For all the love classic rock fans have for the songs John Fogerty wrote as a member of Creedence Clearwater Revival, those compositions have also generated a long trail of litigation from soon after he left the band.
The latest suit was announced Sunday (7/12) on Fogerty’s Facebook page. He has counter-sued ex-bandmates Stu Cook and Doug Clifford – who tour as Creedence Clearwater Revisited – claiming they breached a 2001 agreement that allowed them to use the “Creedence Clearwater” name and perform his songs for a share of their concert and merchandise revenues.
Cook, Clifford and the widow of Tom Fogerty preemptively sued John Fogerty last December, also claiming that he was breaching that agreement with this tour this summer, billed as “John Fogerty Performs the Songs of Creedence Clearwater Revival 1969.” The tour celebrates the “extraordinary year,” as Fogerty’s website calls it, in which the band released three albums that were huge hits: Bayou Country, Green River and Willie and the Poorboys.
The Revisited camp claims the tour violates the 2001 deal and object to “unreasonable concessions of our rights.” Fogerty counter-claims that his former bandmates have not paid him his share under the agreement.
“This action is about the need to defend ourselves and rights,” asserted Cook and Clifford when they first filed at the end of last year.
Fogerty insists, “No lawyers, lawsuits, or angry ex-band members will stop me ever again from singing my songs.” After he left CCR in 1972, Fogerty sued Fantasy Records to get released from his contract, the first of a number of actions between him and the label and its owner, Saul Zaentz. For a period he did not play the Creedence songs he wrote.
Fogerty will follow his tour with the October 6th publication of memoir Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music, which he says will tell “the whole story.”
