John Fogerty regained control of the worldwide publishing rights to his music with Creedence Clearwater Revival last month and he couldn’t be happier.
“Finally getting ownership of my songs now, you can see it’s correcting something that has been wrong in my life for most of my life — you know, since my early twenties,” he tells Variety in a new interview in which he delves into his 55-year fight to get those rights back.
The news comes as many of Fogerty’s peers are actually selling their publishing rights, and the irony isn’t lost on him.
“It is ironic, certainly, that everybody else is selling and I end up buying my songs, but of course it makes perfect sense,” he says. “It has been such a wrong use of music business law, all these years. To finally own ‘Proud Mary’ is a big deal.” Fogerty adds, “I understand other people, especially older people, wanting to sell. But that’s not my frame of mind, certainly at the moment, anyway.”
How he got the rights back is long and involved, and at one point had him refusing to perform any CCR songs. But now that it’s over, he isn’t dwelling on what he’s been through.
“I am now, at this point in my life, looking to all the positiveness of this blessing, and I’m not turning around and looking at the horror that was the past,” the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer shares. “It is a blessing, for sure — it could have been a situation that never changed, but it did change, and I’m really happy.”
He adds, “I don’t know what simple phrase would work here. ‘Good things come to those who wait’ — maybe that’s one.”
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