1 post tagged “john fogerty”

John Fogerty has just come out with a new album titled Revival which, despite being a tad subdued, stays true to his swamp rock roots and radiates his high regard for artistic integrity. In this 2005 CMT interview, he talks about the epiphany he had while visiting the Delta blues legend Robert Johnson's gravesite: 'I'm just mulling over Robert's great career and the mythical, legendary 29 recordings that he had made. Basically, I'm looking right at a big tree that seems to be where Robert was long ago buried. And I'm thinking about how these songs are very vital now. Remember that 1990 was within probably a year of the big [Robert Johnson] boxed set that got released and went platinum. I thought, "I wonder who owns the rights to those songs." And then I got this very negative image. I thought, "It's probably some lawyer"  — some unsavory type in a tall building in New York City with a big cigar. I thought, "God, we always get screwed. That really stinks." And then I just shook my head. Very emphatically, I said to myself, "It doesn't matter. Those are Robert's songs. I'm standing here with Robert Johnson, basically, at his gravesite. He's the spiritual owner of those songs." That's literally the phrase I born to myself. And at that moment, that's when the lightning bolt hit. My eyes got real wide, and I thought, "That's just like you. Do you see it? You're the spiritual owner. No matter what you've gone through, you wrote those songs. You created them. You lived those songs, and you're the one who really can sing those songs with the true understanding of how they came into being." It doesn't matter about the mythical tall building and the crooked guy with the big cigar. Robert's story was just like mine, and that was when I made up my mind.' More