Creedence Clearwater Revisited: Interview with Stu Cook

However, instead of inviting his former bandmates up on to the stage, Fogerty completely ignored the watching Stu Cook and Doug Clifford, and proceeded to run through a number of Creedence classics, accompanied by the house band and stars such as Bruce Springsteen and The Band's Robbie Robertson.

"The Hall of Fame kept saying, 'Oh yeah, you guys will get to play'," remembers Stu, with a world-weary sense of 'seen-it-all-before'. "Then we kept pressing them on what was going on and they said, 'Oh, they’ll just be a jam', and finally, when we get there, they go, 'Oh, didn’t anybody tell you? You’re not playing'."
Snubbed by an Old Friend

"We had a confrontation with John," he continues, "and he said, 'I don’t like you guys, I’m not gonna play with you guys, you left me twisting in the wind' - whatever the hell that means! To make the night about our feud, to bring our feud to the event, I thought that was just incredibly small.

It should have been about the band, celebrating the band, and taking the award, and leaving all the family stuff behind, as it were. You don’t take your laundry out and drag it around at an awards event, so, yeah, Doug and I felt extremely dissed.
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We and our families just got up and walked out. I got into it with Robbie Robertson and Bruce Springsteen, and Bruce apologised. Robbie gave me some BS, just saying, 'Well, you know, that’s the way bands are'. It was just handled extremely poorly by the Hall of Fame, and by John.

Just to say, 'Hey, we had some worth, we were part of that'. To deny us the opportunity to share fully in the evening by refusing to play with us, that was fairly childish. That one incident may have led to the 'Revisted' project."
Creedence Clearwater Revisted

In the mid-1990s, Stu and Doug decided to assemble an able group of musicians, and take the songs of Creedence Clearwater Revival out on the road, something John Fogerty had previously refused to do.

"I had moved to a small mountain town up in the Sierra Nevadas, Lake Tahoe, and Doug and I were hanging out together," explains Stu. "He lived there for many years and we were hanging out, jamming every day, and we just started going, 'Hey, why don’t we get some guys that can play and see if we can get anybody to hire us?' That was back in 1995, I think, ’94, ’95. This is our 16th year."

Suite 101: What was John Fogerty's initial reaction?

"We invited him to join, he said no, and then he sued us over the use of the name, and ultimately, had to settle with us because he doesn’t control it. It’s a trademark and it’s controlled by the four members and the courts didn’t agree with him. It took us a lot of money and a lot of time, but finally we got to use the name again."

Suite 101: How has the band been received by the public?

"When we first started the 'Revisted' project, we were amazed at the number of young people that were interested in what we were doing and would come to see us perform. At first, we thought maybe they’d gotten lost, ended up at the wrong concert, but as it turns out, we have a solid three generations of fans now."

Suite 101: CC Rev has taken you to Latin America. Were you surprised at how popular you are down there?

"Creedence is pretty popular everywhere. When we first started going down to South America in the late ‘90s, we were really surprised at how many fans we had because the original band never toured south of the border. It was always so-called security issues, but that doesn’t bother us anymore.

Sometimes, we’ll finish a song and they’ll get into one of their soccer chants, and it’s hard to start the next song. It really shocked us to feel that much love from the fans – we had never experienced that in the original band and it’s really allowed us to more fully enjoy the music.

There’s not anywhere near the same kind of pressures as there was in the original band, so we’re really able to enjoy every bit of what we’re doing."

Suite 101: Do you think your friendship with Doug Clifford has been a vital element to your success?

"I’m sure that has a lot to do with it. We learned to play our instruments together and have been friends for 52 years now. We’re able to just take the best parts of our relationship on stage with us and we know that at this point in our lives, without sounding morbid, you never know when it's your last night to perform. So we try and savour every night, every song, every note."
Keeping the Music Alive

The popularity of the Creedence Clearwater Revival songbook has led to CCRev being in huge demand around the world, as the public continues to show its love for such timeless classics.

Despite the objections of the original band's defacto leader, John Fogerty, Stu and Doug have successfully made the tensions that drove CCR apart a thing of the past, deciding instead to just let the music do the talking.