Fogerty and the Dead at the Bill Graham memorial show

In an interview that appears in the Guardian, John Fogerty suggests that with Creedence Clearwater Revival he took a different approach to the commercial prospects of his music than the Grateful Dead. Fogerty recalls, “I smoked a little pot. I think my bandmates smoked quite a bit more pot. I had rules: never do that when we’re recording, never do that when we’re playing. To me it was a competition. You’d have the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane talking like: ‘We don’t want to be successful, maaaaan.’ For one thing I wasn’t sure I believed them and for another, why would I go to all this trouble and only sell one record to my mom? I wasn’t embarrassed that I was ambitious. We wanted to be the best we could be.” Fogerty also blames the Dead for losing the crowd at Woodstock before CCR’s set: “They were snockered out of their minds! The Grateful Dead put half a million people to sleep and I had to go out and try to wake them up again.”

Clearly he worked through any issues by 1989 when Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir were part of his band over Memorial Day weekend at the Concert Against AIDS– you can watch that performance here. In addition, the Dead backed him at Golden Gate Park on November 3, 1991 at the memorial for Bill Graham (see above).

Fogerty’s new album is Wrote A Song For Everyone. Click here for our review.