The years following Creedence Clearwater Revival’s disbandment in the early 1970s were difficult for John Fogerty. The breakup hit him so hard that he gave away his prized ACME Rickenbacker and lost the rights to his own music, plunging him into his darkest days.
Half a century later, he’s got both vital pieces of his legacy back. But there was another piece of the puzzle that has gotten less attention in the wake of CCR’s demise – and Fogerty spent 45 years chasing it.
Speaking to Guitar World in 2023, Fogerty, who turns 81 today (May 28), reflected on the band’s “whirlwind” year in 1970, which saw them racking up hit singles and playing London’s historic Royal Albert Hall. The amps that went on the road with them were paramount to their success.
“I was playing a Kustom K200A[-4], which was an amazing rig,” he reflects. “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…”
The amp had four built-in effects, but curiously, engaging the reverb increased the amp’s volume, so it was never used. Besides, CCR had more natural 'verb to play with.
“I felt there was enough reverb in the big room; I didn’t need to add more,” he says.
“But the other things [effects]– I used all of them,” he adds. “They were wonderful.”
The amp's built-in fuzz tone was a doozy, and a treble-bleed was reminiscent of a chicken-head knob on a Gibson ES-355, while its resistors gave the amp a “nasally ‘honky’ kind of a sound” which can be heard on Keep On Chooglin’.
“Mostly, I just like what a guitar sounds like straight into an amp,” Fogerty expands. “But 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.
“It would sound like a normal tremolo, but with the addition of a kind of spooky sound that came out of vibrato.
“It was a blend,” he continues, “and they were on the same clock, happening at the same time. I used that sound on Born on the Bayou and Midnight Special. There are so many songs I recorded plugged into that amp, using that vibrato-tremolo thing.”
It’s unclear what happened to the Kustom following the tour. What is clear is that he was left longing for it, saying, “I spent the next 45 years trying to get someone to replicate that.”
But his track record of getting his precious belongings back – his Rickenbacker was a tear-jerking Christmas gift from his wife, and the legal wranglings over his song rights took some 50 years of perseverance – suggests he’ll complete the hat trick soon enough.
