Today’s classic rain-themed song of the day comes to us courtesy of songwriter/singer/guitarist John Fogerty and his band, Creedence Clearwater Revival. The song is “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and it was released in January of 1970 as one side of a double-sided single, the flip side being “Travelin’ Band.” Like many CCR tracks, “Who’ll Stop the Rain” peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. (They had many number-twos, but never a number-one hit.)
“Who’ll Stop the Rain” was placed smack dab in the middle of side two of the band’s Cosmo’s Factory album. That album included a slew of hits, including “Travelin’ Band,” “Lookin’ Out My Back Door,” “Run Through the Jungle,” “Up Around the Bend,” “Long As I Can See the Light,” and an eleven-minute, extremely swampy version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The album, which spent nine weeks in the number-one position on the charts, got its name from drummer Doug “Cosmo” Clifford, who dubbed the band’s warehouse rehearsal space “The Factory.”
John Fogerty allegedly wrote “Who’ll Stop the Rain” after CCR played a set at the Woodstock festival on August 17, 1969. Fogerty told the following story:
“A lot of folks seem to think I sang this song at Woodstock way back then. No, I was at Woodstock 1969. I think. It was a nice event. I’m a California kid. I went up there and saw a whole bunch of really nice young people Hairy, Colorful. It started to rain, and got really muddy, and then half a million people took their clothes off! Boomer generation making its presence known, I guess. Anyway, then I went home and wrote this song.”
While the final verse might be about Woodstock (“Heard the singers playin’, how we cheered for more/the crowd had rushed together, tryin’ to keep warm”), the rest of the lyrics express Fogerty’s dissatisfaction with Washington and that era’s politicians and political environment. Or maybe it’s about the Vietnam War and the politicians (re: Nixon) who promised to end the war but in reality ramped it up. You know it’s political, especially that second verse:
I went down Virginia, seekin’ shelter from the storm
Caught up in the fable, I watched the tower grow
Five Year Plans and New Deals, wrapped in golden chains
And I wonder, still I wonder, who’ll stop the rain?
Like most of Fogerty’s tunes for CCR, “Who’ll Stop the Rain” is a relatively simple one, harmonically speaking. The acoustic guitar intro shifts between the I and the vi chords (G and Em, in the key of G). The verse is I – IV – I, I – IV – I, followed by IV – I, IV – I, IV – V, vi – I. There is no chorus. The song is so simple even I can play it on acoustic guitar.
Finally, let’s not confuse “Who’ll Stop the Rain” with a similar rain-themed CCR tune, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” That one was released a year later and was about something completely different—the way the band was starting to break up. Success will do that to you.
So now we move to today’s daily bonus track of the day. It’s CCR playing “Who’ll Stop the Rain” live at the Oakland Coliseum on January 31, 1970. They were a damn fine live act that didn’t get the respect they deserved from critics of the time.
