Creedence Clearwater Revival co-founder, lead vocalist, lead guitarist and primary songwriter John Fogerty has finally gained a majority interest of the worldwide publishing rights to his CCR songs from Concord bringing decades of legal battles to a close. Fogerty now has control of such iconic songs as “Down On The Corner,” “Have You Ever Seen The Rain,” “Fortunate Son” and “Bad Moon Rising.”
The acquisition, first reported by Billboard, flies in the face of the current trend in which legacy artists are selling their publishing rights for vast sums of money. While CCR achieved massive success between 1969 and their 1972 breakup, the band had signed an onerous contract with label Fantasy Records and its owner Saul Zaentz. John Fogerty signed away his CCR publishing rights and royalties in 1980 to get out of his deal with Fantasy.
Fogerty had been fighting to regain control of his songs ever since with numerous legal challenges. He was so angered by the situation he refused to play Creedence Clearwater Revival songs live for a long period of time.
Concord purchased the publishing rights in 2004 from Zaentz, who had used some of the profits from CCR to help finance his film production career. Saul Zaentz died in 2014. The amount John Fogerty paid Concord has not been revealed. Concord will keep the CCR master recordings currently in its catalog. “The happiest way to look at it is, yeah, it isn’t everything. It’s not a 100% win for me, but it’s sure better than it was,” Fogerty told Billboard. “I’m really kind of still in shock. I haven’t allowed my brain to really, actually, start feeling it yet.”
Though John Fogerty would have started to regain domestic publishing rights to his CCR songs in the coming years thanks to the U.S. copyright law’s 56-year rule, he now doesn’t need to wait and gets global control. “I was always hoping for a miracle that John would own his songs, and I’m so blissful knowing that this has finally come true for him,” wrote Julie Fogerty, John’s wife and manager, in a press release. “The songs he wrote for CCR were going to start reverting in approximately three years, continuing for each year forward. I thought to myself that if there was anything I could do to make that happen now, it would be the miracle that we have been waiting for more than 50 years.”
John Fogerty now looks towards the future. “There’s definitely more to come,” he said as he aims to hit the recording studio soon with new material and added, “I happen to like the songs a lot.”
