Creedence Clearwater albums to be reissued

Wed Jul 30, 2:14 AM ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The first six albums of California rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival are being reissued on September 30 with bonus tracks and new liner notes, Concord Music Group said on Tuesday.

The reissued albums, which have been digitally remastered and will be presented in DigiPaks, are: "Creedence Clearwater Revival," "Bayou Country," "Green River," "Willy & the Poor Boys," "Cosmo's Factory" and "Pendulum," all originally released from 1968 to 1970.

Among the many extras are unreleased studio versions of "Down on the Corner" and "Born on the Bayou," which were recorded with Booker T & the MGs. The tracks appear on "Willy & the Poor Boys" and "Cosmo's Factory," respectively.

The announcement comes about three years after Creedence singer/songwriter John Fogerty re-signed as a solo artist with Concord's Fantasy Records label, for which Creedence recorded in the late '60s and early '70s.

Concord bought Fantasy in 2004 from Fogerty's nemesis, Saul Zaentz, and has been mending bridges with Fogerty, such as paying performance royalties on his back catalog.

Creedence, one of the great American bands to emerge in the late 1960s, recorded for Berkeley, Calif.-based Fantasy until it broke up in 1972. Fogerty had signed away his copyrights to such tunes as "Fortunate Son" and "Bad Moon Rising," and spent the ensuing decades in legal battles with Zaentz.

He once immortalized Zaentz in a song called "Zanz Kant Danz," while Zaentz countered with a plagiarism lawsuit, claiming that Fogerty's solo song "The Old Man Down the Road" ripped off the Creedence hit "Run Through the Jungle." The litigation went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman)