One of the more heartwarming stories of recent years has been John Fogerty’s victory in regaining the publishing rights to the songs he wrote for Creedence Clearwater Revival over 50 years ago.
The now 80-year-old Fogerty celebrated by re-recording them, much like Taylor Swift has done with her various ‘Taylor’s Version’ series of albums, in a new album, Legacy, which was released in August.
Legacy is a reminder of just what an astounding songwriter Fogerty was, indeed still is. Have You Ever Seen The Rain? has been covered innumerable times. Proud Mary has become a standard. Green River, Long As I Can See The Light, and Travellin’ Band were all huge US hits – Creedence chalked up no fewer than five Number Twos on the Billboard chart, though they never reached Number One. They did, however, score a UK chart topper with Bad Moon Rising.
Creedence occupied an interesting place in late '60s rock. Though they hailed from the San Francisco area, they had little in common with their SF contemporaries, as Fogerty explained in a 1993 interview with Rolling Stone: “I never inhaled. I was really Mr. Straight. I was scared to death of LSD or any kind of pill.” With their rootsier sound, Creedence managed to draw in the sort of blue-collar punters put off by the drugginess of the likes of The Doors or Hendrix.
Yet at the same time - and much to Fogerty’s chagrin - CCR were never as hip as fellow travellers such as The Band: “Here I was, a competitive guy trying to make my band the biggest thing in the world, and here these guys (are getting attention) just 'cause they're from New York or Woodstock or Big Pink or Bob Dylan or whatever. I was definitely envious of all that.”
But great songs are great songs, and they just seemed to flow out of Fogerty in the late 60s. By late 1968, Creedence had already had a hit with Suzie Q and were about to release Proud Mary but Fogerty was already looking ahead: “I was desperately worried we were about to fall flat on our faces,” he told Classic Rock in 2021. “In those days, you put out singles every few weeks, so when Proud Mary was on the radi,o I knew we had to write the next one.”
He wrote the central riff fairly quickly. Then came a general theme. “I’d come up with the chords and melody and I got the phrase ‘bad moon rising’ from this little book I’d kept song titles in since 1967. I didn’t even know what it meant, I just liked how the words sounded.”
“Then I remembered one of my favourite old movies – a black-and-white 1941 film called The Devil and Daniel Webster, shot in that spooky, film noir way they did back then. It’s a classic tale where the main character, who’s down on his luck, meets the Devil and sells his soul to him. The scene I liked is where there’s a devastating hurricane; furniture, trees, houses, everything’s blowing around. That story and that look really stuck in my mind and they were the germ for the song.”
Fogerty wasn’t writing in a vacuum. This was November 1968 – allegedly, Fogerty wrote the lyrics on the day Richard Nixon was elected. Recent events were certainly on his mind – it had been the year of assassinations and riots, when US fortunes in the war in Vietnam (which Fogerty had himself served in) had taken a turn for the worse.
“I don’t think I was actually saying the world was coming to an end,” Fogerty says, “but the song was a metaphor. I wasn’t just writing about the weather. The times seemed to be in turmoil. Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy had been assassinated. I knew it was a tumultuous time.”
Musically, Fogerty’s prime influences were Pete Seeger and Leadbelly. “He (Leadbelly) played a 12-string guitar tuned down to the key of D,” he explained in a Youtube video uploaded in 2024. “It sounded huge. By the time I got to high school I got an acoustic 12 string (myself), put a DeArmond pick up on it so I could put it into an amp, and I would often use this set up as a feeedback device so that when I was playing another guitar I could bring in the 12 string feeding back and just make a drone sound.”
Fogerty wrote Bad Moon Rising using this D tuning on the Gibson ES-175 he was playing at the time. The guitarist showed it to the rest of the band – his brother Tom, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford and the group worked on it during rehearsals in a shed at the bottom of Clifford’s garden.
“Then disaster struck,” he remembers. “I drove down to Fantasy’s (Creedence’s record label) headquarters in Oakland. I parked up and when I came back out I could see that someone had thrown a brick through the rear window of my car.” The ES-175 was gone.
“This was an emergency. We were due to record Bad Moon Rising in a few days. I needed a guitar. So I drove immediately to a music store in Albany.” Fogerty saw a Les Paul – the only one in the shop - and asked if he could retune it down to D. “I strum an E chord that now comes out D. It was magical, epic. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. My eyes got real big. I said ‘I’ll take it!’”
With his new Les Paul in tow, Fogerty remembers the session recording Bad Moon Rising as “the smoothest sailing we ever had. Band relations were very good during the session,” he insists. “We were all on the same page, trying to make our band go. It was actually a very happy time.”
It wasn’t until the sessions that Fogerty realised what he’d written – a troubling, sinister song set to a positively jolly tune. Pop gold, in other words. “It was about the apocalypse that was going to be visited upon us,” he told Rolling Stone. “It wasn't until the band was learning the song that I realised the dichotomy. Here you got this song with all these hurricanes and blowing and raging ruin and all that, but it's (snaps fingers) ‘I see a bad moon rising.’ It's a happy-sounding tune, right? It didn't bother me at the time.”
Bad Moon Rising was released in April and rose to Number Two on Billboard that summer. In the UK it reached Number One in September, replacing another apocalyptic (but somewhat more ridiculous) record: In The Year 2525 by Zager and Evans. There was a lot of this abroad at the time – the Stones own apocalyptic treatise Gimme Shelter was just weeks away. The pop mood was weary and full of deep foreboding about what the 1970s might hold in store.
In the 56 years since, the song has been covered by artists as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, Jerry Lee Lewis, Nirvana, The Meteors, Emmylou Harris and the Blue Aeroplanes, and used in countless films.
The most notable of those was probably John Landis’s An American Werewolf In London. It’s even been adapted to the football terraces – Manchester United, Liverpool and Argentina are just some of their fans who’ve come up with their own versions. Not that Fogerty, who, of course, did not own the publishing, was in any position to object.
“I also objected to Bad Moon Rising being strewn around on TV commercials and any old movie,” he told Classic Rock. “but we had no power in our contracts to veto where our music went. It was everywhere. And for every good movie that you’ve heard it in – for example, An American Werewolf In London, which was a pretty cool movie – there were at least ten more that were awful.”
Given the increasingly dystopian world we live in, it’s fairly certain that Bad Moon Rising will keep on cropping up in media of all types. At least now its author will be fairly compensated for its use.
“I could have written that song yesterday,” Fogerty reflected in 2021. “It still reflects my personality and the way I do things. I’m very proud of Bad Moon Rising. I’m grateful that, 40 years later, people still enjoy the song – and that I’m still here to sing it.”
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