John Fogerty

The conversation opens with small talk about water, coffee and a set of notes the guest says cover "what I went through with CCR and all that." The first anecdote concerns military service. One participant says they read that the guest got out of it by smoking a lot of weed and not eating. The account that follows describes being "really skinny by 1967, 68," at about 129 pounds, and smoking joints tucked into cigarettes while crossing the Bay Bridge on the way to meet an Army doctor. The speaker does not fully endorse the starvation-and-protest-diet version but concedes "it's essentially some truth."

The discussion then moves to UFC walkout music. One participant notes that many fighters walk out to this music, naming "Fortunate Sun" and "Bad mood rising" as transcribed, and the other admits to not being very aware of it but accepts it: "whatever floats your boat."

The talk turns to songs about being cheated by the record business. The discussion cites Lynyrd Skynyrd (transcribed "Leonard Skitter") and a song transcribed as "Zanz Can't Dance." According to the account, the song sold about half a million copies under that title before Warner Brothers, as part of a partial settlement, had the name changed to "Vance." The speaker places this in a larger mess: "I got sued for sounding like myself."

The speaker gives the background. A new song, "The Old Man Down the Road," appeared on the comeback album Centerfield, released after the speaker had left Fantasy Records, Creedence's label, which was owned by Saul. The suit sought what the speaker calls "an enormous amount of money, $144 million." The speaker attributes it partly to jealousy at success elsewhere. They also say they learned at trial that Creedence's bass player, Stu, had gone to Saul and told him the speaker was ripping off Creedence. The speaker calls this ironic and claims to have "taught Stu every single note that he ever played in Credence."

The speaker says they won at trial but stresses the cost of getting there. Saul "had unlimited funds," the case took years, and the speaker rejects the idea that it was funny, describing "three, four years of anguish" and the prospect of losing a lot of money.

The two participants then make the general argument against the claim. An artist who is lucky enough to develop a style should not be told to "go back and invent some other style, be some other person." The speaker uses Dylan and Springsteen as examples of artists who would face the same demand. The other participant points out that many artists sound like other artists without trouble, as long as they don't copy notes and lyrics. The speaker reads the suit as possessiveness, saying the other side "wanted to own the new stuff" and adding: "He wanted to own me, basically."

The speaker describes the result as "kind of a major ruling" that mattered "for all artists." The discussion places the episode in the 1980s and suggests that the public dispute, including the song's forced name change, showed fans a side of the industry most had never seen.

The participants list the ways labels and managers can control artists: catalogs, publishing, names and likenesses. They cite Elvis's manager, "the colonel," and Prince, who "had to change his name to a symbol because he didn't own his name anymore." One participant calls the people collecting most of the money "hyenas" who aren't making any music. The other speaker argues that creative people are special and outnumbered, and that dousing or owning that creativity "is just an onerous thing."

One speaker suggests it may be better for fans not to know: "When I was young, I just cared about Elvis and his guitar player." The speaker also says the anger has faded with age, without claiming more wisdom: "I can't say wiser. It's more like I came out on the good side." The other participant argues the story is still worth telling so young artists know that bad people are "just waiting for you to slip up and sign something that will give your rights away."

The speaker credits their wife, Julie, with their survival: "If I hadn't met her, I probably would be dead, as simple as that." Asked why, the speaker describes abusing alcohol "mostly," feeling bad inside and "not really operating on the same plane" as other people. The speaker traces this to "something really unjust" that had been done to them. They say self-abuse becomes a habit, and that bitterness works like a self-fulfilling prophecy: "you look for something to go wrong and then it goes wrong. And you go, see, I told you."

Asked whether the lawsuits caused this loop, the speaker says there was more than one lawsuit and points to betrayal by bandmates. They say they are "the only guy from Credens" to publicly call Saul evil. During the same period, the speaker says, their brother Tom publicly called Saul his best friend after re-signing with Fantasy, having failed to find another label after the breakup. The speaker calls the other two members "more cowardly about it," saying they never spoke up.

The "first trial," the speaker explains, concerned the band losing "its life savings." The record company steered the band into an offshore tax plan. At the time the band expected to pay around 90% income tax, and the plan promised something like 10 to 20 percent. The vehicle was Castle Bank in the Bahamas. The speaker stresses that the band's own side vetted it, including their accountant and the bass player's father, an entertainment lawyer whose firm had represented the Oakland Raiders, and that they "checked it all out and said that it was okay, it was legit."

Some time in the 1970s, the speaker says, the bank disappeared along with the money, and the band sued. During the conversation one participant looks up the bank and reads that it "was being used by the CIA to funnel money for covert military operations, including those at Andros Island, a staging area for anti-Castro activities." That participant says they had "just typed it in and went to the Wikipedia." The speaker says they did not know this when entering the plan: "No, I didn't know that part." The CIA connection therefore comes from a lookup during the show, not from the speaker's own experience.

The speaker describes trying to leave the plan around 1975–76. Getting money felt like asking for an allowance through a distant bank account and waiting days, and the arrangement "was starting to just smell." At a meeting with their professionals, the speaker asked them to:

take a shoebox, put all the money I've ever earned into the shoebox, and now hand me the shoebox so I can see how much money have I earned

They couldn't do it. Realizing in the parking garage that a request alone gave the advisers room to "weasel some more time," the speaker returned the next week and gave an explicit order. A week or two later, the speaker says, word came that the bank had closed. They mention a telegram apparently sent on Valentine's Day, and say the bank president had died in a sauna and that there would be no more withdrawals. The speaker notes that a bank does not normally close when its president dies, and says the money then "just disappeared in a pop of smoke."