The Pop Corporation

He’s spent half a century fighting of ownership of his songs and finally, at long long last, John Fogerty now has the rights to the Creedence Clearwater Revival discog. Fogerty has bought a majority interest in the global publishing rights from Concord Records who got them after buying out Fantasy Records. The whole thing has been a murky affair and it’s great to see it get a happy ending, even if it was long overdue.

So what happened?

Fogerty split CCR up in 1972, and went solo. In 1970, while still part of the band, he wrote ‘Run Through The Jungle’, and Fantasy were like ‘that’s ours, thank you!’ In ’85, Fogerty released ‘The Old Man Down The Road’ on Warner Bros. This is where it gets silly. Fantasy said that the songs were basically the same, and sued John Fogerty for… well… sounding like himself. The whole thing went before a jury, who eventually decided in the songwriter’s favour, before Fogerty sought attorney’s fees, which was denied by the court, because the law didn’t agree that Fantasy records had brought the case about in bad faith. There’s a whole Wiki page about it.

Muddling everything further, the ’85 Warner album contained two songs that were thinly-veiled attacks on Fantasy Records President Saul Zaentz, and some heavily suggested that the legal challenges from Zaentz were basically a frivolous vendetta.

Fogerty said: “We were the only artists that mattered on the label. We were selling almost 99.9% of the company’s records. We had signed a contract thinking we were all in it equally. I thought we would share to a great degree in the company’s success. But then it didn’t happen. Fantasy own the songs and they’re supposed to pay me as the songwriter, but I’ve had to fight to get royalties from 1980 and every year after that. Basically, to get paid I had to sue them, that was their stance.”

Worse still, is that this wrangle caused a family fall out. John’s bandmate in CCR was his brother Tom, and he died in 1990 estranged from his family, because somehow, Tom had sided with Zaentz over John: “He ended up befriending Saul Zaentz against me. By the end of his life Tom was saying ‘Saul is my best friend’. He even wrote me nasty letters saying things like ‘Saul and I will win’. It was very unresolved and very sad.”

The whole thing is incredibly sad, and the amount of litigation has turned John Fogerty into something of a punchline in certain circles, not helped by the fact that, eventually, he would sue his own lawyer. Where did Fogerty’s money go? Zaentz would use a huge chunk of it to fund movies, such as ’75’s ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’, ’84’s ‘Amadeus‘ and ’96’s ‘The English Patient‘, which all won big at the Oscars. Zaentz has since passed away.

But then, just like that, he appeared on Twitter and simply said: “As of this January, I own my songs again.”

“This is something I thought would never be a possibility,” he said. “After 50 years, I am finally reunited with my songs. I also have a say in where and how my songs are used. Up until this year, that is something I have never been able to do.”