While it may not rival the return of the Palestinians to the Gaza Strip, the news that John Fogerty was returning to Fantasy Records marks a reconciliation that seemed just as unlikely. It was at Fantasy in the late sixties and early seventies that Fogerty’s Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded a string of hits that seems even more remarkable today. “Bad Moon Rising,” “Hey Tonight,” “Fortunate Son,” “Green River” — most songwriters could have retired having written just one of those but on album after album they just kept on coming. (And really, you can’t blame the man for every weak-assed version of “Proud Mary” or “Lodi” you’re heard performed by troubadors everywhere from SF to Katmandu.)

Then in the mid-seventies the well seemingly went dry and in an infamous meeting with Fantasy head and CCR father figure Saul Zaentz, Fogerty threw a fit and ceded the rights to all of his songs to Fantasy just to get out of his contract with them. Even in the addled history of rock ‘n’ roll this seemed to be one of the most bone-headed moves of all time — up there, perhaps, with the Kinks similarly stupid sale of all future song rights though not quite in a league with Sam Phillips releasing Elvis to RCA for $35,000. And for the next decade Zaentz used that money to finance one Oscar-winning picture after another (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus) while Fogerty sulked, going into the studio in his home every day and coming out empty-handed.

I interviewed Zaentz for the Berkeley Monthly about twenty years ago. He was gearing up to produce Phillip Kaufman’s adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and was most agreeable on every subject — except that of John Fogerty. The singer’s dry spell finally ended with the release of a new album, Centerfield, and he opened local shows with not one but two Fuck You, Saul songs, “Zanz Can’t Danz” and “Mr. Greed.” Though John wouldn’t talk to me his brother, Tom Fogerty, wrote to say that Zaentz had always been great to him and the rest of the band and that John was the one with the problem. (Tom died a few years later of tuberculosis.) I had the sense that whatever went down in that boardroom had more to do with the surrogate father-son relationship the producer and the artist had and little to do with Fogerty’s output.

There were numerous lawsuits and counter suits. “Zanz” became “Vanz” as the result of one, and in a a truly bizarre moment, Zaentz and company tried to claim that Fogerty’s 1985 hit “The Old Man Down the Road” was a rewrite of the 1970 CCR song “Run Through the Jungle” — which Fantasy owned, accusing Fogerty in essence of plagiarizing himself. (A jury ultimately disagreed.) Whatever the psychology of the players, this had to be a low point in the art-vs-mammon world of rock business, akin to David Geffen suing Neil Young for making music with no commercial potential.

The stage for Fogerty’s return to Fantasy was set earlier this year when Zaentz sold Fantasy to a consortiium of buyers (including Norman Lear) for $80 million. In November the label will release a retrospective with an apt if stultifyingly unoriginal title: The Long Road Home. An album of orginal material is due in 2006 but don’t expect to hear any songs from it on Zaentz’s next project, a biography of Goya. Now there was an artist who knew something about suffering.