John Fogerty: “I practice ferociously. I’m grateful God allowed me to keep going with my love of guitar. It didn’t end when I was 15, and it didn’t end when I became famous”

John Fogerty performed overseas many times throughout his career. But there is a mythical quality to his first tour of Europe in 1970 with his band, Creedence Clearwater Revival. In particular, the band’s April 14, 1970, show at the Royal Albert Hall is one of his favorite memories.

At the time, CCR – which also included John’s brother (and rhythm guitarist) Tom Fogerty, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford – were speedily making a name for themselves, already with five Top 10 singles in their first year together. Hits including Proud Mary, Bad Moon Rising, Green River, Fortunate Son and Down on the Corner showed off the band’s raw, high-energy, no-compromise rock ’n’ roll and tight chemistry.

The attention and success while touring the U.S. earned the band their first European tour. One of the shows was at the Royal Albert Hall, one of London’s most respected venues. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were among the British groups that had performed there, and when CCR performed, it was just days after the Beatles had announced their breakup.

“I was writing songs like a maniac,” Fogerty says. “By the time we got to Europe, there’d already been four or five hit singles, meaning in most cases, both sides, and also maybe three or four albums by then. It was like a whirlwind… Getting to play the Albert Hall was certainly an honor. That was at a time when the band was still mostly positive and happy to be there. And all the energy was in a positive direction.”

This past September, Craft Recordings, a sub label of Concord, released a live album of the concert, Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall, as well as a companion documentary and concert film, Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall.

The concert’s audio was mixed by the Grammy-winning team of producer Giles Martin and engineer Sam Okell and mastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios using half-speed technology.

The concert film is directed by Bob Smeaton and narrated by the Dude himself, Jeff Bridges. The film focuses on the band’s earliest years in El Cerrito, California, through their rise to fame, culminating with the Albert Hall show. It’s the only concert footage of the band’s original lineup to be released in its entirety.

After 50 years of sitting in the vaults, fans are now able to revisit the concert. “I’m very happy for the fans,” Fogerty says. “It’s good that it’s finally coming out and that [people] can see it.”

GW recently caught up with Fogerty to reflect on the concert, the electric guitars, the amps and so much more.

How does the audio from the album release compare with what you remember about the show?

“It doesn’t sound as clear as I remember it. But back in the day, I did not listen to the audio. There was another album around that time that was recorded in Oakland [The Concert, recorded January 31, 1970]. I produced that, even though I didn’t get credit for it later when that album came out. But the sound was done very well on that one. This one sounds very live. It’s not as clear as what I remembered in my mind’s eye, but it’s exciting. The performances are good.”

What was the experience like going to Europe in your twenties with CCR?

“We did just a manic, lightning-speed [trip] across Europe. We’d go from one country to another, the same way here in America, you go from Nevada to Arizona to Colorado to Chicago. It was just amazing for an American to go there. I’m talking about a 24-year-old person.

“Half of your knowledge was in musical terms, but a lot of your knowledge was in historical terms, things you’d read about in school, or on your own, or seen in movies, that sort of thing. So you had very little snippets of information about each country.

“But, of course, you weren’t there long enough to really even get a sense of each country. Staying in one country, basically on a stage and in a hotel room for two days and then moving to the next country, really doesn’t give you much of a sense of what’s going on there.”

The guitars sound really great. What can you tell me about the gear you used for the show?

“[Tom and I] were playing through Kustom amps. Tom had a Kustom with a cabinet that had one 15-inch JBL [speaker] in it. And those were D130 outs, which is probably still the best rock ’n’ roll speaker ever made – and it hasn’t been made since. I was playing a Kustom K200A[-4], which was an amazing rig. It was roughly 100 watts and was solid-state, but it was probably the best-sounding solid-state amp ever made.

“It didn’t sound hard and cold and sterile the way so many other solid-state amps of that era sounded. And I’m just talking about when I used it clean… That amp had four effects built in; one was reverb, which I never used. It had a little remote pedal that you plugged in with a cord, and it had four buttons on it.

“The reverb button, I’d just click it on and off to make sure the reverb was off, because the amp was louder when the reverb wasn’t used. If you pressed reverb, the amp got a little quieter, and I didn’t want that. I felt there was enough reverb in the big room; I didn’t need to add more. But the other things – I used all of them. They were wonderful. It had what they called a harmonic distortion.

“It was basically a buzz tone, but it was built in. It didn’t come in front of the amp, the way you’d have to plug in, let’s say, a Maestro Fuzz-Tone at the time. Another gizmo that was built in was a treble tone-control thing. And it clicked to, I think, five different positions, like the way a Gibson – is that an ES-355? – the way they’d have had that little chicken-head knob that you could click to the different numbers.

“It had resistors built in that changed the sound. That’s what this thing on the Kustom amp did. I didn’t use it too much. The only time I ever used it, I think it was on Keep On Chooglin’. It gave it sort of a nasally ‘honky’ kind of a sound on one of the selections.

“Mostly I just like what a guitar sounded like straight into an amp. But by far for me, the most mind-boggling effect was the fourth one, which was a vibrato-tremolo effect – and you could blend between tremolo and vibrato. I didn’t want to use too much vibrato – vibrato meaning pitch-bending, so I’d turn it to the right a little bit, which was less vibrato and more tremolo, which is a volume effect.