“I thought I could just give all my problems away and start over”: John Fogerty recalls giving away his prized ‘ACME’ Rickenbacker guitar to a 12-year-old after Creedence fell apart
John Fogerty has looked back on the time he gave away his legendary ‘ACME’ Rickenbacker electric guitar to a 12-year-old kid during the darkest days of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s breakup, in hopes it might help him start afresh.
Speaking on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Fogerty reflects on the emotional spiral that followed the band’s split – and how giving away the guitar felt, at the time, like a way to shed the weight of everything falling apart.
READ MORE: John Fogerty thought effects pedals were a “communist idea” and didn’t want to use them
Reflecting on the guitar’s origins, Fogerty explains that he bought the Rickenbacker in early 1969 and immediately began modding it into something uniquely his own.
“It was a Rickenbacker, but I made a bunch of changes to it because I found some things lacking with the standard model,” he says [via Ultimate Guitar]. “The most important thing was, I put a humbucker pickup from a Gibson Les Paul.”
“I’d heard about these fellas over in England; there was quite a mystique. They were Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton… And it really helped. And when I got done, I changed the nameplate and hand-painted ‘ACME’ right there.”
By the early ’70s, CCR’s internal tensions had reached a breaking point.
“So the Credence Clearwater Revival thing had its run, and then, I guess, fellas just didn’t know how to have fun or something,” Fogerty recalls. “I wrote a song called Have You Ever Seen the Rain. That was about the band breaking up. It just seemed like I was certainly pushing to achieve these heights of the music business, and everybody was getting more and more miserable. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s human nature.”
When the band finally dissolved around 1972, Fogerty found himself emotionally gutted: “I was pretty forlorn,” says the musician. That’s when a young kid – about 12-years-old – approached him at the band’s headquarters and asked if he could have one of Fogerty’s guitars.
“He comes to me one day, says, ‘John, can I have one of your guitars?’ And I suppose, thinking that I could just give all my problems away and start over, I took this guitar and gave it to that kid,” says Fogerty. “I didn’t see it for a long, long, long time, 44 years.”
Fogerty was eventually reunited with the Rickenbacker thanks to his wife, Julie, who quietly set out to find it after decades away.
“Unbeknownst to me, just a few years ago, my beautiful wife Julie went searching far and wide for this guitar,” he says. “She finally found it in Ohio, and she got it home, put it under the Christmas tree, and that’s how I got it back.”
Watch the full interview below.
The post “I thought I could just give all my problems away and start over”: John Fogerty recalls giving away his prized ‘ACME’ Rickenbacker guitar to a 12-year-old after Creedence fell apart appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
