In an interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, John Fogerty revealed that he still doesn’t own his old Creedence songs. For many years he refused to make new music and perform old songs after a bad deal with Fantasy Records, managed by Saul Zaentz
He said:
“I don’t own them, still.”But hopefully I’m going to live long enough that they finally revert to me. It’s a period of about 56 years, and so far, we’ve been celebrating the 50th anniversary of ‘Proud Mary,’ so you do the math. It should be pretty soon.”
Zaentz ended up suing Fogerty for a song he said defamed him, called “Zanz Kant Danz” from Centerfield, and even went so far as to charge Fogerty with plagiarizing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Run Through the Jungle” on his comeback hit “The Old Man Down the Road.” Zaentz lost the suit over copying CCR, and Fogerty ended up changing the other song’s title to “Vanz Kant Danz.”
The CCR legend released six more solo studio projects, and performs Creedence song but bad feelings remain:
“At some point, I realized I was being treated very poorly and that I wasn’t being paid anywhere near a proper way,” Fogerty says. “In the back of my mind, I wanted to own my songs – my children, you might say. I’m talking about owning the songs themselves, the publishing, but I realized that I had been lied to by Saul and I wasn’t going to get to own them. He wasn’t going to allow me to own them.”
“He had let the other members of Creedence out of their contract, but he didn’t let me out of that same contract,” Fogerty explains. “So, although I knew that Saul owned my music and by that point had also stolen my life savings in an offshore tax shelter – in another miserable part of the story, he had basically stolen our life savings and gotten away with it. After all that, I found myself in the horrible position of having to give any new music, any new records, to Saul Zaentz. That was why I stopped.”
“I just felt like I was playing into Saul’s hands if I did, as he was going to profit more from me out there performing the songs,” Fogerty said. “It was a horrible career conundrum and choice, because it’s suicide to a career. Your fans want to come see you sing those songs; they don’t want to hear you sing other songs. It was just really horrible on my career.”
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