin or Hoagy Carmichael, that was a singular, alone moment.
Guest:And when I was about three years old, she's explaining to me a songwriter, one of the greatest, Stephen Foster.
Guest:And so I was...
Guest:shown that some, Oh, you mean somebody makes this stuff up?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:Well, I mean, I don't know what she had in mind or why she did that.
Guest:I really don't.
Guest:It's just one of those.
Guest:Uh, and I think I'm the only kid in the family that she did that too, which is also kind of weird.
Marc:How were you different than the other kids in terms of, were you musical?
Marc:Did you show something?
Guest:Well, yeah, I was showing music.
Guest:It was just coming out of me.
Guest:I was still in diapers dancing and singing at church.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Probably everywhere, but I know that at church you're, shh, you know, shh.
Guest:And they're mortified that I'm making noise, and all the other people go, huh-huh.
Guest:You know, and I'm singing an old song called Shoe Fly Pie Apple Pan Dowdy.
Guest:Make your eyes bug out and you tell me, say, howdy.
Guest:Anyway, cool old song.
Guest:I think it was Dinah Shore, matter of fact.
Marc:Really?
Guest:And also there was the race record of it, which probably was the Ink Spots or the Mills Brothers or something.
Marc:So you remember that separation of... I didn't know it then.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I didn't know anything about that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So Elvis sort of sparked you a little bit.
Guest:Well, I'd had a long... By the time Elvis came along, even though I was only about 10, I'd had a very liberal musical education by then.
Guest:I mean, amazing when I think about what happened between...
Guest:When I was born, let's say, and by the time Elvis came along, I knew exactly where he was coming from.
Guest:I tended to like the people that were kind of rough and ready.
Guest:I wish I could say I'd seen Hank Williams, but I don't remember that.
Guest:I remember the songs, of course, but I don't remember actually seeing Hank.
Guest:I remember seeing Johnny Cash, though, about 57 years.
Marc:He's a profound presence.
Marc:When you see him for the first time and you feel the weight of that.
Guest:I tell people all the time.
Guest:Johnny Cash was on TV.
Guest:He was all by himself.
Marc:Right.
Guest:There was just this guy.
Guest:It was very dark and moody looking.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And here's this guy singing, you know, I keep a close.
Guest:And he's way lower than that.
Guest:It's almost haunting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was on one of those shows, you know, like Bing Crosby or some of these guys had shows, and they'd have a million dancing girls and outfits and all, you know, casts of thousands on the, you know, your cavalcade of stars or whatever it was.
Guest:You know, and we were used to that, being...
Guest:kind of vaguest on television.
Guest:And then Johnny Cash comes on and he's all by himself.
Guest:To me, that was way more striking.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Way more powerful.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:And with that voice and that, it was heavy, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I remember I have very, very vague memories when he had a TV show later on.
Marc:Like I must have been like... Oh, you're remembering the... Mid-60s maybe?
Guest:Late 60s.
Guest:See that?
Guest:He'd already had a middle period where he'd gone away.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now he was back on top.
Marc:But I saw that when I was like five or six...
Marc:You might have seen me on that show.
Marc:Is that possible?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:With Creedence?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah, we were down there.
Guest:Really, Dylan had already taped a show, but they didn't show it yet.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was the first season.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They had only done a few episodes, and we got to go down there and do Bad Moon Rising.
Guest:I mean, that was amazing to me, because here are all these people.
Guest:You know, Johnny, the buzz was all around him.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Marc:Have you met him before you did the show?
Guest:No.
Marc:No, I'd never met him before that.
Marc:Was it amazing?
Guest:Oh, I was blown away.
Guest:I walked up at one point and said, Johnny Cash, I just want to tell you I love you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I felt embarrassed suddenly.
Guest:I mean, you know, in my head, you know, it's kind of like,
Guest:I love you, man.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:He got it, though, right?
Guest:I hope so.
Guest:I mean, they were just flying.
Guest:I mean, the dressing room, right?
Guest:Here's Mother Maybelle and June.
Guest:June was a sweetheart, by the way.
Guest:We were... I guess we were in the Ryman.
Guest:Yeah, we were in the Ryman taping that thing.
Guest:And I remember I was just sitting in a pew, and she comes over.
Guest:I mean, she was just trying to make us feel comfortable and at ease right away.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It wasn't like, you know...
Guest:see my agent have them talk to my public you know yeah yeah right over and sat on started talking and all that she was pregnant wow with their only child i think anyway in that dressing room sitting in there waiting to do stuff besides being shown what a dobro was firsthand oh who played that for you
Guest:uh-huh okay uh he showed you how it worked and everything yeah oh yeah that's why i got one oh they're amazing so right after that is you know i kind of worked it up for looking out my back door right right right anyway um gosh in that room was roy orbison carl perkins uh statler brothers
Marc:They were all there when you were there?
Guest:Yeah, they were all sitting in the joint.
Guest:We're telling stories, you know, or I'm hearing stories from the 50s.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:You know, all about Elvis and Roy and Johnny and Carl all touring, you know, the country with their hit records and all that.
Marc:And you'd covered Roy, not yet, but you did one cover of Roy's song, right?
Guest:Did Ooby Dooby.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And before you met him or after?
Guest:uh that was probably after i'm gonna say so were you able to you know i mean oobie doobie was one of my favorite you know by now roy was a huge star he was already the tail end of the big run he had with pretty woman and only the lonely and all that you must have been overwhelmed glenn campbell would come through he was there too glenn was the same episode we were on yeah um mini pearl i think was running around with her hat and her price tag yeah
Guest:Yeah, exactly, the whole thing.
Marc:So it was like chaos, but these are all your heroes.
Guest:Yeah, but these were like the kings of the rock and roll that I'd grown up with.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:That must have been overwhelming.
Marc:That was amazing.
Marc:Were you able to talk to anybody?
Marc:Oh, sure.
Guest:Oh, no, they were the most down-to-earth people you'd ever want to meet.
Guest:I'm quite serious, you know.
Guest:Roy talking all about, you know, basically on tour the same time Elvis is on tour, you know, and Carl Perkins talking about those times.
Marc:The Sun Records stuff?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just talking about how the music was made, that sort of thing.
Guest:Because you feel like I'm finally here, man.
Guest:I'm finally, this is it.
Guest:oh i felt like a little kid oh yeah i tend to that's my personality yeah still sure i'll meet somebody that's you know 35 years younger than me and they're you know a big star and i'll just be gawking like a little kid you know and i want to i'm that way with brad paisley yeah well you're still a fan show me something you know how do you do this little thing you know i don't want to learn how to do it yeah that cut on the new record is crazy that's him on guitar right yeah that is crazy
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, he's phenomenal.
Marc:I can't even, like I play a little, but I'm just a sloppy blues player.
Marc:But when you hear stuff like that, you're like, oh my God.
Guest:Well, that's how I felt even as a kid.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, when I was little, I always kind of bemoaned the fact that I didn't have like an Uncle Harley or something who had been in a country band, you know, in college and, you know, played mandolin and all that stuff.
Guest:And it could show me that stuff because it was always a mystery to me.
Guest:right um you couldn't you weren't you didn't have the well i wanted to be able to i mean my my you might say my idol in those days was chet atkins oh he's amazing yeah yeah i mean in other words that was within my realm that stuff i liked right but yet was what i considered the top of the mountain i i knew guys that played jazz and classical and you know other forms were also really good but i wasn't interested in that music
Marc:And also the focus it takes to be a virtuoso is different than playing with feeling necessarily.
Marc:Like, you know, sometimes I think you can have both.
Marc:No, I do, too.
Marc:But like sometimes just the raw feeling without complicating it too much is it just moves me.
Guest:Well, yeah, look, that's a good cop-out.
Marc:Sure, sure it is.
Marc:But, you know, as a guitar player, that's probably a cop-out.
Guest:No, the deal is, so I grew up...
Guest:You know, I would study the songs that I could figure out, meaning most of them were the rock hits.
Guest:You know, all the music of Dwayne Eddy and The Ventures and all the, you know, Honky Tonk even, which, you know, Honky Tonk, if you're going to really play, like, that was Billy Butler.
Guest:I didn't know it then, but that's an amazing... I knew that whoever that guy was sure has...
Guest:He has ability and there's subtlety.
Guest:There's a lot of, you know, technical ability there.
Marc:It's got that little walk down, you know, country walk down.
Guest:And so, I mean, it takes years to really be able to play it like how it's played.
Guest:I'm talking about the Bill Doggett record.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:Now, a lot of rock and roll guys kind of, let's say, straightened it out and played it with less finesse and more just raw performance.
Guest:the ventures kind of did that and they put it in the key of e instead of the key of f with f is really hard um i'm not so sure that that bill dogett's version the guy didn't just tune the guitar up to that key sure sure hard to know but i learned it in f yeah you know it was harder and you know blazes and my little trio in high school which was the blue velvets yeah played it in f i mean you know
Marc:So you got to keep that bar going the whole time.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Whereas, you know, the Ventures, when they did it, and every country band in the world, they did it in E. It's a lot easier.
Guest:And yeah, what I'm getting at is, because you said something very important.
Guest:The...
Guest:Put it this way.
Guest:You're going to move a lot more people if you play with emotion and passion than you are if you play with technical bravado.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's just the nature of the beast.
Guest:And certainly, even still, the thing that gets me first is emotion.
Guest:If I can hear...
Guest:one a guy play one note like albert king right exactly you know you close the book and go home because you'll never be able to do what he does right but but you but you had that you had an uh but there was still some party that had an insecurity about the virtuosos in the sense i wanted that yeah i mean and i would have grown up i i wished i could have grown up with that in my uh in your family experience sure like because you know because that's really the way to do it you can't you
Guest:Put it this way, I went back, probably I started in my... Well, I took up the dobro at the age of 48.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that was kind of the beginning of, okay, dang it, I've waited long enough.
Guest:I'm going to figure out how to do these things I've always wanted to do.
Guest:And there's no more excuses.
Guest:Yeah, I don't have an Uncle Harley to show me the banjo and all that.
Guest:I'm just going to...
Guest:In other words, in the olden days, to play something that was difficult, even like when I did the original Blue Ridge Ranger thing, I would just kind of make up a part which was over my head and then practice that little part until I could sort of play it authoritatively.
Marc:But it was yours.
Marc:You made it up.
Marc:You just applied yourself.
Guest:I mean, that's kind of what I did even on looking out my back door.
Guest:So I could play that little part, but I couldn't really play the instrument.
Marc:Yeah, but you bring your whole sense of emotion and feeling to it.
Marc:So, you know, the dobro, it's an open tune.
Marc:You know, you can just slide that thing up and boom, you can hit it.
Guest:Well, yeah, but what I'm getting at is so starting at when I was 48, I decided, okay, I really want to learn how to play this.
Guest:And that means it's a reverse of the other way.
Guest:I'm going to keep practicing this thing until I'm good enough that I can play something.
Marc:Right, I get it, I get it.
Guest:About halfway through that process, Dobro is an interesting story.
Guest:I was well into Dobro.
Guest:To me, for some reason, this was the key, or a key.
Guest:And I didn't know why or what, but it was a key.
Guest:So I stuck with that.
Guest:And of course, I was driving my long-suffering wife, Julie, kind of crazy.
Guest:She's a Dobro widow.
Guest:Because I'd go, and I
Guest:I got to practice on, you know, and she goes, I'm sure it sounded like skinning a cat or something, and she's, why don't you ever play a song?
Guest:Well, no, I got to learn, you know, because I'm trying to get the picking going.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So anyway, midway through that process, kind of near the end, actually, as I was starting to get good enough to actually play something, I wrote, or I came up with a cool lick, a dobro lick.
Guest:It was my own lick, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I used to run away to this place and write songs up at the Kern River.
Guest:I'd stay for four or five days and write songs for what was going to be Blue Moon Swamp.
Guest:then i'd come back you know and of course julie and i missed each other and all that and i'd you know well she'd say how you do and i said well i i got a couple songs i think you know and one time i came home and i had that lick right and basically um i you know i came home i think on a sunday because we're going to take the kids to school the next day yeah and i i
Guest:kind of either laid down and went to sleep or I didn't fall asleep, and the idea for a song came into my head with that lick.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And I'm laying there with Julie right next to me, and the idea, it was basically the song Joy of My Life, right?
Guest:And so I'm just laying there right after a trip I'd had at the Kern River, and basically the whole song, which is...
Guest:kind of what had just really happened.
Guest:I tiptoed in the room, I know you gotta have your rest.
Guest:That's the first line of the song.
Guest:We had little boys and Lindsey, their older sister, who were just kind of all rolling around on the carpet.
Guest:It takes a lot of energy, especially from mom, to keep after all that.
Guest:So she really did have to have, needed her rest.
Guest:So the idea and a lot of the words for that song came to me while I was laying there in the dark thinking about how we had just seen each other after a week apart or so.
Guest:And I wrote the song, basically.
Guest:And there was some irony to that in my mind.
Guest:The next morning I woke up and realized I'd just written a love song.
Guest:It's really my first love song ever.
Guest:It's a beautiful love song to my beautiful love, Julie.
Marc:And she earned it, right?
Guest:Yeah, but it's just so ironic that it's on the dobro.
Guest:Right.
Guest:This thing that was sort of a bone of contention, at least, in our relationship.
Guest:What's going on?
Guest:I turned her into a dobro widow.
Marc:And you made up for it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I sprung it on her at a variety show at school.
Guest:That's the first time anyone ever heard that song.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, in front of a... We were doing a little variety show with a few musicians, and it's all children and their parents out in the audience.
Guest:I asked the guys in the... I just want you to leave the stage for a minute.
Guest:And then I played that song to my... Excuse me.
Guest:Played that song to my wife, and it was a pretty incredible...
Marc:moment there for me is everybody blown away i'm getting a little uh choked up sorry no that's nice it was a you know she had no idea so it was pretty cool that's great man did she cry i think so okay no that's sweet that's sweet so going back um a bit you know when so you were in a band in high school and that became your first recording band yeah and that was called the gollywogs
Guest:Well, originally, you know, it was two guys that were in the same grade as me, Doug Clifford and Stu Cook.
Guest:That started when we were in the eighth grade.
Guest:And so I think it was that summer, right after the eighth grade, the guy down at, which was basically, there's the building right almost across the street, right across Potrero Avenue.
Guest:avenue i guess in el cerrito yeah uh was the boys club el cerrito boys club now it's called el cerrito boys and girls club um but the guy and i can't his last name i can't remember but his name was bob and he got wind of this little group of musicians so he asked us if we would represent the el cerrito boys club to go out to you know other uh
Guest:around the Bay Area and represent El Cerrito.
Guest:And I said, yeah, sure, cool.
Guest:And so we got to play a lot of these little kind of like county fairs and things like that, meeting other kids from other boys clubs from other towns.
Guest:Just doing covers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, he provided the transportation.
Guest:He drove us everywhere.
Yeah.
Guest:Anyway, on one of those places where we played, there was a fellow named James Powell who lived in Richmond.
Guest:And he was in his mid-20s, at least.
Guest:And he approached me one time.
Guest:He said, would you like to make a record?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I said...
Guest:cool sure how do we do that and he said well you know i'm gonna i've got some songs and i want to get them recorded and i think he also knew a guy from christy records which is where beverly angel eventually got uh released but anyway so we got to um we got to you know learn james's song he had
Guest:five or six songs that i remember and every one of them was a girl's name like the other side of beverly angel was lydia yeah then he had another song called martha my darling yeah and i mean you get the drift sure sure um he knew he knew his audience yeah exactly well anyway the and it was just classic doo-wop i mean he was just right there if you've ever heard beverly angel i mean it's it's as cool as really as any of the doo-wop songs you know that were huge hits and that was your first single kind of thing i
Guest:Yeah, I mean, well, it wasn't really, we were the backup band.
Guest:I'm not sure it even had, I don't know if it had our name on the label even.
Guest:It was James Powell was the artist, the singer.
Guest:He wrote the songs.
Guest:But I was, in effect, the producer.
Guest:I was making sure, especially at the recording session, that things sounded right.
Guest:And also, I came back later and overdubbed bass, actual stand-up string bass.
Guest:You played it?
Guest:Yeah, I played it.
Guest:And, I mean, this is a story I've never told, and I won't make it real long, but basically...
Guest:I learned that one of the people on my paper route in El Cerrito, and I believe he lived on Norvell Street, was a musician.
Guest:And he was in a country band.
Guest:He played actively, at least.
Guest:He played mostly country music.
Guest:And he talked about some TV show that they recorded every weekend down in Oakland.
Guest:I remember the name Red something.
Guest:And I don't know who that artist was, but I don't remember seeing the show.
Guest:But he went down there every weekend and he played.
Guest:Anyway, I told him about this recording and I don't know if I brought it up, if I was that precocious or he volunteered, but somehow I finagled that I was going to get to use his bass.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so he graciously let me take that, you know, and I picked it up in a... Or James picked... We picked it up in a U-Haul trailer.
Guest:I mean, open trailer, you know, wrapped the base in blankets the best we could.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Drove across the Bay Bridge.
Guest:I mean, with a...
Guest:You know, a string bass in the back.
Guest:And went to the session, and I overdubbed bass on both sides of that single.
Marc:And you're like, what, 17?
Marc:No, I was 14.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:It was 1959.
Marc:So you were in.
Guest:I mean, I look back at that now, and how precocious was that?
Guest:I mean, wow.
Guest:But you just did it.
Guest:And you know what?
Guest:You want to know what's really freaky?
Guest:What?
Guest:The guy who recorded this, I'm pretty sure the engineer at that.
Guest:Number one, that place where we recorded is the same place where we recorded Susie Q.
Guest:uh-huh same recording studio same engineer that engineers the same guy guy his name was walt pine and he was uh you know an old-time guy he was probably in his 60s when i did suzy q so when did you when you when you became uh the the gollywogs or or i guess when you well we were the blue velvets all through high school right and when'd your brother get involved
Guest:Well, Tom was kind of involved off and on with me because we were brothers.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I mean, we both loved music.
Guest:Tom was a little bit older, so he had made some records or had been on some records before Beverly Angel, I think.
Guest:Certainly, we had made some... Come in and record yourself for a quarter.
Guest:Those kind of things where they give you acetate.
Guest:It wasn't a real pressing.
Guest:In those days, it was cheaper to give your reference thing instead of a piece of tape on a reel.
Guest:They gave you an acetate.
Marc:That was your... It was like a booth you could go into, right?
Guest:Well, this was like we went into... We were...
Guest:hanging out at various little recording studios right um sometimes it was their idea sometimes it was our idea you know yeah and you get to record a couple songs and it gives the guy that owns the studio a chance to kind of put his stuff through its paces and your reward was you got to walk away with a little recording you could take home sure and play till it wore out you know yeah so when did you when did you guys start when did you start really laying into writing songs and and recording you know full on
Guest:Well, that was, it's a process.
Guest:I mean, I really started writing songs somewhere around the age of eight.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, they weren't good or anything, but I would, you know, I was, I was, oh, I would make a line.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Then I'd make another line.
Guest:It rhymed with it, you know.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, just silly kind of stuff.
Guest:And then all through my, you know, my teenage years in high school, I mean, I wrote a song called Have You Ever Been Lonely that was a pretty cool song.
Guest:Were you lonely?
Guest:I mean, so much... I pictured myself a... I was a loner.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And yet, I had a lot of friends in high school and stuff.
Guest:I mean, it's almost like you're in a movie and you're sort of... This is the part you've been dealt.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because I felt...
Guest:I lived in the basement in my house, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, we were kind of in a... El Cerrito was like a middle-class area.
Guest:What'd your dad do?
Guest:My dad was a printer by trade.
Guest:For a while, he worked for the Berkeley Gazette, and then he worked for other... Union guy?
Guest:that i don't know much about yeah i just know he was a line of type operator uh-huh which is long since been sure they got rid of that job that's done i'm sure i pushed a button or two that i wasn't supposed to and that probably the end of that so he was around what's this big cutter thing dad
Marc:There goes that page of the paper.
Marc:So was he around a lot?
Marc:No.
Marc:No?
Guest:No, my parents split up when I was about eight, and basically he was kind of out of our lives after that.
Guest:I mean, it was our dad, and for a little while there was the weekend thing every once, but that kind of petered out pretty quick.
Guest:Then my dad moved up to Santa Rosa, which is north of San Francisco, or El Cerrito,
Guest:And so I'd go up there in the summertime and stay.
Guest:I'm not sure if Jim, the oldest, went there, but me and Tom and the younger brothers went up there.
Guest:And I remember, I only bring that up really because I got a job at the Healdsburg Beach for a few summers as a result of my dad living up there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and in fact the first record i ever bought on my own was there yeah it was the summer of 56 and elvis's album had you know elvis was big on the radio and i walked three miles or whatever to the record store to get elvis's album but it was sold out and i had my four dollars and 12 cents so i bought the bill haley album so that ended up being my first uh record that rock around the clock
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I had bought a couple of records, but they were for Christmas presents for my brothers.
Marc:So your first album was Rock Around the Clock, your first record.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Was it the whole record or just the same?
Guest:Yeah, the album.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I went back the next week and got Elvis's record.
Marc:So those were it.
Marc:Well, that's the beginning of rock and roll right there, right?
Guest:Yeah, especially the Bill Haley thing.
Guest:Bill Haley, as you know, it was sort of, he had an odd career because he was, you know, kids are kind of a funny brew.
Guest:Um...
Guest:And Bill Haley's music was just a little bit older.
Guest:It was more sophisticated than Elvis.
Guest:I mean, I tended to, you know, Elvis was really raw and cool.
Marc:It almost felt like he came out of the big band thing.
Marc:Well, he did.
Guest:He was 29 years old.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Old!
Guest:yeah yeah yeah um and they dressed in kind of plaid coats and all it was from another era and especially the guitar playing was phenomenal i mean literally it took me until about 10 maybe even less uh years ago before i could finally play the solo on rock around the clock that's a tricky one
Guest:Well, it's very advanced.
Marc:Well, you know what's amazing about your old records, those fantasy records, despite whatever your issues with them were, is that those things are thick.
Marc:They hold up.
Marc:It's amazing.
Guest:I mean, the vinyl itself.
Guest:The actual vinyl.
Guest:Because you were talking about that.
Guest:Number one, when my album, Blue Ridge Rangers, was going to come out way back in 73.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The pressing was, how can I say it, was defective.
Guest:There was this thing on it.
Guest:It was kind of a berm.
Guest:And I actually had people knocking on my front door with their little kid, little eight-year-old Johnny, and the dad is saying, well, there's this thing on the record, and it hops and skips.
Guest:It's about the size of a walnut.
Guest:You know, and I mean, basically the consumer coming to the producer and complaining, you know, instead of complaining to Saul freaking Zantz.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I, I took it to heart.
Guest:I said, well, shoot, you know, maybe, you know, maybe my record would do better.
Guest:Number one, if it wasn't defective.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I kind of got way into this thing.
Guest:Went down to RCA Victor where they were pressing, you know, and all that was done there.
Guest:And, I mean, all during the Credence time, I had gone down there to actually master the vinyls, right?
Guest:I mean, I was present when this happened.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So now I've gone down and I've determined that, you know, this is kind of a secret thing.
Guest:Remember, Elvis had his Aloha from Hawaii was just out.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so I learned that RCA at the time, and if you used their services, it would be what you could get too.
Guest:They had four different grades of vinyl.
Guest:There were four different levels.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Elvis got the very highest grade for that album, although that was Elvis.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And guess which grade my record was being printed on.
Guest:And the other thing I wanted to say about that was I think when Pendulum came out, they had come out with a new... Remember, this was the only medium then.
Marc:There was no other thing.
Guest:It was just vinyl records.
Guest:And so they had come out with a new high-grade, they said, flexible vinyl record.
Guest:And it showed a picture of somebody in Life magazine or one of those taking their LP and going and holding it in one hand, kind of bent over like a bonnet or something.
Guest:Well, I started getting letters from fans of Creed and said, I tried what I saw.
Guest:It broke.
Guest:It cracked.
Guest:I want my money back.
Guest:Well, it turned out it was the same thing.
Guest:It really wasn't that the vinyl was more flexible.
Guest:It's just that they were now saving pennies by using less vinyl.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it was skinnier.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, they were turning, in other words, a cheap ass, you know, economic move into a marketing flow.
Guest:I'd say, see, it's more flexible.
Marc:But it was garbage.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Let's go through like the new CD.
Marc:This one, the one that just came out, I wrote a song for everyone, wrote a song for everyone.
Marc:You collaborate with some pretty amazing people and you made certain choices.
Marc:I imagine you chose these songs.
Guest:No.
Guest:Here's how it all started.
Guest:I'm sitting in our family room, basically with my family, and Julie, my wife, just suddenly turns to me and she says, why don't you get a whole bunch of the people you love and sing your songs?
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, she said it as simply as that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that ignited a fire in my imagination.
Guest:I mean, basically, Christmas, you know, I looked at that.
Guest:Man, you mean I get to call up Brad Paisley?
Guest:Whoa, this will be so much fun.
Guest:I mean, basically, she was saying...
Guest:You know, people you love.
Guest:It doesn't have to be that I knew them, because most of the people I didn't know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it was people whose music I loved.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And in all cases, people that I've been collecting their records for a long, long time, following their careers, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's, how can I say it?
Guest:It was genius.
Guest:You know, instead of some record company guy saying, well, why don't you get the top 10 or the top three artists in each generation?
Guest:What do they call that?
Guest:There's a military word where it goes across logistics, something like that.
Guest:Anyway, this was not that.
Guest:This was my wife saying to me, why don't you get people that you love and sing your songs?
Guest:It just sounded like a great, fun idea.
Marc:It's a great album.
Guest:So the premise became, as I talked more over the next few days and time forward with Julie,
Guest:Basically, well, we'll contact the artists, see if they'll do it or not.
Guest:Obviously, all the people here are the ones who said yes.
Guest:There were some others who, because of scheduling and all other reasons, couldn't be present.
Guest:But once somebody did say yes, the first thing I said was, okay, now you choose the song you want to do.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's beautiful.
Guest:And then the second thing I said was, now, I want to, after you've, you know, go ahead.
Guest:You don't have to tell me right now.
Guest:Think about it.
Guest:And then when you've decided on a song, let's talk about the arrangement.
Guest:I want you to, you know, come up with your vision.
Guest:Have some kind of
Marc:something that you want to do you know let's let's don't just re-record the old record right over again who needs that right right my idea would let's make some new music in other words have fun and be creative well that's the amazing thing about your songs is that they're they're timeless and there's very few people that have achieved that that you can take any john fogarty song and you you let someone else arrange it or you even play the originals and it stands outside of time and
Marc:And they're constantly new.
Marc:I mean, I listened to your music, you know, yesterday, today, and it doesn't have any date on it.
Marc:You can listen to it at any time, and it's just as fresh as it was when it first came out.
Marc:And that's a brilliant, amazing thing, and it's a gift, and I hope you know that.
Guest:Well, I hear that from other people, and I kind of absorb that and go, well, that's really neat that they say stuff like that.
Guest:But you know songs that are dated.
Guest:You mean Itsy Bitsy, Teeny Weeny?
Marc:No, I mean, even Rock Around the Clock, man.
Marc:I mean, Rock Around the Clock is a period piece.
Guest:Well, that's because of Vic Morrow, the original Blackboard Jungle.
Guest:right and then um but even the bonds you know yeah well that's true that's true but there was a style to it but like when you like on this on the new record i mean well you know why because rock around the clock does it's that sort of i mean it was it was actually a little old-fashioned even when it was a hit right that was kind of like a tommy jimmy dorsey arrangement from the 40s if you think about it yep um
Guest:That could probably still be made new.
Guest:We don't have to challenge anybody to do that.
Guest:I think what I'm getting at is I see it from my side of the perspective, I guess you'd say.
Guest:While I was writing the song, of course...
Guest:My wife and I just talked about this a couple days ago because I heard something on the radio that was... I told her, honey, that's the kind of thing I always call the sideways song.
Guest:And she said, what do you mean?
Guest:It's horrible.
Guest:And I said, well, yeah, I won't tell you what we're hearing.
Guest:And I just said...
Guest:Yeah, it's got some nice little parts in it, and you can kind of see what maybe inspired them to start doing the song, but then they kind of wimped out.
Guest:They didn't go any further, and so they're just doing that thing, and it's getting really monotonous to hear that over and over.
Guest:I said, in my case...
Guest:One of two things would have happened.
Guest:I'd have been pushing myself to try and make this thing better, you know, go on, move from that part, go to another part.
Guest:Or halfway into the song, I would have realized this is a dead end.
Guest:I'm stuck.
Guest:This is going to be no good.
Guest:Period.
Guest:And I might have spent a week on it, which happened all the time back in the day.
Guest:But I would realize at some point, this is a dead end.
Guest:It's not going to be good.
Guest:I can't make this song turn out good.
Guest:It's going to crash.
Marc:So you're very hard on yourself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I have to close the door and allow my brain to be free.
Guest:Maybe at some day in the future, some little snippet will move on.
Guest:But I realized that it was just a dead end.
Guest:Because I want to make a better song than that.
Guest:I want my song to be better than what that is.
Marc:And only you know what that is in that moment.
Guest:Well, I haven't always succeeded, Mark.
Guest:I'm not going to sit here and say everything I did was wonderful because it wasn't.
Guest:But you know what?
Guest:At least to be a musician and certainly to be any kind of writer, any kind of writer, or certainly an artist that paints and those sort of things, playwright, whatever...
Guest:You've got to be honest to yourself.
Guest:You really do.
Guest:Otherwise, you're sitting there and everything you do is wonderful.
Guest:Oh, I'm wonderful.
Guest:Isn't this wonderful?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Well, of course, that's not true.
Guest:Yeah, you can't believe it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know.
Guest:You've got to look at it and go, oh, that stinks.
Guest:Why is that?
Guest:You know, lame.
Guest:And you've got to be brutal enough to tear it apart and try to make it better.
Marc:So on the first album, you know, you did the you did.
Marc:I put a spell on you, which was a that's a that's an eerie song.
Marc:That's a great song.
Marc:It's a great song, but it's kind of heavy in a way.
Marc:Well, there's something like sometimes when I listen to your records that, you know, they're they're they're almost they got some mystical element.
Marc:There's a little darkness underneath there.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Absolutely.
Marc:And you feel that.
Marc:Right.
Guest:That's why I loved them.
Marc:And Susie Q became a huge hit, right?
Marc:Now, what was the first time, like the first song that you wrote personally that became a huge hit was Born on the Bayou or which one or Proud Mary?
Marc:Proud Mary.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that thing is a masterpiece.
Marc:And because I feel that there's a there's an urgency and there's a certain menace to your voice that just plows into your head in a great way.
Marc:Now, do you can you identify where that comes from?
Yeah.
Guest:Well, a simple answer is growing up hearing incredible voices on the radio and the records I would buy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you're speaking strictly of the vocal part.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, I grew up, one of the people I really loved was Howlin' Wolf.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I just, you know, I mean, it's very obvious even.
Guest:It's very...
Guest:pretty clear in some of my vocals that I was very influenced by Howlin' Wolf.
Guest:Some of the other great soul singers of that time, Wilson Pickett, Little Richard, obviously, they had a thing in their voice that was more than just singing good, like Bing Crosby.
Guest:My mom loved Bing Crosby, and I grew to really love Bing Crosby too.
Guest:And of course, that would be called singing.
Guest:That was really great art.
Guest:But when somebody could insert that other thing, put it this way.
Guest:Bing Crosby's fans would never allow that.
Guest:And I'm sure his record company wouldn't have either.
Guest:That was a different audience.
Guest:But the thing that Little Richard had and Howlin' Wolf, when they'd put that extra edge in their voice and yet still sing...
Guest:The way Wilson Pickett did it, it was basically screaming in tune.
Guest:Yeah, right, sure, sure.
Guest:I just really loved that, and so I kind of went after that.
Guest:I mean, I was just a little white kid from middle-class El Cerrito.
Guest:I wasn't born there, but...
Guest:In a sense, though, I think—how can I say it?
Guest:I created my own environment, or the environment was there.
Guest:All I had to do was let it be revealed to me, meaning when I would hear Howlin' Wolf or Little Richard or a lot of other guys that I really loved their voice, and try to emulate those people, try to be like that.
Marc:And when you did, like on Green River, when Bad Moon Rising came out—
Marc:And yeah, because what Fortunate Son came out later.
Marc:But when did you start to realize that, you know, that you were becoming somewhat of a voice for the Vietnam War era?
Yeah.
Guest:Boy, it's interesting.
Guest:You know, put it this way.
Guest:The first album, which had Susie Q on it, and by the way, even though I wrote some songs on that record or that album, you know, Susie Q and I Put a Spell on You and 99 and a Half were certainly the best songs on that album.
Marc:I listened to 99 and a Half over and over again.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, it was, my songs were, and I think Porterville's on that album.
Guest:My song writing was right on the edge between the guy who wrote teenage love songs when I was in high school and the guy who was going to figure out a way to apply his
Guest:his feelings, even his own philosophy, what he was seeing in the world, to somehow incorporate that into the song.
Guest:Having grown up through the first wave of the rock and roll era, you're sort of emulating, and of course the R&B era too, you're emulating your heroes.
Guest:They were all kind of Tin Pan Alley songs about fairly normal subjects.
Guest:Porterville, by the way, on that album, that was a song that started while I was in the Army, on my active duty in the Army.
Marc:Were you drafted or you joined up?
Guest:No, I was drafted.
Guest:There was no way I would have joined.
Guest:I was very anti, like most people in my generation.
Guest:Most guys, Vietnam did not, as a let's go get them, did not resonate with my generation.
Guest:really kind of saw it as a tragedy, to say it in simple terms.
Guest:No one could really figure out, well, why are we there?
Guest:What are we fighting?
Guest:What is it?
Guest:And as Nixon got elected and became the guy in the White House who was even more simpatico with all the big business and all that, I mean,
Guest:If you were paying attention, it became very clear that, hey, this war isn't about patriotism and my country and all that.
Guest:It's about money.
Guest:It's business, in other words.
Guest:They're basically sacrificing the young men and women of my country for business interests.
Guest:How wank is that?
Guest:That stinks.
Guest:But they had a draft then, so they could come grab you against your will.
Guest:I mean, that was the huge difference between Vietnam and Iraq.
Marc:And you didn't end up going to Vietnam.
Guest:I didn't go to Vietnam.
Guest:No, I stayed in this country.
Guest:But anyway, so during the time I was on active duty, a lot of your day would be spent marching out on a parade field.
Guest:You know, it's this big square mile of asphalt somewhere where it was 115 degrees because they didn't know what to do with you, but they couldn't leave you just sitting around sleeping.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they would march you.
Guest:You'd go out and you'd march for like three or four hours in a day.
Guest:I mean, frankly, I was delirious half the time, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I remember a couple of things.
Guest:One was you had to spit shine your boots.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Had to shine them up to a mirror shine.
Guest:And while I was marching around, there'd be this one thumbprint or fingerprint on my otherwise glossy...
Guest:uh toe of my boot you know and it would be there kind of like a little devil a little you know gremlin in in my mind i'm seeing this one smudge uh thumbprint on my spit shine uh boot and it's going and i try to wipe it you know away in my mind it would just move over and oh no no no you know you're marching along to hey or in some guy going you know they all talk about jody all the time by the way
Guest:Anyway, so that was one thing that was going on in my head.
Guest:And the other thing was this narrative about my childhood.
Guest:And I began to realize I was writing a song and didn't even know it.
Guest:I was talking about my dad.
Guest:Somehow that...
Guest:He was sort of from the wrong side of the tracks.
Guest:I was, therefore, the next of kin and the wrong side of the tracks.
Guest:Because I kind of felt that way as a kid.
Guest:We were sort of lower middle class.
Guest:Don't get me wrong.
Guest:I never starved or anything.
Guest:Always had shoes.
Guest:But still, it was just sort of a...
Guest:A lot of kids feel that way anyway.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I certainly had a lot of trouble with acne, that kind of thing.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Awkward with girls, you know.
Guest:I mean, the whole normal teenage thing.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And so I began to put it into this song, just kind of not so much incidences, but the emotion.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was a pretty punk song, way ahead of its time.
Guest:This was Porterville?
Guest:Yeah, Porterville.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so...
Guest:all those days and weeks we were marching around i was creating porterville what i didn't realize i was because you asked about you know in a kind of sideways way you asked about storytelling and that one was really the first one i you know it became instead of i love you marie why did you break my heart i'm as sad as can be right you know yeah part right right right yeah yeah yeah
Guest:Instead, I was telling this cool story.
Guest:And when I got home, I don't think I ever wrote it down until when I got home and I started getting serious about writing.
Guest:And I realized it was kind of a cool little, it was just different.
Guest:It was different than the usual boy-girl and broken heart thing.
Guest:Sure, sure, sure.
Guest:then proud mary as you know became really the first really good song right that i wrote and so that's that was a to me was a big accomplishment just to get there and then again with a story yes yeah right it was a get to where i i sort of had now i had that in hand i really i kind of was starting to know what i was doing sort of yeah yeah you know yeah and as i did that i began to reflect that wow
Guest:I can write about something.
Guest:I can tell a story, but I can have a point of view.
Guest:I can put up an example and then use that example about what I've pointed out and have a point of view about that.
Guest:That's precisely what Fortunate Son is.
Guest:Because what was really pissing me off about that was you'd see all these guys that were basically the kids of well-heeled people, whether they be millionaires or businessmen, in other words, or sons of politicians.
Guest:And they weren't going to Vietnam.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They probably weren't having to go anywhere.
Guest:Somehow they had, what do they call those things?
Yeah.
Marc:Deferrals.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Where they were out, they weren't in the military, or if they were, they got a desk job somewhere.
Guest:So I realized I could write about that and point out the glaring examples, the flaws, without naming any names, but these were things that we all knew at the time.
Marc:And it also has not hung on any era.
Marc:That's always going to be the case.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Fortunate Son is always going to be the story.
Guest:Well, because it is what it is.
Marc:That's exactly right.
Marc:And so there's a certain amount of rage in that song.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Yeah, it is about the war, of course, but it's more about privilege and the inequality of the classes, where basically the rich men declare the war and then the poor men have to fight the war.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Now, with Bad Moon Rising, that was not specifically a war song.
Guest:No, not at all.
Guest:I actually got the idea from an old black-and-white movie called The Devil and Daniel Webster.
Guest:But I was hooked on the phrase, bad moon rising.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, it was a phrase that I just sort of...
Guest:I don't know, conjured up, I guess.
Guest:You know, there was a lot of talk back in the late 60s about, it was a lot of astrological stuff.
Guest:People walk up to you and they do the peace sign to you and then somebody would actually say, what's your sign, man?
Guest:You know, and I'd usually lie.
Guest:I'd say Aquarius.
Guest:Yeah, I knew it.
Guest:I knew it.
Guest:I mean, it was, you know, that's how bogus it is.
Marc:It all seemed kind of... But was there a difference between, I mean, did you associate, did you identify with the hippies?
Guest:Or were you just... Yes and no.
Guest:Actually...
Guest:uh, philosophically very much.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I, um,
Guest:The idea of certainly being a liberal person is who I am.
Guest:Thinking that we have an obligation to our fellow man.
Guest:The idea of trying to care for the less fortunate.
Guest:These were all pretty much liberal Democrat precepts, at least in the 50s and 60s when I grew up.
Guest:Things have gotten a lot more blurred over time.
Guest:I'd still...
Guest:loosely call myself a democrat but you know i realize i'm kind of a lot more like some kind of libertarian or something yeah you know um i still feel you i made the mistake of not voting in the mainstream a couple times and of course that meant my vote got thrown away and the guy i really hated got elected because i threw my vote away right and a bunch of other people felt like me right yeah and we've had that happen in our history in our recent history yeah um
Guest:So anyway, but yeah, I very much agreed with the hippie philosophy, if that's what you want to call it.
Guest:I mean, anything Pete Seeger would say, that's where I'm at.
Guest:But the lifestyle, you know, the idea of being stoned all day and laying around and thinking that somebody else is going to take care of you, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had a big argument with a guy while I was in the army.
Guest:He said, oh, no, I'm going to move to the desert and I won't have to do anything.
Guest:And I said, well, everybody else is going to have to pay your way, man.
Guest:You know, the army is protecting you, the police, the welfare that's going to bring you food.
Guest:That ain't right.
Guest:Oh, well, man, I'm just going to.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I've always thought you're supposed to.
Guest:take care of yourself and bring yourself up by your bootstraps.
Guest:I think that's my parents' generation teaching me.
Guest:But the idea that we're obligated to our fellow, I mean, obligated, that we need to do something is certainly ingrained in me.
Guest:I just didn't think personally the lifestyle of, you know, eyes glazed over and just kind of being unkempt and lazy.
Guest:I didn't like that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So Bad Moon Rising is an apocalyptic song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:To me, it was just the idea... Yeah.
Guest:It's scary in that way.
Guest:It was basically... It's not really a protest song at all.
Guest:It's more...
Guest:These great forces happen in our lives that are beyond our control.
Guest:To me, that metaphor in that movie, because the star or the hero in the movie sells his soul to the devil.
Guest:Then there's a gigantic hurricane that destroys everybody else's crops and farms and everything, and yet he's saved.
Guest:It's just that image after he spends the night cowering in his barn and all these noises outside, and he comes out, and his land is perfectly protected.
Guest:Wow, that was scary.
Guest:But of course, in the movie, he starts to have second thoughts about eternity, and he hires, I think, Daniel Webster to argue his case.
Guest:No, no, you didn't see this phrase, Mr. Devil.
Guest:You see the fine print.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He doesn't owe you his soul and 10 masters.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:But that song got co-opted by the Vietnam generation.
Marc:There was that thing you wrote about, that moment you had with that vet who talked to you about the song.
Marc:I found that very powerful.
Guest:Oh.
Marc:When he came up to you and he said that that... Well, that was...
Guest:What happens is when you're a record maker or making any kind of art, you make it within yourself maybe for a certain purpose or a certain reason.
Guest:And then once it goes out there into the public, you really aren't in control of it anymore.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And it can be interpreted in a lot of ways and then even...
Guest:adopted or adapted in a lot of different ways.
Guest:A lot of my songs had that happen to them.
Guest:What did that guy say to you?
Guest:And that's all cool stuff.
Guest:Well, what happened in the case of this song, it was one of the most profound moments in my whole life, really.
Guest:Because it was...
Guest:so deep into another person's reality that I didn't live.
Guest:I was told about it later.
Guest:And because of the person's enormous...
Guest:sacrifice.
Guest:Well, what did he say?
Guest:What happened was, um, the little school where my kids were going to school was having a fundraiser, you know, like all school, little schools do private school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so Julie had thought it'd be, my wife had thought it'd be a cool thing for me to donate something that could be, you know, auctioned.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that would help raise money.
Guest:Um, so I wrote out the words to bad moon rising and signed it and, you know, donated that.
Guest:And, but my handwriting is really horrible.
Guest:I mean, like a third grader.
Guest:And so I was, you know, that came the night of the event and I went to school with my family and I, you know, walked over to the place where they had my, my effort hanging on a wall, you know, cause I was very concerned about my chicken scratch.
Guest:And I walked over, you know, just looking at it and kind of cringing.
Guest:And then I think I, for a moment I went, yeah, yeah.
Guest:yeah okay it's not it's not as bad as i had made it out to be and i noticed somebody's walked up and is standing next to me uh because you know i was really only going to be there like 30 seconds and you know a voice says john and i turned over and i said yeah and it's a uh nice looking guy uh about my age maybe a little younger yeah uh dressed nice you know he'd come and it wasn't somebody i knew as one of the parents at school yeah
Guest:But he's dressed in a suit and tie, you know, very, what's the word, deferential to the event that was being put on.
Guest:And he says, well, you wrote Bad Moon Rising, didn't you?
Guest:And I said, yeah.
Guest:He says, oh, I want to tell you something about it.
Guest:I said, okay.
Guest:And I look at him and he says...
Guest:Well, I was in Vietnam and I looked at them.
Guest:It's because of the special place that all of that is in my heart and what we all lived through and certainly all the experience I had and all the music I made and just the struggle, the social upheaval of those days and those times.
Guest:He really had my attention because now I realize this was beyond where we were now standing, right?
Guest:And he says, well, I want to tell you about your song while I was in Vietnam.
Guest:He said, me and my buddies were, you know, we had a patrol there and we were camped in the jungle.
Guest:He said, our mission was to seek out and go find Charlie, right?
Guest:And right away, my brain is remembering those times.
Guest:It's the craziness of how that war was put forth, I guess.
Guest:The enemy is on his own turf in the jungle, and we're in there as campers, tourists, basically, because we don't live that way, and we're supposed to go find him, right?
Guest:Anyway, so this fellow says, so my unit, our mission, our orders were...
Guest:to go find Charlie in the jungle.
Guest:And part of our orders were we were to go at night.
Guest:And I'm going, you know, I look at him and I shake my head.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he says, so what we had to do, you know, every night after it got dark, we'd have dinner.
Guest:He says then, he says, the idea was we were supposed to go out into the jungle.
Guest:He said, you know, it's just my little patrol.
Guest:We called ourselves the Buffalo Soldiers.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:And I thought, really?
Guest:He says, well, you know, we were, I mean, in my mind, without verbalizing, I knew that that's a sign of bravado.
Guest:You're sort of hoisting yourself up against this almost suicidal mission that you're on.
Guest:And he says, so we would turn on all the lights in our encampment.
Guest:We had this PA system.
Guest:And so we would turn it up as loud as we could, and we would play Bad Moon Rising at the top, the highest volume we could play, just before we went out into the jungle.
Guest:And I said, you're telling everybody that you're coming out into the jungle?
Guest:And he said, yeah, that's right.
Guest:I just looked at him in awe, and I said, wow, I'm glad you made it through.
Guest:um i wish i could tell you the man's name because he's a hero in my mind and certainly one of the more important guys i've ever met you know i kind of turned away i think we shook hands i turned away and looked at the thing on the wall when i looked back he was gone and it was just you know one of those things how can i say it if you think about that even for 30 seconds you realize that's so many people so many
Guest:millions really hundreds of thousands at least of soldiers stories that lived through that time that they were given a wacky set of instructions that they had to do and so they did the best they could
Marc:Yeah, and you had no idea that that could have been until that guy told you.
Marc:You had no idea that your song was just out there, and that platoon drew strength from that.
Guest:Well, I'll always remember that, that he was a buffalo soldier.
Guest:I mean, that was some guys with their own...
Guest:They realized that they were an island in eternity, basically.
Guest:That's what you are.
Guest:They've sent you over there for this crazy thing.
Guest:You can't really refuse, or they'll put you in the penitentiary.
Guest:and you'll be shamed.
Guest:The horrible thing about all of that was that the American public wasn't smart enough yet.
Guest:When those guys came home, of course, they were all treated horribly.
Guest:The public at large was against the war, but the administration at the time managed to
Guest:join the concept, the clash of ideologies together so that it made people think they were against the soldiers, and they were not.
Guest:They were against the policy.
Guest:These poor soldiers were just simply doing what their country asked them to do.
Guest:But the...
Marc:insane administration was using their best uh pr people i guess you know like halderman yeah uh to put the disease on the soldiers it's such an unfair horrible yeah and the other songs on here that like we'll just go through a couple of them like the uh long as i can see the light um always chokes me up and i think that the my morning jacket did a beautiful version of it thank you did you
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Oh, I love it.
Marc:Where did that song come from, man?
Guest:I think that was that loner, again, that I kind of mentioned.
Guest:I think I've always kind of just had that feeling that I wished so desperately for Home.
Guest:You know, when we were kids... I mean, there was... How can I say it?
Guest:Television or escapist entertainment is full of little touchstones of this stuff.
Guest:In the 50s, of course, with TV...
Guest:there'd be shows like Leave it to Beaver, maybe the old movie Old Yeller, you know, where you get this sense of a very strong home, even if you really didn't have that yourself.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But you just desperately wanted that, right?
Guest:And so my idea was a candle in the window that's, you know, it's certainly a fragile thing that any little wind can blow it out.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And the idea that I would be able to find my home and get back home, no matter how lost I might be, as long as that candle was in the window.
Guest:Now, I do want to tell you, the man that wrote that song was a pretty sad man internally.
Marc:That man being you at a different time.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And I found my home.
Guest:My beautiful wife, Julie, gave me that.
Guest:So that song has a wonderful... How can I say it?
Guest:There was so much desperation in that song, and now I can, of course...
Guest:It's a struggle that now I'm proud of the song, but I'm also proud that at least I found my salvation.
Marc:Where was the sadness coming from then?
Guest:All my life, my whole life.
Marc:Do you think it has something to do with your old man splitting?
Guest:Yeah, of course.
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:Yeah, I felt like a stone cast adrift, you know, just kind of with no moorings.
Marc:And then you wrote the other song that directly sort of approaches that, which Someday Never Comes, right?
Marc:And that can be looked at, just the language of that song, like this is with a lot of your songs, that the language is powerful, but not directly hinged
Marc:to, you know, a personal experience in the song so it can apply to anybody.
Marc:Like, in the sense of Someday Never Comes, I mean, that heartache of that song can be applied to anybody's experience.
Marc:But it's very specific for you.
Guest:Well, it was personal.
Guest:I was breaking up with my wife at the time.
Guest:This was 1972, I believe.
Guest:And, of course, we had children.
Guest:And the phrase... It was something my dad would say or my parents would say.
Guest:They would say, oh, someday.
Guest:You know, I'd hear, someday, or someday you'll understand.
Guest:Right?
Guest:And so there's...
Guest:I don't know how in, you know, this is a songwriter and a poet at heart, I guess.
Guest:Because now I really, it's amazing that I came up with that title, Someday Never Comes.
Guest:Because it's an angry statement.
Guest:Because my parents said it to me.
Guest:And basically I'm the man who's grown now, the child who's now a man.
Guest:And I'm saying it to my child.
Guest:And it's just, that's so sad to me.
Guest:It's horribly sad.
Guest:but I'm angry at the, let's say, fairy tale I'd been given as a child, someday you'll understand.
Guest:You don't.
Guest:You never come to understanding.
Guest:You come to, that's the way it is.
Guest:Acceptance.
Guest:Yeah, but you accept only because you're older.
Guest:Yeah, and you don't want to be bitter.
Guest:If somebody tells me,
Guest:you keep thinking someone's going to leave a toy for you down on the sidewalk where the path of your house meets the sidewalk.
Guest:And you think somebody's going to leave a toy there.
Guest:And every day you run down there and you look for your toy, you know, for 15 years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No one ever leaves a toy there.
Guest:Every single day, you know, at some point, damn, you know, that's the people that call in radio psychiatrists.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You need to move on here.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:Someday, somebody's going to leave a toy for me.
Guest:He's saying, someday never comes.
Guest:Anyway, I came up with that phrase, someday never comes.
Guest:It's an angry, that's anger.
Guest:Because it never comes.
Guest:No matter what your parents told you, it's not true.
Guest:Someday never comes.
Marc:Well, the anger thing, this is something you've had to deal with your entire life.
Marc:I mean, you know, when I read about you and what you went through with Fantasy Records and with Solvents Ants and that whole thing, I mean, a good chunk of your life was fighting for your own work.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:And finally, you got resolution around that.
Guest:Well, the only... It's really not, Mark.
Guest:What it is... In other words, I never got... I don't own my songs, so that's not resolution.
Guest:If I live long enough, I'm going to get them back after a long, long time.
Guest:How did that happen?
Guest:Um...
Guest:Here's the simple truth.
Guest:You have a little band, right?
Guest:None of you has been within a million miles of any sort of fame or making it or money, right?
Guest:You're like every other wannabe.
Guest:You have a dream and, oh, I hope I have a hit song someday and all that sort of thing.
Guest:But you're so far away.
Guest:You have no reason to believe other than having a dream.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because you know, as you look around, all the other people that show up at the little engagements you play in some little...
Guest:You know, a high school gymnasium or maybe a little sock hop after school or a nightclub on the outskirts of Sacramento.
Guest:Not even downtown Sacramento.
Guest:You know, you're so far away from, you know, you're playing out...
Guest:Out in all the little farm towns like in California, you're in Merced and Turlock and Hanford.
Guest:Beautiful places, by the way.
Guest:As I grew up, since I played there so much, a lot of that informs the music and the kind of writing I do.
Guest:But you know that everybody else you're seeing that has their little musical group or comic group or whatever part of showbiz they're in, they all have the same dream.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you have no really more reason to expect anything ever happening than all... You just look at the odds.
Marc:Everybody's playing guitar in the garage.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, so...
Guest:And there's been no, other than your own passion, there's been no really reason to believe.
Guest:So you have your little four-piece band, and you have a guy who has a little record company.
Guest:I mean little, a little jazz record company.
Guest:that has, I think, 27 albums by Cal Jader on it.
Guest:And because I was a shipping clerk at that record company, I know how few records they actually ship because I was the guy that had to put them in boxes.
Guest:And they were lucky to ship 300 records a week.
Guest:That would be a big week, right?
Guest:And I had that job for a couple of years.
Guest:And so as you look around these...
Guest:the five of you and you all have, you're talking about this dream and you're all talking about it like you're equal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, yeah, we're all in this together.
Guest:Boy, if we ever, if we ever manage to hit the big time, boy, we'll, we'll all, you know, be on the good side of the, on the, the wealthy side of the street, you know, the gold will finally come to us.
Guest:We'll, we'll share and share alike.
Guest:I mean, everybody's talking that way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so as you see your bandmates and this guy who owns this little tiny, tiny record label, you believe that to be true.
Guest:And when you sign a contract that says you're all sharing or he's owning the songwriting and arranging and he's owning the masters and all that, not that I really even read the thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But you talk about it verbally.
Guest:And one of the questions was asked, well, how about if we ever, you know, make it?
Guest:I mean, we have a hit record, and then the man who owns the label says, oh, we'll tear this thing up, and we'll all share in this equally.
Guest:Well, you're all sitting in the exact same boat.
Guest:You believe that.
Guest:You think that's the truth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, you know, you ever see the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, once there's money involved...
Guest:Things change really radically.
Guest:When there's no money, there's nothing to share.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Nothing to split up.
Guest:Hey, man, I'll give you, here, on the turn, you're playing poker, you know, like a virtual poker game.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Hey, I'll bet you 50% of my share.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Whatever.
Guest:It's worth nothing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, you're kind of talking that way because you all have a dream.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And you're all being nice to each other.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You don't know that one day... You can't trust that guy.
Guest:Basically, because of your own efforts, mostly, things are going to drastically change for these other people.
Guest:And suddenly, greed is going to rear its ugly head.
Guest:And suddenly, every man is for himself, except they're all...
Guest:And as I had somebody put it to me once, well, they killed the goose that laid the golden egg, meaning me.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So that went on for years, right?
Guest:So all throughout the... Yeah, but I didn't get the songs back, and I didn't get the money back that was stolen.
Guest:So really, I forget the word, if you call it resolution or something else.
Marc:Closure, maybe?
Guest:I don't remember.
Guest:Well, what it is...
Guest:A person, I'm a lot older guy, right?
Guest:You live long enough in this world, hopefully, you get... I mean, look at the times I've lived through.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, just in the world stage, the world of events, and then my own personal play.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's been rather volatile and remarkable.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What I was getting at is you get to be older.
Guest:Hopefully, you have some perspective.
Guest:And you really...
Guest:come to the realization of what actually matters, what's important.
Guest:And I was lucky enough, by no design of my own, by certainly no deserving any more than the next guy of my own, I met a beautiful, wonderful woman who loved me for me, just cared about me.
Guest:Lord knows she didn't know all the demons that were in the next room behind me.
Guest:She was soon to learn about it.
Guest:Oh, I didn't know.
Guest:This came along with the program.
Marc:Whoa.
Marc:This is a lot of work, John.
Marc:These are my evil friends.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Anyway, I fell in love.
Guest:We fell in love.
Guest:I can remember way back when it first happened to me.
Guest:I was babbling like an idiot I would talk about it so much because it was like a new toy in my life.
Guest:Wow, love is everything.
Guest:I would grab people I'd known for years.
Guest:Do you know what love is?
Guest:Come on, man.
Guest:This is what it means.
Guest:I'd talk and I'd talk and I'd wear people out.
Guest:Well, it is the truth.
Guest:The only thing in this world, really,
Guest:Is love.
Guest:And to have a person, to have one person in your life that suddenly you realize they're more important than you are.
Guest:I mean that in the sense that for me, she is more important than I am to me.
Guest:I would do anything for her.
Guest:So therefore, all that selfish stuff, you know, again, this is a process, Mark.
Guest:This didn't happen to me.
Guest:Like, I opened my eyes, she flooded her eyes, and I went, boom, you know, like a thumper in that movie.
Guest:It took a while for me to get all this, you know.
Marc:So with her love and with her support, you were able to get out of yourself and get a little peace of mind.
Guest:The peace of mind is knowing, and especially as a family came along, you realize that no amount of money in the world compares to having Julie and my kids in my life.
Guest:No amount of money.
Guest:No fortune, no goal record or achievement.
Guest:It doesn't even come close.
Guest:Frankly, my proudest achievement in my life is my family.
Guest:I get to ask, well, what did you do?
Guest:Was it Woodstock?
Guest:What's the coolest thing?
Guest:And they're always thinking in terms of career stuff.
Guest:I go, no, my proudest achievement is meeting Julie.
Guest:And somehow not messing that up and then having my wonderful family with Julie because, you know, and this is sincere.
Guest:This is the truth.
Guest:Some of the days, especially when I was still kind of working it out and, you know, had all those anger emotions you talked about, I could open my eyes real wide and go, you know,
Guest:My little boy here is so much more meaningful to me than that stupid contract and whatever money got lost or whatever.
Guest:I mean, it's holding my little child here, holding my wife, thinking about what we have is so much more fulfilling.
Guest:I mean, it's obviously more precious.
Guest:Were you able to?
Guest:And the other side of that became very true to me, very clear to me, I mean.
Guest:No amount of money can buy that.
Guest:You can be that guy over there on Wall Street that owns half the East Coast, right?
Guest:And all he really wants in his life is what I have.
Guest:In fact, I've said that.
Guest:He wants what I've got.
Guest:And I've already got what I want.
Guest:And that's that.
Guest:It's as simple as that.
Marc:In your new state of mind, have you been able to, because I know there was a lot of tension with the band and there was tension with your brother, were you able to get any closure around that or make an amends along those lines with the guys in Credence or in memory of your brother?
Guest:The closure in my mind about my brother Tom, you know, in the real world while Tom was still alive, I had, I don't know how long a story you want me to tell.
Guest:I had actually tried to get real, you know.
Guest:I mean, it was hurtful to me that we didn't get along, that there was obviously this gaping distance between us.
Marc:That went back to the band.
Guest:Yeah, it certainly was.
Guest:I couldn't quite.
Guest:Julia's helped me a lot over the years.
Guest:I couldn't quite define it in those days.
Guest:I didn't quite know that a lot of it was jealousy.
Guest:But I didn't know that then because I didn't have that.
Guest:I wasn't jealous of Tom.
Guest:I didn't have any jealousy in me.
Guest:So I wasn't experiencing that emotion.
Guest:Does that make any sense to you?
Guest:I wasn't jealous.
Guest:I was happy doing what I had to do.
Guest:But he was pissed off.
Guest:And jealous, right?
Guest:Some of that must have been exacerbated because he was older.
Guest:Therefore, he was first.
Guest:He kind of was out in the limelight in high school and all that while I was still younger.
Guest:So he experienced it
Guest:earlier in his life and had had that longer and now kind of had to take a back seat to me.
Guest:I'm just trying to reason this out.
Guest:Anyway, I had heard this story when I was a kid about the Dorsey brothers.
Guest:Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey had a band together when they were kids and then they split up and didn't talk to each other for 30 years or something.
Guest:These are people from the old days when I was growing up.
Guest:My mom's music.
Guest:But then I heard that for their mother...
Guest:for their mom, because their mom wanted them to get back together, they did.
Guest:And near the end of their lives, that's the show that I saw Elvis Presley on, as a matter of fact, on TV.
Guest:So they were now rectified, whatever that word is, back together again.
Guest:And so I thought, man, because my mom was ill,
Guest:And I thought, you know, it would be really cool to do that for our mob.
Guest:So I was trying to engineer this to happen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and I called Tom and wrote him a letter.
Guest:Then he kind of agreed.
Guest:And he said, oh, yeah, cool.
Guest:I said, well, look, I think this is just me.
Guest:This is John talking.
Guest:Because, you know, I had some anger and I knew Tom did, too.
Guest:So I said, I think the quickest way to get there is if we just write down words.
Guest:our issues you know why am i mad at you why are you mad at me you know whatever if your list has a thousand lines on it i don't care then we'll go over the list right now tom had always been sort of in a he he managed to be a bit in uh i don't i want to call it either denial or some some sort of displacement sometimes from
Guest:what was going on right now i want to say displacement from reality but that's a little harsh so he was hung up in the past when the band broke up and everything else yeah he's hung up in those feelings because he was still doing that right so anyway so i you know he agreed yeah we'll write down you know so i wrote down on my list which later had probably six or seven lines but the first thing i wrote was tom i'm mad at you because you sued me
Guest:So I sent that to him, and we did it by phone.
Guest:I know we talked by phone a few times, but we did letters.
Guest:And his response back was, no, I didn't.
Guest:And I'm going, huh?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What?
Marc:He sued you over the name?
Guest:Yeah, he sued me over... It's very complicated, but at the time when all the money had disappeared from Credence and all that...
Marc:From Saul Van Zandt took it.
Guest:Yes, this offshore, whatever, offshore banking tax deferral thing.
Guest:It's very clumsy or cumbersome to try and explain.
Guest:But anyway...
Guest:And so Tom kept saying, well, no, I didn't sue you.
Guest:So finally I found a copy of the lawsuit, the cover page that explains everything, and there's Tom Fogarty, and I think his wife is named too, hereby sue or whatever, join John Fogarty.
Guest:Here's a copy of the thing, and I sent it to him.
Guest:Well, Tom, you did sue me.
Guest:Don't say you didn't sue me.
Guest:I mean, we're not getting anywhere if you just deny what I've said.
Guest:I'm mad because you sued me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So then his answer a little later was, well, you know, what happened was, in his mind, what had happened was, the morning of the trial in 1983, Tom walked up to my attorney and he said...
Guest:I don't want to sue John anymore.
Guest:So in his mind, he wasn't suing me.
Guest:And so that's why he answered, I didn't sue you.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:Even though I had to give, I don't know how many depositions and file papers and all of that over those six years or whatever it was, defending myself against that.
Whew.
Guest:Anyway, so we got past that one and we went on whatever the second line was, we tried.
Guest:It was still sort of, I mean, this was really hard work for everybody, I guess.
Guest:Then Tom got ill, right?
Guest:And he was dying.
Guest:And a couple of times during that long ongoing process, Tom revealed to me, well, you know, Saul's aunt is my best friend.
Guest:Ugh.
Guest:And so whenever he'd say something like that, I mean, he's ill, right?
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:So I can't really contest it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or try to argue.
Guest:No, he's not.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, because if the other guy says somebody's your best friend, you can't.
Guest:How can you argue against it?
Guest:That's what he believes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Although in my mind, I know that Saul's answer, you know what, Tom?
Guest:He's using you, Tom.
Guest:He's using you because now you won't go against him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You'll have you as an ally against me.
Guest:So it kind of ended that way.
Marc:It just got complicated.
Guest:That's pretty complicated, right.
Guest:So Tom was being used, and Saul was a really evil person to do that.
Guest:But to jump ahead in time to my wonderful life now, you know, I've thought of, obviously, I think of my brother, the guy that we sat in a room dreaming about music and hearing Satisfaction in the car for the first time by the Rolling Stones and looking at each other that certain way where you hear something and go, oh, my God, listen to that, you know, that sort of thing.
Guest:And I decided that, you know,
Guest:If Tom was here, we would talk about it.
Guest:I forgive you, Tom.
Guest:And I know he would.
Guest:Because I'm healed enough that I can forgive him.
Guest:It really doesn't matter.
Guest:Can you understand that?
Guest:Whatever it was when I was angry, well, I'm not angry anymore.
Guest:Those things don't matter anyway.
Guest:Whatever money, whatever crap about Saul's aunts,
Guest:You know, wherever.
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:Because that's not... What's important to me is my life here with Julie and my family.
Marc:So you got peace in your heart around this stuff.
Marc:Right.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:So it's important to me, at least on my side of the ledger, to have said to myself, you know, Tom, I forgive you.
Guest:Meaning...
Guest:Whenever we do meet, we're in a state of grace as far as I'm concerned.
Marc:That's beautiful.
Marc:And you got inducted into the Hall of Fame, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and that must have been a big night, huh?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's amazing.
Guest:It lasted about 24 hours.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was a great night.
Guest:I was happy.
Guest:We, our band, us, our music was being honored.
Guest:As I said, I don't remember the whole speak, but I do know at some point I said something to the effect of, I know we've had our ups and downs or something like that, and I said, but after all that...
Guest:some point or at some point in time we made some pretty great music together yeah and that's after all why we're here yeah right yeah and then the mush hit the fan yeah with the other guys yeah yeah um is that is that resolved no you know it's you're not now what's what's hilarious to me really truly
Guest:I don't know, some guy, a lot of playwrights, a lot wiser than me, have sort of been devil's advocate, almost like the little devil himself up on the tree branch looking down at humanity and just shaking their head at how easy it is to keep the little barnyard animals upset in every way, as Alan Wolfe said.
Guest:I mean, quite innocently, just a couple years ago, somebody was asking me, well,
Guest:Do you think there'll ever be a reunion?
Guest:Because they always ask that question, right?
Guest:And the first thing that happened was, because I'm asked all the time, but this particular time, I said, wow, you know what just happened?
Guest:He goes, what?
Guest:I said, well,
Guest:in the days gone by i would always like you it's like you push the button i go no you'll never have a you know yeah but this time it's like i was just like real easy going about it said you know i don't know maybe it could happen my knee didn't jerk in other words i didn't have an automatic response because i because i'm happy yeah you know and i'm kind of looking out from my porch yeah you know i got my little lemonade sitting here and i'm going
Guest:I don't know, this big old world, you never know what's gonna, you know, I'm looking at the freeway across the lot over there, and cars going this way, and trucks going that way, and I don't know, you never know what might happen.
Guest:So the guy prints that, right?
Guest:John seems kind of mellow about the idea that there might be a reunion, you know, because I'm at peace.
Guest:Not a week went by, maybe three days, the other guys are in somebody's article.
Guest:no, no, no, it's too late.
Guest:We're never going to have anything.
Guest:I read that, and I just kind of said to the wind, I guess they're still mad.
Marc:Just a couple more questions.
Marc:The performance at Woodstock, is there any tape of that, man?
Guest:Is there tape of that?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, sure.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah, I think probably the whole thing was more or less recorded.
Guest:But you didn't want it in?
No.
Guest:Now, you have to—well, eventually it has been used.
Guest:You have to remember way back at the time, we had played Woodstock.
Guest:We followed the Grateful Dead.
Guest:Talk about that hippie lifestyle you were talking about a while ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, this would be probably the Technicolor poster boy example of all of it gone wrong.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The dead got on.
Guest:The whole thing was running late anyway.
Guest:And we were supposed to be on at something like 10 o'clock.
Guest:We were promised a really prominent position on Saturday night.
Guest:Well, it got to be past midnight.
Guest:Then it got to be 1.
Guest:And then the dead ambles on stage.
Guest:They play a few songs.
Guest:Then their equipment breaks.
Guest:And it's like, Jerry.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:Where's my guitar?
Guest:I don't know, man.
Guest:Their equipment broke, and so there was no music at Woodstock for 45 minutes or whatever, right?
Guest:Then finally they insist or persist on coming back out.
Guest:They finally find the electrical outlet, and they plug in an amp or whatever, and they start playing.
Guest:By the way, it was Turn On Your Love Light.
Marc:Yeah, Bobby Blanton.
Guest:Well, yeah, I love that version.
Guest:But this was some white boys from Milpitas.
Guest:Anyway, you know, and so they play for like another 45 minutes after that.
Guest:I mean, it's getting late.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So Creedence comes out finally on stage.
Guest:I don't even know.
Guest:Here they are, Creedence, Clearwater.
Guest:They run out.
Guest:We play our first song.
Guest:It's probably Born on the Bayou.
Guest:We're trying to kick out the jams.
Guest:Finally, I look down at the people.
Guest:Well, they're all asleep.
Guest:They're all muddy, naked, and asleep.
Guest:I'm stomping up and down.
Guest:At some point, I literally walk up to the mic.
Guest:It was to be a big opportunity for my little band from El Cerrito, right?
Guest:And I look out and I said, man, you know, we're up here.
Guest:We're just rocking.
Guest:We're hoping to do a good job for you.
Guest:We're having a good time.
Guest:We hope you are too.
Guest:And I'm looking out, you know, nothing.
Guest:I mean, no response.
Guest:Finally, some guy way out in the darkness, you know, flicking his bick.
Guest:And he goes, don't worry about it, John.
Guest:We're with you.
Guest:I mean, the fact that in a half a million people, I could hear that one guy a quarter mile away is astonishing.
Guest:Because everybody else, the only thing you could hear was snoring.
Guest:Well, the Grateful Dead had put a half a million people to sleep.
Guest:right yeah so i just you know credence at this point in the middle of 1969 we were on our third gold single probably had three albums in the top in the top 10 you know it was pretty clear that we had a hold of the that freight train there's rolling down the track at pretty high speed that was all really great and i just and it wasn't right then by the way it was a
Guest:A year later, maybe, somebody sent me a tape of Bad Moon Rising.
Guest:We were thinking of putting this in this movie we're making, right?
Guest:Yeah, the Woodstock movie.
Guest:I listened to it, and it was kind of a sideways version.
Guest:It was okay.
Guest:It wasn't horrible, but there was no extra oomph.
Marc:No electricity.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I just thought everything else we're doing is like, what do they call it nowadays terms?
Guest:Over the moon.
Guest:Hitting it out of the park.
Guest:And here's this thing that's kind of, it doesn't show us in a great light.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I just thought, why do I want to be part of something like that?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So I just said no.
Guest:You know, years and years and years went by, and finally I did say yeah, because by now it was just historic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it wasn't helping the career at all.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It was kind of showing a weakness, you might say.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Carlos Santana, of course, in the daylight because you couldn't take film in those days at night.
Guest:It was basically 10 feet away and you were a shadow.
Guest:And so Carlos was really killer, looked great.
Guest:And of course, Jimmy, Jimmy, all dressed in white in the morning light.
Guest:But it's sort of hilarious.
Guest:Jimmy had in his contract, he had to close the show.
Guest:He had to be the final act of Woodstock.
Guest:So by God...
Guest:And that next morning, whatever morning, I think it was Monday morning after the whole thing, like 7 o'clock in the morning after everyone has left, Jimmy's out there doing purple haze to a couple of cows and a lot of trash.
Marc:And that was the mythic performance.
Marc:That was immortal.
Marc:But he looked great.
Marc:God, he looked great.
Yeah.
Marc:Well, I want to say this, is that this album, the new one, wrote a song for everyone, is just great.
Marc:And I listened to it twice, and all these versions of your songs and the new songs are great.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:And I got to tell you, personally, when I was younger and I listened to you guys in high school and I had the Greatest Hits album and all these other records that I got from my uncle, the ones I still have, the Credence records, and then when you guys sort of disappeared, I remember when Centerfield came out,
Marc:I went out and bought it, and I was so excited that you sounded so damn good.
Marc:And those songs were so great.
Marc:And I kind of put that in the shelf in my head.
Marc:And then I interviewed Dave Grohl when he was working on Sound City.
Marc:And I was at Sundance with IFC for a different thing, and I went.
Marc:Oh, did you come see us?
Marc:Well, I went and saw you, and when you got out there, it was like everything else just paled.
Marc:You got out there, and I heard you sing in the exact same tenor that you always had, and I cried.
Marc:I was so thrilled to see you up there and just to see you doing your songs with the same amount of heart you always had.
Marc:It's just been a great honor to talk to you.
Guest:Oh, well, thank you, Mark.
Guest:You know, what you've done is you've sort of reinforced, you know, what passion is.
Guest:Basically, yeah, it's really important to me.
Guest:And I dare say, certainly at a certain time in all our lives, and if we're lucky enough, we get to keep that passion, that when it's so important to you and you want to really...
Guest:do the best you can.
Guest:You're trying to be great, as it were.
Guest:And your audience, obviously, you felt that way from a connection from when you were young.
Guest:You know, you carry that because it really matters to you, right?
Guest:I mean, it really matters to me.
Guest:There's...
Guest:I mean, when you're teenage and you have the guys in music especially, or it might be sports or it might be a movie star or something, but it's really, really important.
Guest:It may be the most important thing to you.
Guest:And you keep that passion.
Guest:If you're lucky, you get to hang on to that throughout your life and have that same sense of, well, man, this is really important.
Guest:I care about this.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And you still got it, man.
Guest:I appreciate that.
Marc:Thanks for talking to me.
Guest:You bet.
Marc:I was ecstatic driving away from that interview.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed it.
Marc:I listened to the record on the way back.
Marc:I'm telling you, man, the version of as long as I can see the light with my morning jacket.
Marc:It's making me cry thinking about it.
Marc:I swear to God.
Marc:It was a real honor for me to meet him and talk to him.
Marc:Just a very special day for me.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:Let me tell you what I'm going to be doing.
Marc:I'm going to be in Phoenix at Stand Up Live on Thursday, June 6th.
Marc:I'm going to be doing a book event at Politics and Prose at Six and I in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, June 11th.
Marc:I will be doing a book event at Barnes & Noble in Union Square in New York City, June 12th.
Marc:I will be doing a book event at the Bryant Park Summer Reading Series.
Marc:hosted by Julie Klausner, I believe, June 13th.
Marc:That's a Thursday.
Marc:And I'll be at the Brattle Theater for the Harvard Bookstore on June 14th.
Marc:That's Friday.
Marc:My old stomping grounds.
Marc:There's also an event with me and some of my writers and Bobcat Goldthwait and a couple of the writers going to be doing an event at the Paley Center here in Los Angeles on Tuesday, June 18th.
Marc:And I'm sure other things will pop up between then and now.
Marc:Don't forget, I'll be at the Ice House in Pasadena June 2nd, Los Angeles people, with Dave Anthony doing something.
Marc:Get yourself some Just Coffee.
Marc:I've actually got some right now.
Marc:They should send me some.
Marc:I'm almost out.
Marc:Hold on.
Marc:Haven't done one of these in a while.
Marc:Pow!
Marc:I just shit my pants.
Marc:Look out.
Marc:JustCoffee.com.
Marc:Co-op.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Has been a while.
Marc:Forgot the tag there.
Marc:JustCoffee.co-op.
Marc:What else?
Marc:I told you about Mike Lawrence's album.
Marc:Mike Lawrence is a very funny kid.
Marc:Go get it.
Marc:Sadamantium.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And again, the music today was by the Zig Zags.
Marc:Mike's album comes out on the 20th.
Marc:iTunes and Amazon.
Marc:Zig Zags did the music today.
Marc:I'm fucking... I have to go write my intro for John Fogerty for tomorrow night.
Marc:Which I think what I should go with is... Ladies and gentlemen, this man has made some of the... Ladies and gentlemen, this guy... Ladies and gentlemen...
Marc:This rocker, ugh.
Marc:Ladies and gentlemen, I want to bring, are you ready for a great show?
Marc:Are you ready for a great show?
Marc:This guy needs no introduction.
Marc:See, now it seems trite.
Marc:This guy, ladies and gentlemen, the man I'm about to bring to the stage has written some of the most amazing and perfect rock songs in the history of rock and roll, and they are timeless.
Marc:How often can you say that about an artist?
Marc:That his songs are timeless.
Marc:Please welcome to the stage one of the greatest rock and roll artists to ever live, Mr. John Fogerty, ladies and gentlemen.
Marc:John Fogerty.
Marc:It's close, right?
Marc:Boomer lives!
Boomer lives!
Boomer lives!