Capping one of the longest and nastiest legal battles in music business history, John Fogerty has gained worldwide control of the publishing rights to his Creedence Clearwater Revival songs, more than 50 years after the songs were first released.
Fogerty has acquired a majority interest in the global publishing rights to his song catalog with the group, which includes “Proud Mary,” “Fortunate Son,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Up Around the Bend,” “Have You Ever Seen Rain” and others from Concord for an undisclosed amount, a rep for the company confirmed to Variety; the news was first reported by Billboard.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s disputes were not with Concord, which acquired the rights to the catalog in 2004, but with music and film mogul Saul Zaentz, who signed Fogerty, now 77, and Creedence to his Fantasy Records in the mid-1960s under a draconian contract that he defended aggressively and litigiously for decades. The bitter legal battle between Fogerty and Zaentz played out in the courts and the press and even in Fogerty’s thinly vieled 1985 song and music video, “Vanz Kant Danz” (which unsurprisingly led to a lawsuit from Zaentz).
It consumed decades of the artist’s life and sidelined his music career for many years, although upon its acquisition, Concord quickly improved the terms of the deal. The company reinstated the artist royalties Fogerty had relinquished to Zaentz in 1980 to get out of his Fantasy deal, which he’d signed as a teenager and, unwisely in retrospect, renegotiated with Zaentz in 1970 while acting not only as the group’s singer, songwriter and lead guitarist but also its manager. Zaentz went on to a successful career as a film producer that was largely funded by his Creedence profits, winning Oscars for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Amadeus” and “The English Patient.” He died in 2014.
Concord retains the CCR master recordings already in its catalog and will continue to administer Fogerty’s share of the publishing catalog for an unspecified limited time.
