It was easy to see the tide turning from John Fogerty’s perspective. After spending his teenage years trying to get his musical ambitions off the ground, Fogerty nearly gave up his dreams after being drafted into the army. “It was pretty intense because this was right at the height of the Vietnam war,” Fogerty observed in 2019. “Every young man’s clock was running pretty fast.” The idea that Fogerty could be sent over to – and possibly die – in Vietnam was a very real possibility.
When Fogerty eventually got discharged in 1968, he rededicated himself to music with a new level of commitment. A flood of new songs followed, and he decided to rechristen the band he formed with his brother Tom and their friends, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford. Creedence Clearwater Revival embraced swamp rock and southern imagery under their new name, even though the members themselves were native to the Bay Area of California. The material that Fogerty focused on would be unique as well.
Highly political in his outlook, Fogerty balanced odes to riverboats and bayous with fiery observations related to the waves of cultural unrest. CCR’s first major hit, ‘Proud Mary’, fit nicely within the band’s swampy outlook. Their second, ‘Bad Moon Rising’, was quickly picked up as a political anthem. The only problem was that Fogerty didn’t intend to represent the rising anxiety of a nation at war. While songs like ‘Fortunate Son’ and ‘It Came Out of the Sky’ took a more direct approach to politics, ‘Bad Moon Rising’ wasn’t meant to chronicle the foreboding ascent of the Vietnam war. Instead, Fogerty found his inspiration from another form of media: classic film.
“I got the imagery from an old movie called The Devil and Daniel Webster,” Fogerty told Rolling Stone in 1993. “Basically, Daniel Webster makes a deal with Mr. Scratch, the devil. It was supposed to be apocryphal. At one point in the movie, there was a huge hurricane. Everybody’s crops and houses are destroyed. Boom. Right next door is the guy’s field who made the deal with the devil, and his corn is still straight up, six feet. That image was in my mind. I went, ‘Holy mackerel!’”
“My song wasn’t about Mr. Scratch, and it wasn’t about the deal,” Fogerty added. “It was about the apocalypse that was going to be visited upon us. It wasn’t until the band was learning the song that I realized 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.”
Fogerty would save his political/aquatic metaphors for some later songs like ‘Who Will Stop The Rain?’ and ‘Have You Ever Seen The Rain?’. For now, he was content with letting ‘Bad Moon Rising’ represent whatever evils were haunting the listener’s imagination. With just three chords at his disposal, Fogerty crafted a simplistic structure that kept ‘Bad Moon Rising’ buoyant and driving. He also found additional inspiration in one of his heroes: Scotty Moore, guitarist for Elvis Presley.
“‘Bad Moon Rising’ is a kind of a sideways ‘You’re Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone’ from Elvis’ Sun Sessions,” Fogerty told Guitar World in 1998. “Back then, I couldn’t do the alternating bass thumb-pick stuff, so I played it with a flat pick and used my fingers for the upper notes. It’s built around an open E chord with an added 6th, C#, and again I’m playing the G to G# in the riff.” With a guitar tuned a whole step down, Fogerty got the iconic D-A-G chord progression that made ‘Bad Moon Rising’ sing.
“Scotty is the man!” Fogerty added. “He was in the band that defined what the line-up of a rock’ n’ roll band would be; he was the lead guitar player melding blues and country and coming up with the bible of rock’ n’ roll. That’s what you’re hearing in the ‘Bad Moon Rising’ riff – blues and country and me ripping off Scotty in my humble way.”
By all accounts, ‘Bad Moon Rising’ was set to achieve what ‘Proud Mary’ couldn’t: reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Unfortunately, the track would instead continue a trend that would follow Creedence Clearwater Revival for their entire career. Just like ‘Proud Mary’, ‘Bad Moon Rising’ peaked at number two on the US pop charts, being held off from the top spot by Harry Mancini’s ‘Love Theme From Romeo & Juliet’, the song that accompanied Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation of Romeo & Juliet. Over their brief career, CCR would land five different singles at number two without ever achieving an elusive number one.
Despite failing to reach the top, ‘Bad Moon Rising’ followed Creedence Clearwater Revival for the rest of their time together. The band played the track during their appearance at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in 1969. It quickly became a concert staple, being featured at nearly every show the band played for the next three years. Even though ‘Bad Moon Rising’ stalled at number two in America, the track became CCR’s first and only number one hit in the United Kingdom.
‘Bad Moon Rising’ became one of CCR’s most iconic songs. In spite (or more likely because) of that fact, Fogerty himself refused to play the song for decades. Legal spats with his former label, Fantasy Records, soured Fogerty on his CCR songs, and it wouldn’t be until the 1990s that Fogerty eventually revived most of his best-known songs. When he did, fans were once again treated to the infectious and apocalyptic overtones of ‘Bad Moon Rising’.
