Fortunate Son Read online

  One sunny morning me and Mickey Cadoo had a day for the ages. I was about four years old. First we had climbed some small apricot trees and stuffed our pockets with green (unripe) apricots. Then, after eating a few of these, we decided to “climb to the top of the high school.” They were still framing the building up on the top floor, and there was a lot of exposed wood crisscrossing and not nailed down. Somehow we managed to get all the way to the top level and stand up on the frame. There was nothing but sky above us.

  I had seen cartoons where guys slip on a banana peel, so to make it even more dangerous, I untied my shoelaces, letting them dangle. There was a long, thin board that was just lying across the two sides of the framed space, maybe ten feet from one side to the other. The board was about six inches wide and perhaps one inch thick. So as I stepped out onto this board, it began to bounce up and down. Right about this time, I noticed my dad down in the front yard of our house, which was just across the street. There I was, fifty feet in the air, calling down to my dad, “Hey, Dad, Dad—look at me! I’m up here!”

  Well, my dad looked up and saw me there, and his heart must have stopped. I remember that he started jumping up and down, almost like dancing, arms waving in the air. And after a few shocked exclamations, he began to say, “Don’t move, Johnny! Stay there, stay there. Do not move!” Somehow I stayed put and my dad clambered up the structure and got us to safety. Whew.

  I lived in the El Cerrito area until I was forty. In 1986, long after I’d graduated out of traffic patrol, El Cerrito declared July 15 John Fogerty Day. That little ceremony was very small and sweet, the mayor spoke, and a few fans came from far and wide. Usually when somebody gets these things it’s because they invented something or cured a disease. In my case, the official proclamation mentioned songs: “Whereas Mr. Fogerty has written ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘Down on the Corner’…” Not everybody has a day set aside by their hometown, so being honored in that way is pretty untouchable to me. Whatever happens for the rest of my life, I will always remember that fondly.

  I loved the song “Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy,” and when I was a kid I sang it everywhere. Apparently, one Sunday morning at church I became filled with the spirit and broke into the song. I started dancing, and to illustrate the lyric I made my eyes bug out while I rubbed my naked tummy. The folks in church got a big kick out of this bouncy, diaper-wearing baby belting out “Shoo-Fly Pie.” The more my parents tried to shush me, the more my “audience” laughed. I’m told I created quite a scene. Two years old and already on the road to perdition!*

  I can remember riding in the car in the dark back then. Nighttime. And my parents were singing to each other. With no accompaniment. They would sing a lot of old American and Irish standards, like “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” “Little Sir Echo,” “Danny Boy”—things like that. They weren’t singing to the radio, they were just singing with each other. They’d do one song they called “Cadillac”—“Cadillac, you got the cutest little Cadillac.” I asked my parents about that one. I thought it was odd that somebody would write a song about a car. They explained to me that it was actually a song called “Baby Face,” and they had changed the words. When Little Richard’s second album came out, he had both “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” and “Baby Face” on there for the parents, and this made total sense to me.

  Listening to my folks sing was really nice. I realized even then that it sounded full. I’d sit between them and sometimes sing along. If one of my parents sang a different note that complemented the melody of a song that I knew, like “Jingle Bells,” I’d get curious—“That sounds good, but what are you doing?” They told me they were harmonizing. My parents were very good at it.

  So that’s where I first heard about harmony: sitting in the front seat in that old car with my parents. A little later, in public school, probably about the fourth grade, Mrs. Gustavson would come in and teach music for an hour once a week or so. That’s where I first learned “The Erie Canal Song” and “This Land Is Your Land.” There was some American songbook we were learning from. Sometimes there would be a piano accompanying us, and sometimes we were just doing this a cappella. And I always looked forward to it.

  Everyone was singing in unison, all singing melody, and I’d sit there and start singing harmony. I really had fun finding a note either over or under what the class was singing. And because there were forty kids singing their part and only me singing my part, it felt pretty safe to experiment. I was drowned out a bit, but I could hear it. If it was wrong, I could quickly change before anybody heard. Both my regular teacher and my music teacher would take note that I was somehow harmonizing—and knew what sounded right. Without being told. One day we were singing “Come Now and See My Farm for It Is Beautiful,” and Mrs. Gustavson looked over as I was singing away, and I said, “Is that okay?” She said yes and smiled.

  Sound was one thing and lyrics another, and I have cared about both practically forever. My dad and I were in the car once, talking about the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” We liked that song and he was explaining it to me. It seemed like a really fun place. Then we got to that “little streams of alcohol” part. I asked my dad, “What does that mean? What’s ‘alcohol’?” He said, “It’s something grown-ups like to drink. That would be fun—a whole river full of it, like if there was a whole river of soda pop!” It’s ironic: here I was, asking a guy the meaning of “alcohol” when I would eventually learn that he consumed far too much of it. And so would I.

  There’s certainly a lot of musical influence from both of my parents, but probably more so my mom because I was around her a lot more. My mom played what was called stride piano: her left hand would play a bass note and then a chord, and the right hand would be doing melody and also some syncopation. It was cool, kind of like boogie-woogie. And she was appropriately sloppy. It sounded kind of barrelhouse.

  My mom would play the piano and sing “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” and sometimes I’d sing along. This was after my parents split up. When you’re a kid who’s a little rambunctious and rebellious, sometimes you join in, sometimes you act like it’s corny and not cool at all. But “Shine On, Harvest Moon” is still one of my favorite songs. One of the best versions is Oliver Hardy singing it in a Laurel and Hardy movie, The Flying Deuces. That version of “Shine On, Harvest Moon” was truly inspiring to me. Laurel is dancing, doing a kind of soft shoe, and Hardy is singing. It’s a thirties musical arrangement, but Oliver is more bluesy. And he sings really good! Even though it was slapstick for the rest of the movie, this was serious. Nobody laughed at this. At least that’s how I took it: they were presenting art.

  There were five boys in our house. We were pretty rough-and-tumble, it’s a wonder we didn’t all end up in San Quentin. It would’ve been so easy to fall in with the wrong kids. None of us had any trouble that way, really. My parents—especially my mom—kept my brothers and me on a fairly wholesome path. Whenever I got too close to the edge, my mom would pull me back. I’d call us lower middle class.

  My mom was a social person, kind of gregarious. After my parents divorced, she got a teaching degree and dealt mostly with emotionally and even mentally challenged young people. She knew an awful lot about that stuff—I say “that stuff” because us boys really didn’t know a lot about my mom’s work. Her job was across the bay in South San Francisco, so she left pretty early in the morning and didn’t get back until almost dinnertime. That’s a lot of day we had to ourselves, and we turned out all right.

  I don’t know how my parents met. They came to California, to the Bay Area, from Great Falls, Montana. Lucile—my mother—was born there. That’s a cool place to be from, Montana. I can remember my parents talking about the mosquitoes being so big they could open the screen door and let themselves in. Around 1959—either before or after I was in the ninth grade—my dad took my brothers Dan and Bob and me on a trip to Montana. We had stopped at a railroad crossing, and my dad pointed and said, “John, look
at that train. Trains are really beautiful. And they’re going away.” I think he said it was a steam engine. He got the message across—that this was important and it was too bad the steam train was going away, and more so an era. My dad had quite an affection for trains. I have a feeling he spent some time riding the rails. The folklore in our family is that my dad hoboed all the way to California.

  My father, Galen Robert Fogerty, came from South Dakota and grew up on either a ranch or a farm. My dad was Irish. The way I heard the story is, either my dad’s dad or his grandfather had escaped the potato famine in Ireland by moving to England. Our family name used to be “Fogarty,” but there was a lot of prejudice against Irish people in England, so to disguise that fact, they changed the spelling to “Fogerty.” To my mind, that’s kind of like changing the spelling of “Smith” to “Smythe.”

  England proved unsuitable too, so they came to America. I grew up feeling very strongly about being Irish—leprechauns, the pot of gold, the Irish whiskey—and I took note that the Irish are pretty good at sitting around a pub and putting down a pint.

  My mom’s roots go all the way back to the Mayflower. Her distant relative was William Gooch—he was English, and the first governor of Virginia. George Washington was born in Goochland County. I liked the fact that we had roots going way back in our country. Family legend has it that we were related to Daniel Boone. Another story I’d heard was Davy Crockett.

  My dad worked at the Berkeley Gazette. Speaking of appreciating trains and beautiful things going away, he was a Linotype operator, setting type for the paper each day. Then he took a second printing job, so he was not only working an eight-hour-a-day job, he was working after that. In other circles, other times, he would’ve been called a man of letters. Well-read. Even though I believe that my dad graduated from college back in Montana, in our lifetime, it never really translated into a better job, into making more money or offering any change to our station in life.

  That may sound selfish, but I don’t mean it that way.

  My dad was a dreamer.

  He wrote stories. My dad had a movie camera in the forties, for taking movies of our family. I still have some of that film (and even use it as a backdrop in my show). And he would sit and edit different pieces of it on this editing contraption that he had. But he also had some stories that were filmed about a character named Charlie the Chimp. My dad wrote a story about the discovery of Pluto. I think it might’ve appeared in Reader’s Digest. I believe that was the biggest thing he ever got published. In later years, my dad really identified with Ernest Hemingway: he had the white beard, white hair. There were a few manuscripts lying around the house. I think my dad really had the goods as a writer, but he was never able to get it across. There are many people in this world like that: they’re artistic and yet they don’t know how to meet the right emissary, that person who’s going to publish their work and get it out there. Dad wasn’t able to pull off being a famous writer. Or even one who gets paid for his work.

  He was always on the fringes, smart and in the moment. He had invented a little game that I had when I was three or four. It was an educational toy: little round cardboard disks, each disk had a letter and a number, and every disk was a different color. There were shapes, colors, letters, and numbers—that’s how I learned my alphabet, how to count, and the names of colors. It was a cool idea! Looking back on it, why couldn’t he have made a million dollars with that? He never hooked up with the right people, I guess—maybe never even tried—so we just had it in our house.

  Like I said, Dad was a dreamer. I tried to write a song about it I don’t know how many times. The way I felt about it even as a fourteen-year-old kid was, “Dad isn’t practical. He doesn’t bring that dream into the real world. He doesn’t do something about it.” Being a dreamer, I know that can be a good thing. But when it came to my own life, the idea was, “Don’t be just a dreamer. Do something.” The lot of the dreamer is, he gets to hold bricks made out of mud. He never finds the gold mine. It’s always some turkey like Rupert Murdoch. Or Saul Zaentz, for that matter. For me, I wanted to do both. I wanted to dream and I was going to try to be more successful.

  Now, my dad was successful in so many other ways, like exposing us kids to nature. He loved camping and the outdoors. I didn’t really learn to fish from him, but I think I wanted to know how to fish because of my dad. He also read stories to us when we were really little, stuff that was cool and informative to his family of five boys. “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service were favorites. Tales of the Yukon and gold-mining camps. One of the greatest scenes in “Sam McGee” never left me, the part about this guy who was really cold and died. He froze to death. Well, firewood was scarce, so they threw him into the incinerator, right? Then a little later in the story they open the door to throw in some more logs and the guy they threw in there goes, “Hey, would you put another log on the fire? It’s getting cold in here!” That was just cool to me.

  Sometimes we’d visit Davis or Dixon or other small towns up in the central valley of California. I remember being in Dixon for the Fourth of July one year. There were fireworks and jungle gyms, swings, a lot of green grass.… Further up Interstate 80 were the Giant Orange Stand (which was shaped like a big orange) and the Milk Farm Restaurant. It was a really warm, happy, cozy feeling. My parents liked to go to places like that. And they transferred that love to me. I really have a love of interesting little American towns—it’s an idyllic way of life, at least to an outsider. Almost like a Norman Rockwell painting.

  Some of my happiest memories are of Putah Creek. It was a wild creek up near Winters, in Northern California—“going to Winters,” my family called it, and every summer we went. In my childhood we went to Putah Creek five or six years running. Putah was a picturesque, slow-moving little creek. We stayed in a small cabin. I remember that cabin fondly—it had a wooden, green screen door. I don’t know why that’s important to me. We rented it from a guy named Cody who was around seventy-five years old, tall, very thin, wore a hat. I was told that he was a direct descendant of Buffalo Bill Cody.

  Not far from the cabin was a rope that hung down from a tree, over a little shallow spot in the creek that was ours when we were there. There’s home movies showing my brothers swinging out and dropping in the water. My dad helped us kids make slingshots out of Y-shaped twigs with elastic bands cut from an old car tire’s inner tube. We didn’t hear talk about, “Well, you can put somebody’s eyes out” or “Don’t break those windows over there.” There was so much open, free space. It was woods and brush, hardly a car anywhere—you really had to go far to see any people. All day long we could wander around. Once I even found an old, decrepit abandoned house.

  The air was fresh up there, but when I breathe deep and think back, it isn’t of grass and sky. My dad had a canister attached to a pump that he’d use to spray for mosquitoes. It had a certain sort of smell, kind of like paint thinner. I remember that smell fondly. It brings it all back.

  I learned how to swim in Winters—when my older brothers, Jim and Tom, dared me to stick my head underwater. One day I learned how to float on my back. I was up early and the rest of the family was asleep. I floated across to the other side of the creek. I think it got deep enough in the middle that I couldn’t stand up. When my dad came out of the cabin and saw me on the other side he just freaked out. I was a little afraid he might whack me.

  Once in a while my dad would go with us into the actual town of Winters. There was a little grocery owned by this one family that owned the liquor store and the gas station too. My dad would give me a dime or a nickel to get a soda, usually a Nehi Orange. Or cream soda. Or lemon-lime.

  Boy, I looked forward to Putah Creek. One time, when my brother Bob was a baby, there was some discussion about going to Los Angeles instead. My dad said, “We’ll have the baby decide.” He wrote down “Winters” on one little piece of paper and “Los Angeles” on another piece. They put baby Bobby d
own and let him go. For a while he was crawling toward the “L.A.” I remember I didn’t want that. Finally Bobby went over to the “Winters” piece of paper and we all went “Yay!,” so happy that we were going back to Winters.

  After we stopped going, I’d think back fondly about our trips, even as a kid. I was possessive about Winters and Putah Creek. In my memory, they were mine. My vacation place, my special little spot. I always felt really good there. Number one reason, I think, is because my parents were relaxed there, as they used to be when they’d be singing songs together.

  Things change and sometimes they change a lot and leave just bits of what mattered behind. Sometimes the best things stay around only in our heads. At one point back in those days, Dad drove us in the car high up on a hill, and we were looking down at the little town of Monticello, and he said, “One day that will all be underwater.” I had no idea what that could mean. How could that be? Are people going to walk around underwater?

  I think Dad was saying good-bye to our idyllic Putah Creek. In fact, they did dam up the creek. Now it’s called Lake Berryessa, a big man-made lake. I drove my motorcycle up there in the seventies and I think I found the spot where the cabin would’ve been. It was all overgrown, just bushes, remnants of wood. I couldn’t find the actual cabin. I think even then it had long since fallen down.

  CHAPTER 2

  The D Word

  FOR FIRST GRADE, my mom enrolled me in a Catholic school in Berkeley, the School of the Madeleine—or the School of the Mad, as us kids called it. It was a few miles away—which doesn’t sound too far, but all I know is it took a half hour or more in the morning and many’s the time I ran out of the house to catch the bus and missed it.

  Our teacher was a twenty-year-old named Sister Damien, who was in her first year. She was just a kid. And throughout that year she had several unhappy episodes. Sister Damien was overwhelmed. In the end we heard that she had a nervous breakdown. One time she was mad at the class and kept us all after the bell. “You can’t leave. You have to stay in your seats and not a peep out of you.” And this little second grader comes in, he’s got his rag, and he dutifully starts polishing up the platform that Her Majesty’s desk is sitting on. He’s busy and doesn’t turn around to see the whole class sitting there. Suddenly Sister Damien just slaps him across the face—wham! That was indicative of the atmosphere.