Bad Moon Rising

The end of the 60s was a transitional time in America – not least for the members of Creedence Clearwater Revival. “At the start of 1969 we were walking the tightrope between fire and ice,” recalls band lynchpin John Fogerty. “We’d just put out Proud Mary, and in two weeks had gone from being one-hit wonders with [1968’s] Suzie Q to being on our way up. But I was looking ahead. I was desperately worried we were about to fall flat on our faces. In those days, you put out singles every few weeks, so when Proud Mary was on the radio I knew we had to write the next one.” And so, shrugging off the backslaps, a steely-eyed Fogerty sat down to write the band’s next single. As the opening riff rolled from his fingers, a lyrical theme began to form in Fogerty’s head. “I’d come up with the chords and melody,” he recalls, “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.”