As John Fogerty begins talking about his new album, a bemused smile comes over his face. “I wanted to call it Taylor’s Version,” he says during a recent visit to New York. “I lobbied very much to the record company.”
Whether he’s joking or not, Fogerty says his label passed on the idea. Then again, he had a point. Onstage at New York’s Beacon Theatre Wednesday night, during the first of two 80th birthday celebration shows, Fogerty announced his upcoming LP, Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years. Due Aug. 22, the album’s 20 tracks aren’t just covers of his best-known and beloved songs from his Creedence days. Rather, they’re painstaking recreations of the original versions, down to Fogerty’s singing and guitar parts and the original rhythm section, starting with “Up Around the Bend” and continuing through big hits like “Proud Mary,” “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” “Bad Moon Rising,” and “Down on the Corner,” and deep cuts like “Porterville” and “Bootleg.”
“I’m still kind of waiting to hear feedback,” Fogerty says. “But the first five or six people I’ve talked to who’ve listened to it all say it sounds ‘fresher.’ Maybe what they’re saying is it’s clearer, or the fidelity is better or something? That may be something I hadn’t even counted on, but there’s more dimension to it, more depth.”
Musicians have been releasing note-for-note covers of their older material for decades now, but for Fogerty, the thought arrived two years ago. With a push from his wife and manager, Julie, he finally acquired a majority interest in the publishing rights to his Creedence song catalog in 2023. It was Julie, he says, who then suggested a remakes album, although Fogerty admits he was skeptical. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with that,” he says. “But then as time went on, I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll stick my toe in the water and see how that is.’”
That process started with Fogerty and his son (and guitarist) Shane digging deep into the Creedence recordings. With the help of isolated audio tracks — known as “stems” — they could listen separately to each vocal and instrumental part, including every aspect of Fogerty’s singing, in order to create a precision copy. In that regard, Fogerty insists the project is different from his previous remakes albums: the all-star duets project Wrote a Song for Everyone and 2020’s Fogerty’s Factory, where he recut Creedence songs with members of his family. “In those cases, I suppose I was simply singing the songs, whereas this time around the idea was to, I guess they call it ‘re-record,’” he says. “Instead of going off on a tangent of ‘Oh, let’s do a folk music version’ or something, the idea was to sound closely like the original.”
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After cutting a few preliminary backing tracks with a band — Shane on guitar and session veterans Bob Glaub on bass and Matt Chamberlain on drums — Fogerty started by adding a new vocal onto the remade “Proud Mary.” The moment proved pivotal to the project. “I’ve been singing ‘Proud Mary’ for over 50 years, and I developed a lot of bad habits singing it, with no reference to the original,” he says. “But here was the moment where I realized, ‘John, that wasn’t close enough. You’re not really doing the song. You’re doing a “drive-by” version.’ I had to relearn the song, with all the inflections in all the same ways. It’s like people in New York don’t go to see the Statue of Liberty, because it’s right there. Shane was able to point out many times, ‘Dad, I think that part is a little more complicated than you’ve been doing it.’”
That process continued as more songs were recreated over a period of two years. Fogerty realized he was singing “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” with what he calls “more syncopation” at his concerts. “The way I had recorded it, because it was probably within a few weeks of me writing it, it was kind of straight,” he says. “Kind of corny, you know? Then we listened to ‘Born on the Bayou,’ and it became a whole new thing. I said, ‘Man, I like this better than the old way,’ because the parts were very much like a jam band, but a really good jam band. Not waiting forever for something to happen.”
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Adding to the revisiting-the-past process, Fogerty even played the same Rickenbacker guitar (with “Acme” hand-painted on its body) that he’d used during his Creedence days. He’d given it away in the Seventies and had an opportunity to buy it back in the Nineties, he says, for $40,000. But he passed at the time, partly for financial reasons and partly emotional ones. It’s no secret that Fogerty’s relations with his former bandmates, as well as the late Fantasy Records head Saul Zaentz, have been fraught, clouded by lawsuits and hard feelings. So the memories attached to the guitar were, he says, too painful to revisit. “I was hurt. I was damaged,” Fogerty says.
A decade ago, though, Julie Fogerty secretly bought the guitar back (for an undisclosed sum) and gave it to her husband as a Christmas present, after which he says the healing began. “I started as a kid full of joy doing music, but during the time of Creedence, and shortly after that, it became certainly not joyful,” he says. “The idea [behind Legacy] was to reconnect and feel that way about everything again. The guy who couldn’t even stand to look at his own guitar in the Nineties or beyond would have never done that.”
Even if he didn’t use a Swiftian title for the album, Fogerty says Legacy is nonetheless connected to the way Swift began remaking her albums after her back catalog was sold to Scooter Braun. (Similarly, Fogerty and his former bandmates in Creedence don’t own the masters of their albums.) “I understood her plight,” he says. “She’s had a wonderful career, and, of course, had saved a lot of money and was a major touring artist, so she was quite able to pay whatever amount the person that was going to sell it. I really felt for her at the time, because the guy was selling it to somebody else. That sort of thing has certainly happened to me. It’s very much like what Saul Zaentz might do.”
Like Swift, Fogerty does own the masters of his remakes, which could result in a financial windfall if Legacy sells or streams well. (Tellingly, Legacy doesn’t include the band’s hit covers of “Susie Q” or “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” neither written by Fogerty.)
Still, a question hovers over Legacy: Since these renditions faithfully mimic the recordings that longtime fans know, why would they need them? “That’s a great question, because I asked that myself,” he says. “But there’s a couple of things. Number one, there’s probably no chance in the world I will ever have any part of the ownership of the old masters. This is kind of the Taylor Swift part. But another thing is, I think there’s a joy quite evident in the music that may not be there in the original versions.”
In Fogerty’s mind, certain songs have also benefited, especially lyrically, from the passage of time. “When I listen to the finished vocal on ‘Lodi,’ it certainly sounds like the guy who lived that part, whereas I’m not sure the guy who sang it the first time did,” he says.
In 2021, Fogerty re-emerged with the gospel-style “Weeping in the Promised Land,” his first newly written song in eight years. At the time, he told Rolling Stone that an album would likely follow, but it never did, and he now says fans expecting such a record may be disappointed.
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“Do I have a bunch of songs written and recorded?” he says. “No, I don’t.” But he adds that participating in last month’s American Music Honors, where Bruce Springsteen inducted him, proved to be inspiring — especially after Jackson Browne led some of the musicians in a version of “Take It Easy”: “On our drive back to the hotel with my wife, I said, ‘I’m like 10 feet off the ground. I want to go write songs and record them!’”
For the moment, though, Fogerty chooses to revel in Legacy and its surprise announcement at his birthday show. “When you’re 80 years old, you finally are given the special key to the kingdom,” he says. ”I guess you can do whatever you want. And I decided this is what I wanted to do, to give myself a present.”
