By David Cohen | Classic Rock
I play rhythm guitar in a covers band. We love CCR . Anyone who has ever tried to play John Fogerty will tell you the same thing: the man has a sound. Not just a style — a sound. That swampy, coiled groove; the way the rhythm hangs back just slightly before it snaps forward; the feel of the bayou even when the song is about a California suburb. You don’t imitate it so much as you try to inhabit it, and even then you’re only ever circling around the edges of something that belongs entirely to one person.
Which is exactly why what happened to Fogerty in the mid-1980s was not just a legal absurdity. It was a category error so profound that it took a man picking up a guitar in a courtroom to expose it.
How You Lose the Rights to Your Own Music
To understand the case, you need to understand what Fogerty had given up — and why.
By the time Creedence Clearwater Revival broke up in 1972, the relationship between Fogerty and the band’s label, Fantasy Records — run by its formidable owner Saul Zaentz — had curdled completely. In 1970, Fogerty had written “Run Through the Jungle” and sold the exclusive publishing rights to predecessors in interest of Fantasy, Inc., who later obtained the copyright by assignment. That wasn’t unusual for the era; it was standard industry practice, and Fogerty, like countless musicians before and after him, had signed away more than he realised.
When CCR dissolved, Fogerty extracted himself from Fantasy by relinquishing the copyrights and publishing rights to his Creedence catalogue — effectively giving away his own back catalogue to get out of the door. Every song he had written with CCR now belonged to someone else. This dispute was the culmination of twenty years of animosity between Fogerty and Saul Zaentz, chairman of Fantasy, Inc., the Berkeley company that owned the copyrights to most of the songs Fogerty recorded with Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Fogerty Was Not Alone
What made Fogerty’s situation feel so shocking was the specific absurdity of it — sued for copying himself. But the underlying mechanism, a musician signing away rights and then losing control of his own creative legacy, was anything but unusual. It was the industry’s default setting for decades.
The Rolling Stones offer perhaps the starkest parallel. When Allen Klein managed the band from 1965 to 1970, he structured his arrangements so that his company ABKCO effectively owned the rights to their recordings from that period. When the Stones eventually severed ties with Klein, the price of escape was steep: ABKCO retained ownership of their entire recorded catalogue from 1963 to 1971. That means “Satisfaction,” “Paint It Black,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Wild Horses” — the songs most people would consider the Stones’ defining work — have never belonged to the band that wrote and recorded them. Klein died in 2009. His estate still owns them. Mick Jagger put it with characteristic bluntness: “They have the rights to repackage all our old material between 1963 and 1969.”
The Beatles’ story is even more convoluted. Paul McCartney lost the Lennon-McCartney publishing catalogue when ATV Music, which controlled it, was sold to Michael Jackson in 1985 for approximately $47.5 million — a purchase McCartney was reportedly outbid on. Jackson later sold half his stake to Sony in 1995, and after his death his estate sold the remainder to Sony in 2016 for $750 million, making Sony the sole owner. McCartney eventually used a provision of US copyright law — which allows songwriters to reclaim certain rights after 56 years — to recover some US publishing rights through a private settlement with Sony in 2017. But Sony Music Publishing still controls the vast majority of the Lennon-McCartney catalogue globally. McCartney did not buy his songs back. He clawed back a portion of them through statute, after a decades-long legal battle, at the age of 75.
These are not cautionary tales from the margins of the music industry. These are the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. The lesson — that signing away your rights is easy, and recovering them is either impossible or the work of a lifetime — was not a secret. It was simply the price of getting a record deal.
Fogerty knew this as well as anyone. Which is why what Fantasy did next was, in its own way, a masterclass in how completely a catalogue owner can turn a songwriter’s past against their future.
The Comeback and the Lawsuit
Fogerty’s comeback album Centerfield was released in 1985 and was a substantial commercial success. Its opening track, “The Old Man Down the Road,” was released as a single in late 1984. The song had that unmistakeable Fogerty fingerprint — the swampy groove, the southern gothic imagery, the guitar lick that coils and strikes. It was classic Fogerty. That, it turned out, was precisely the problem.
Saul Zaentz, owner of Fantasy Records, claimed that “The Old Man Down the Road” shared the same chorus as “Run Through the Jungle,” a song from Fogerty’s days with Creedence Clearwater Revival. Fantasy filed suit.
The logical implication was staggering: a man was being sued for plagiarising himself. He had written both songs. The copyright to one now belonged to someone else, but the mind, the muscle memory, the musical instincts — those still belonged to Fogerty. And those were precisely what Fantasy was trying to weaponise against him.
The Guitar on the Witness Stand
With neither party willing to settle, the case went to court. During the jury trial of 1988, Fogerty even played his guitar on the witness stand to demonstrate to the room of stoic jurors why “The Old Man Down the Road” and “Run Through the Jungle” were similar stylistically but two different songs nonetheless. His performance won over the jury, who ruled in his favour.
As a musician who has spent years trying to understand what makes one guitarist’s touch different from another’s, this moment strikes me as one of the most important things that has ever happened in a music copyright courtroom — even if nobody quite described it that way at the time.
What Fogerty was arguing, guitar in hand, is something every serious player understands instinctively: style is not the same as plagiarism. A songwriter’s voice — the way they approach a groove, the chord voicings they favour, the melodic shapes their ear naturally gravitates toward — is the product of decades of accumulated habit and craft. It is as personal as a fingerprint. When that style produces two songs that share certain characteristics, that is not copying. That is simply what it sounds like when one particular human being writes music.
The alternative — the position Fantasy was effectively advancing — would have been extraordinary in its implications. It would mean that a songwriter cannot revisit their own territory, cannot write in their own established idiom, cannot produce work that sounds like themselves, without risking a copyright claim from whoever happens to own their earlier material. It would, in effect, allow a label to colonise not just a musician’s past work but their entire future creative voice.
The jury saw through it. Fogerty walked out of court vindicated.
The Legal Battle That Went Further
The story did not end there. Fogerty’s joy was significantly diminished by the legal fees he had spent defending himself against the infringement claim. He petitioned the court for reimbursement of his legal fees but was denied, with the court ruling that Fantasy’s suit had been neither frivolous nor in bad faith — the burden required for reimbursement. He appealed that ruling and in 1993, his appeal was denied by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Fogerty kept going. The U.S. Supreme Court finally granted Fogerty’s appeal in 1994. The lower courts then decided that Fogerty should be awarded his attorney’s fees, totalling $1,347,519.15. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. also established an important precedent: that prevailing defendants in copyright cases should be treated on equal footing with prevailing plaintiffs when courts consider awarding legal fees. It was a meaningful shift in how copyright law balanced the scales between rights holders and creators.
What This Means for Anyone Who Makes Music
The Fogerty case is sometimes presented purely as a rock and roll curiosity — the absurdist headline that a man was sued for copying himself. It is genuinely absurd. But underneath the absurdity is something more serious.
Copyright in music was designed to protect creators. The irony of the Fogerty litigation is that it demonstrated how thoroughly that protection can be inverted once a creator’s rights pass to a third party. Fantasy did not create “Run Through the Jungle.” Fogerty did. Fantasy acquired the copyright through contract, and then used that copyright to go after the man who wrote the song — not for copying someone else’s work, but for continuing to sound like himself.
Every working musician who has ever signed a recording contract has, in some form, signed away something. The question of what exactly you give up — and whether what remains is truly yours — is rarely as simple as it looks on paper.
I think about this when I play “Proud Mary” at a gig. Fogerty wrote that song. He doesn’t own it. And somewhere in that gap between the creator and the copyright lies a warning that the music industry has still not finished teaching.
David Cohen is an English solicitor and Israeli lawyer practising in cross-border technology transactions. He is also a gigging musician with his band The Core.
Leave a Reply