There were once two brothers from an Irish background, living in the outer suburbs of a hip city. They got in a band and one of them turned out to be a genius songwriter and arranger. For a few years everything they touched turned to gold. Then they fell out, bitterly, each blaming the other for everything that had gone wrong.

It’s the story of not just the Gallagher brothers, but also John and Tom Fogerty. Like Noel, John was the brilliant songwriter, arranger, lead guitarist and producer – but he was also like Liam, the frontman with one of the great rock’n’roll voices. Whereas Tom Fogerty, who had been the original lead singer of the group that eventually became Creedence Clearwater Revival, had nothing without his brother’s genius.

The first strains came when Tom began to resent his younger brother’s leadership, and the demands he made on the rest of the band. It widened when Tom was the first to quit, in 1971. It became a chasm after Creedence completely split. Fantasy, the tiny jazz label that had been the only one to offer the young band a deal – a staggeringly onerous deal, demanding 180 songs over five years on a meagre royalty – freed the other three from their commitments, but refused to let John go, and kept ownership of his songs.

Things soured further throughout the 1980s, when John battled to extricate himself from Fantasy, and from the failed offshore savings scheme the label had pushed him into which had left him without any of the rewards from his Creedence years. Each time, Tom took Fantasy’s side, proclaiming John’s nemesis, Fantasy boss Saul Zaentz, to be his friend. The two never reconciled. Tom died, aged 48, in 1990.

The John Fogerty sitting in his home in California – dressed, inevitably, in a plaid shirt, a giant photo of himself on stage in 1969 hanging behind him – is cheery and tolerant on our video call, not the raging man he was through the decades after Creedence split in 1972. He has the stability of a long and happy marriage to his wife, Julie. And, as of two years ago, he has ownership of the 69 songs he wrote for Creedence, 20 of them also additionally rerecorded with two of his sons, Shane and Tyler. They will be released this month as Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years.

He looks back over the years when he was fighting for his songs, and sighs. “The best way I can describe it is I was imprisoned wrongfully and sent away to the penitentiary for many, many years.”

* * *

Creedence, without anyone really noticing, have remained the biggest rock band of the 1960s: of any band from that decade, only the Beatles have more listeners on Spotify each month. Weeks after he turned 80, Fogerty played a barnstorming Pyramid stage set at Glastonbury festival this summer, and the greatest hits album, Chronicle – released without Fogerty’s consent in 1976 – is, like, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, permanently lodged in the US album chart (currently at No 57). But Creedence don’t have the tumultuous love lives, the thinly veiled Broadway plays and TV dramas, the hanging out with Harry Styles. They may be the most unglamorous major band in rock history.

“I’m a great believer in songs,” Fogerty says. “If you have enough songs, even if your playing is kind of average, you can go far.”

But why do those songs – Fortunate Son, Bad Moon Rising, Proud Mary, Born on the Bayou, Green River, Have You Ever Seen the Rain, Lodi and so many more – endure so strongly? Perhaps its because Creedence simply sound like America: you can hear John Steinbeck and Mark Twain in them, as well as Little Richard and Howlin’ Wolf. Their name harks back to something innocent, and those plaid shirts – at a time when their California contemporaries were donning hippy finery – kept the package timeless.

During his boyhood in the San Francisco Bay Area town of El Cerrito, “I had very strong input,” says Fogerty. “My mom gave me a record when I was three years old, and it was songs by Stephen Foster. She explained that he had been a songwriter.” Foster, a century earlier, had composed many of the songs that passed down in American folklore – Oh! Susanna, Camptown Races and more. Fogerty also paid attention to Pete Seeger and the folk revival, and to country music. “Even though I always considered myself pretty much a mainstream rock’n’roll kid, all these other influences were there.”

By the time Creedence broke through in 1968 with a cover of Dale Hawkins’ Susie Q – the start of an astounding run that resulted in nine Top 10 hit singles up to Sweet Hitch-Hiker in 1971, and three classic albums in 1969 alone – the Fogertys, and rhythm section Stu Cook and Doug Clifford, had been making records under various names and in varying line-ups since 1961. By the time he started writing for Creedence, Fogerty knew exactly what he wanted to achieve. Each side of a seven-inch single was rehearsed for six weeks before recording it to achieve maximum impact, and the other three were instructed in exactly how they had to play.

The result was that Creedence sounded like the tightest, most powerful garage band in the world. They were a juggernaut, but they could convey emotion as well. “For every song I wrote I threw 10 away,” Fogerty says. “When you heard one of my songs, I wanted there to be no doubt it was a really good song. It sounds grandiose to say it, but I was trying to have that as my career goal.”

With no competent manager and a label that didn’t have a clue, Fogerty determined he would have to do everything. “The absolute coin of the realm, the only thing that I had to spend, was the music I could create. I became manic about it, but also paranoid, meaning I just had to work really, really hard. Whatever energy I had, I applied it completely to furthering the career of the band. And when the jealousy [from the other three members, who also wanted to write songs] began, I thought I could cure that by working hard.”

But it didn’t work. Tom left after their sixth album, Pendulum. Fogerty believes it’s because his bluff had been called: he knew he would have to write songs for the next one, and that he wasn’t good enough to step up. So for the final one, Mardi Gras, Fogerty let Clifford and Cook write. “It was something I had been putting off, or pushing back against, because I thought they were incapable and it would mean career suicide.” It turned out to be just that – panned by critics, it failed to make the US Top 10 and Fogerty later called it “horse manure”. On 16 October 1972, Creedence announced their split.

Thus began the wilderness years. There was a solo album in 1973, of covers, but Fogerty still owed Fantasy eight original albums. So he went on strike, until David Geffen bought out his deal and brought him to Asylum for one underpowered record in 1975, and then more or less nothing until 1985’s hit album Centerfield, which resulted in him being sued by Zaentz for plagiarising himself. Fogerty won that one, but had to pay Zaentz for defamation over the song Zanz Kant Danz (later rerecorded and renamed Vanz Kant Danz). And still Zaentz wouldn’t sell him the Creedence catalogue.

What Fogerty describes in his autobiography – an inability to write any new songs, an allergic reaction to his old ones (he would turn off the radio if they came on), a refusal to play live in any meaningful sense, periods of heavy drinking, reckless behaviour, disturbed sleep – sounds like an ongoing, decades-long breakdown.

“I never really thought I had a nervous breakdown, but I would say I was not well,” he says. “Not stable, or even-keeled, or normal. It would manifest itself in strange ways: I remember going into a department store to buy some socks, and I was unable to approach the salesperson because it was far too complicated for me. It sounds pathetic.”

No, it doesn’t. It sounds like someone very sick.

“Yeah. I guess I might have seen a shrink, but I was in the middle of the stream swimming and just trying to keep my head above water.” The rage, he says, could make him difficult to be around. “I tried to be nice. I tried to be humble, but there were times when I would explode. That could come out if I was near people, or even if I was quite alone. It happened a few times when I was alone in the wilderness, fishing, and I’d just go off into a rage about my gear.”

I tell him it sounds as though, more than anything else, he needed someone to take care of him. He had been, in effect, chief executive of a multinational company before he was 25, and had been working since childhood. Everyone who was meant to take care of him had let him down.

“Well, yes, that’s true. And, boy, there’s nothing like that sense that somebody cares for you and they’re taking care of you. After I met Julie, she insisted some therapy would help me. I was telling the doctor about my situation with the band and he said, ‘Well, that’s betrayal. You were betrayed.’ And that’s the first time I’d been given a word to describe the situation.”

* * *

Fantasy wasn’t the issue by this point. Zaentz was. So when he sold his share of the company to Concord in 2004, Fogerty returned more or less immediately. Concord now owned the Creedence catalogue, and had no desire to make an enemy of their signing. Almost immediately, it reinstated the royalties Fantasy had previously withheld, and it was open to selling Fogerty his songs. It took a further 19 years, but it did happen, and Fogerty was delighted. “This is something I thought would never be a possibility,” he tweeted in January 2023. “After 50 years, I am finally reunited with my songs.”

The first fruits of that ownership come in the form of the Legacy album. One of the first songs he worked on for it was what he believes to be his first great song, Proud Mary, the unlikely rock’n’roll number about a Mississippi paddle steamer. He built up the backing track, making it sound ragged and raw but thrillingly precise, exactly as Creedence did. Then he listened back to his first vocal takes.

“There was what they call an epiphany. The track sounded really stunning, and the lead vocal paled by comparison. And it finally dawned on me: John, when you were doing this way back when, it was life or death for you. I came from a state of if not poverty, then the lower economic rungs. It was very important and necessary to be great, as great as whatever was in me. And at that point I felt as if I was going through a portal, and really trying to be that person again. I continued to work on Proud Mary that way and I ended up in a place I felt very good about.

“My wife told me she’d been watching me from the control room, and she said she could see it in my face that I actually was making myself go back, so I continued to work that way with the rest of the songs. I’m just an adventurer, you know, like an explorer coming back to the homeland.”

It’s an oddity that Fogerty’s legacy rests on songs written in such a short span of time. Only two of his solo albums (Centerfield and 1997’s Blue Moon Swamp) come within spitting distance of Creedence. It’s terrifying, too, that a song such as Fortunate Son – about how the sons of wealth avoid fighting the wars their fathers profit from – remains relevant, especially now the US is governed by one of those fortunate sons.

“I wrote that song during the administration of Richard Nixon. Now Donald Trump is almost a direct descendant, skipping the years since 1974. Of course, Mr Trump is doing everything on steroids compared to Nixon. I think Nixon did have some shame. I don’t get that sense these days.”

Fogerty, the all-American musician (right down to being a hunter), must have some pretty staunch Maga types among his fans. Does that trouble him? “There’s certainly no secret about a song like Fortunate Son, or Who’ll Stop the Rain” – the rain representing the rot in the Nixon era. “You know what my worldview must be. But I don’t hold fans responsible for the activities of Mr Trump. I wish everyone was a little bit more towards the middle. The older you get, you’re just sorry that everything’s so kneejerk.”

The great imponderable, given how much misery it caused him, is whether Fogerty might have been happier without his success. If he had written and recorded all those songs, but no one had ever bought them and there had been no money to fight over, would he have happily gone back to El Cerrito?

“I like to hope that being a history teacher – if I found my partner and had this wonderful life I have found – would have made me very happy. But my second answer … I don’t know if you can see the picture on the wall behind me.” He gestures to that print of him in full flight as a young man.

“Someone asked me about that, about a month ago: ‘Tell me about that guy up on the wall back there.’ Maybe a couple days before that particular question had been asked, I actually had this conversation in my mind: John, would you trade places and be that 24-year-old who was so confused and unhappy and scratching his head trying to figure out life? Would you trade places? Or would you be the person you are now at 80? And my answer was, and it’ll always be, I want to be the guy I am here now, even though I’m 80. That poor young man had youth, for sure, but he was so confused about what was going on with his gift. I wouldn’t want to live even one day like that. I prefer being really happy, very settled, completely in love with my wife, Julie, having raised great kids. It’s a sense of being that’s irreplaceable.”

• Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years is released 22 August on Concord

• This article was amended on 15 August 2025. Tom Fogerty died when he was 48, not 58 as an earlier version of this article said.