“Who’ll stop the rain?” asked John Fogerty, singer, guitarist, songwriter, producer and, in a word, leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival, in January 1970. The California quartet was at the height of its fame, about to release its fifth album, Cosmo’s Factory, which would dominate the American and British charts. A country-rock ballad energized by the shimmer of three notes on acoustic guitar, “Who’ll Stop the Rain” uses inclement weather as a metaphor for catastrophic times, following a biblical tradition dating back to the Flood: “Long as I remember, the rain been coming down/ Clouds of mystery pouring, confusion on the ground/ Good men through the ages, trying to find the sun.”
This is the rain that Bob Dylan had prophesied seven years earlier in “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” The boys were embroiled in the Vietnam War and Jimi Hendrix, closing the Woodstock festival in New York state) on the morning of August 18, 1969, buried the US national anthem under a carpet of feedback. Creedence played there on Saturday night, between the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin. The day before, a downpour had fallen on the site.
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Chip Monck, in charge of the stage set-up, had to improvise as emcee. He asked spectators to come down from the scaffolding towers and suggested that they “stop the rain” by sheer force of collective will. Would you believe it? It was on this lighting designer’s typewriter that the lyrics of “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” were typed in Greenwich Village.
Vietnam allegory
Soon after he returned from Woodstock, Fogerty wrote the lyrics of “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” thinking of this crowd that had “rushed together, trying to keep warm.” The episode also directed him to the story that follows the Flood in the book of Genesis: “I was thinking of the Tower of Babel,” he told Le Monde in 2005. “This song evokes the misinformation and confusion maintained by the upper echelons of power. It can be applied today to these companies that are often more powerful than nations.” Indeed, this is what his vision of “five-year plans and new deals, wrapped in golden chains” seems to foreshadow in “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”
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Only three verses and at least as many interpretations – that’s an indication of a song’s evocative power. The Vietnam allegory was reinforced in 1978 when British filmmaker Karel Reisz adapted Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone’s novel about a war correspondent in Saigon who traffics in heroin. The film was renamed Who’ll Stop the Rain when the producers obtained the rights to use some of Creedence’s hits, including the eponymous one.
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