Review: Dear John Fogerty: Here’s why your new autobiography needs more music tales and less score settling

John Fogerty recently released his autobiography “Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music.” Given all the rock ‘n’ roll history the former Creedence Clearwater Revival leader has been a part of, we can only imagine how those early conversations about the manuscript went with prospective publishing houses. Perhaps something like this?

ACME Literary Publishers

Los Angeles, Calif.

Randy Lewis/Autobiography Dept.

Dear John,

We are thrilled to receive the first draft of your proposed autobiography, “Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music,” and are looking forward with great anticipation of preparing it for publication.

If I may, at the outset I’d like to say what an honor it is for us here at ACME to work with a musician who, as the leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival, wrote, played, sang and produced some of the most memorable and important songs of the rock era. There is absolutely no question you deserved to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter >>

And on a personal note, I’d like to point out how close your music has been to my heart since I first heard Creedence on the radio here in Los Angeles in 1968, and what a remarkable bit of serendipity it is for me to be assigned to the team working on this project, as my very first concert as a young music fan was Creedence’s show at the Forum in Inglewood back in 1970. That set a tremendously high bar for this music fan’s lifetime of concert-going.

Now, as to your manuscript: Even in this early form, I can see there’s much here of value, and that as we work together on honing it, I’m confident we’ll be able to shape a rich and rewarding story from your life experiences to share with music fans here in the States and around the world.

Before you get working on the next draft, I would share that my favorite parts are those in which you discuss your influences and where you write in illuminating specifics about the genesis of many of your now-classic songs: “Proud Mary,” “Fortunate Son,” “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” “Green River,” “Down on the Corner” and so many others. Those sections are gold.

I do believe Creedence fans and a wide swath of rock music lovers will be drawn to this part of your remarkable story, especially in realizing where these songs came from: not from a young man growing up in the American South, in which so many of those songs seem to have emerged, but from humble little El Cerrito, Calif., near San Francisco.

For instance, I loved learning that you had figured out, even though you were only 14 at the time, that as much of an Elvis Presley fan as you had been, by 1959 the King’s music was starting to show “a kind of softness, a pop ethic” that put you off — and that’s why you spent your hard-earned paper route money on Johnny and the Hurricanes’ “Red River Rock” instead of Elvis’ “Big Hunk O’ Love” when that record came out.

Likewise, your anecdote about the inspiration for your song “Run Through the Jungle” not being sparked, as many people often suggested, by the Vietnam War, but what you felt in reading about mass killer Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree at the University of Texas, is powerful stuff.

If there’s a general suggestion I have on the next draft, it would be to dial back on the many, many passages revisiting and justifying your hard feelings toward your former Creedence bandmates, the record company that band was signed to, Fantasy, and its founder, Saul Zaentz.

Yes, all of us here at ACME sympathize with how unfairly you felt you were treated, how hurtful it must have been to sign over the copyrights to so many of the songs you brought to the world to Fantasy after Creedence disbanded. It’s a far too common story in the pop music world.

There are flashes here where I sense that you understand the importance of moving beyond hurts inflicted in the past. As you put it in Chapter 2, talking about observing your own father’s anger later in his life: “My dad stayed angry ‘til the end…. I thought to myself ‘I don’t want to get old and die being so ornery, so angry.’”

That’s a valuable observation, John, but I think your book would be that much more convincing on that front if you could embrace that attitude more fully, rather than contradict it with so many insults, accusations and recriminations toward those you feel wronged you.

I’m worried that readers who love your music as much as I have will be put off by so many remarks, asides and even footnotes denigrating the musical skills of Creedence bassist Stu Cook, drummer Doug Clifford and even your late brother, rhythm guitarist Tom Fogerty.

Creedence was, after all, a great band — as people like me who saw you guys live can confirm, whether or not they were able to do everything you wanted them to do in the recording studio.

Further, on page after page, chapter after chapter, you remind us of your animosity toward Zaentz and Fantasy. A lot of readers, probably even the majority, would take your side knowing that actually Zaentz once sued you, accusing you of plagiarizing yourself because he claimed that your 1984 solo hit “The Old Man Down the Road” sounded too much like “Run Through the Jungle,” for which he owned the copyright.

Our position as your publisher is that it’s certainly relevant to bring up, but since you won that case, devoting an entire chapter to retelling in extensive detail what you heard and felt during that court case doesn’t read like it’s something you’ve come to terms with.

I’m concerned that the heavy emphasis on courtroom matters make it read less like an autobiography than your testimony for the next round of litigation between you, Cook and Clifford, given the two cases still pending over your agreement of who could use the band’s name on tour. I’m certain that’s not the reader reaction you have in mind.

Perhaps you might read, if you haven’t already, Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles, Vol. 1,” or Neil Young’s “Waging Heavy Peace” as examples of other rock music greats who’ve brought more of their global perspective into their books and not zeroed in so much on trying to right wrongs they believe were committed against them.

They channeled the same observational and poetic skills they bring to their songwriting to the telling of different facets of their life stories.

The voice of John Fogerty, the songwriter — the artist who packed so much emotion and truth about life, society and politics into his songs — rather than John Fogerty, the aggrieved litigant, is the one most fans will want to connect with.

It’s comforting to discover, on Page 385, that you write, “I’m in a happy place when it comes to music and how it relates to me.” We think that sentiment will ring a little more effectively if it’s not preceded by 300-plus pages documenting the anger and unhappiness you suggest that you have transcended.

Also, there seems to be one crucial piece of the autobiography missing. After all the references in this draft, both from you and in the passages written by your wife, Julie, about your many years of alcohol abuse, you’ve included nothing about any treatment through a 12-step or other recovery program that helps those who struggle not just to achieve sobriety, but to find some sort of understanding, acceptance and peace regarding the underlying causes of substance abuse.

Absent that element, it raises a question I think a lot of people will want an answer to, especially those who struggle with addiction. Whatever solution you found might be inspiring to them.

Please get back to us with your thoughts. As you remind us often in the book about your attitude toward your music, we know you won’t be in any hurry to put your story out into the world before the tone and content strike exactly the right balance you envision.

I very much look forward to reading your next draft.

Sincerely,

Randy Lewis

randy.lewis@latimes.com

Follow @RandyLewis2 on Twitter; for more on Classic Rock, join us on Facebook

ALSO:

There’s no pretending in Chrissie Hynde’s spare, deft memoir ‘Reckless’

Elvis Costello’s aim is truth in memoir ‘Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink’

Patti Smith’s ‘M Train’ reckons with life, while ‘Collected Lyrics’ shows her living energy as words