Moonrise

Song 284: This week’s playlist track turns out to be Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival, written by John Fogerty. The YT video for this song that’s linked to my website contains some very entertaining footage of the band performing the tune, although it’s not a live performance video, but rather, live footage matched to the record, as well as a few stills of the band thrown in, but all in all, a good visual track that goes well with the cut. When this song came rocking out of the radio speaker a month or 2 before my HS graduation, if felt like a perfect fit for that moment. The decade I grew up in felt very intense and apocalyptic, in and of itself, with very real scenes from Viet Nam battlefields playing on the 6 o’clock news and the threat of nuclear war constantly hanging over our heads, sometimes haunting our dreams. Add to that the fundamentalist Christian background of my family, which included a strong belief in biblical end times prophecies, and this cut captured the essence of the era. Almost four years after Eve of Destruction (Song 146), it felt good that destruction hadn’t yet arrived, but it also felt like we were that much closer to the stroke of midnight. When the actual stroke of midnight on 12/31/69 passed, and I celebrated the arrival of a new year and new decade by catching a ride from a friend on a snowmobile while on Christmas break as a college freshman, I felt a slight sense of relief that my species had made it out of the ’60s without destroying ourselves. Much turmoil would lie ahead, including the Kent State shooting in the coming spring, more campus demonstrations against the war and the like, but at least we hadn’t blown up our entire civilization, so the Bad Moon had risen, but it had also gone back down, and we were still around. On a humorous note, for the first few times I heard this, I thought Fogerty was singing Black Moon Rising, and that was what I mouthed when I sang along with the record. I also remember reading some critic who mentioned the ‘50s influence on the CCR sound coming through on certain tracks, this being one, and I didn’t understand the context at the time, so I didn’t know what to make of that critique, though it would become much clearer over the next few years as the classic rock of the ‘50s enjoyed a revival of sorts. Many fans of this song probably know the joke about the final chorus line “There’s a bad moon on the rise” being sung as “There’s a bathroom on the right” which reportedly Fogerty himself sometimes did, and if there’s any truth to the rumor about me performing with a country bar pickup band in the East Bay during the 1980s, then it’s quite possible that the lead singer for that outfit did the same thing. As the year 2016 begins, and candidates for the top spot talk about carpet bombing and making the sand glow, that bad moon could be rising once again, but hopefully, by early November, it will have gone back down and we’ll still be around.