“Vanz Kant Danz” is a bitter little fable about power—how greed can grin, steal, and still insist it’s the victim.
“Vanz Kant Danz” (originally released as “Zanz Kant Danz”) closes John Fogerty’s comeback album Centerfield, issued on January 14, 1985. Right away, the bigger picture matters: Centerfield went to No. 1 on the US Billboard 200, a rare, emphatic return for an artist who had been effectively absent from the studio-album conversation for years. Yet tucked into that victory lap is this sharp, satirical track—less an anthem than a pointed finger.
And here’s the key factual twist that defines the song’s legacy: the track was altered and retitled a few months after the album’s release. Early pressings had the name “Zanz Kant Danz,” and later pressings changed it to “Vanz Kant Danz” amid legal trouble involving Saul Zaentz, the owner of Fantasy Records, who sued Fogerty for defamation. Even decades later, serious profiles still describe the change plainly—“Zanz” later renamed/rerecorded as “Vanz”—and note that Fogerty ended up paying in the defamation matter.
This is why it’s important to say what the song is and what it is not. “Vanz Kant Danz” was not released as a major chart single, so it doesn’t have a clean Billboard Hot 100 “debut position” the way “The Old Man Down the Road” does. But it lived in the same blast radius as that single’s very public success—“The Old Man Down the Road” hit No. 10 on the Hot 100 and spent three weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Rock Tracks. In other words, Fogerty returned to the spotlight at full volume… and then, at the end of Side Two, left this small, venom-tipped postcard on the table.
The “behind the song” story is inseparable from Fogerty’s long war over ownership and control. By the time Centerfield arrived, he had already been worn down by years of conflict connected to his Creedence-era catalog—music he wrote, but whose publishing and business entanglements became a cage. “Vanz Kant Danz” is widely understood as a satirical jab at Zaentz himself, and the lawsuit history supports that interpretation: Zaentz alleged Fogerty had defamed him not only in the song but also through repeated statements in interviews, filing suit in Los Angeles Superior Court in 1985. Later accounts summarize the conflict even more starkly: Zaentz pursued a separate, massive defamation claim, and the parties ultimately settled that dispute out of court.
So what does the song mean in human terms?
It’s Fogerty turning a businessman into a character—an almost cartoonish symbol of someone who can’t create the dance, but can still control the money. In the popular retellings of the dispute, the insult stings because it’s so simple: the “villain” doesn’t need artistry; he needs paperwork, leverage, and time. That’s the ache at the heart of “Vanz Kant Danz”: the feeling that the world sometimes rewards the collector more than the maker, the owner more than the author, the gatekeeper more than the voice.
And there’s a poignant irony in how this track sits on Centerfield. The album is remembered for uplift—baseball optimism, open-road guitars, the sense of a man stepping back into daylight. Yet “Vanz Kant Danz” is the shadow at the edge of that sunlight, the reminder that comebacks don’t erase old wounds; they simply give you enough strength to speak about them without shaking.
In the end, “Vanz Kant Danz” endures not because it dominated radio, but because it preserves a very specific kind of truth: sometimes the most personal protest arrives disguised as a sneer and a groove. Fogerty had waited nine years to make a record like Centerfield. And when he finally returned, he didn’t just sing about joy—he also left behind a closing track that sounded like a man refusing to be owned twice.