“Who’ll Stop the Rain”, by Creedence Clearwater Revival, a song as a metaphor for bad times

2023-08-10 11:00:11
Creedence Clearwater Revival, in Woodstock, in August 1969. LAURE JASON/DALLE APRF

Find all the episodes of the series “The Art of Rain” here.

” Who’ll Stop the Rain ? »questions, in January 1970, John Fogerty, singer, guitarist, composer, producer, in a word leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival, at the height of his glory since the fifth album that the Californian quartet is about to publish, Cosmo’s Factory, will dominate the US and UK charts. Country-rock ballad energized by the scintillation of three notes on the acoustic guitar, Who’ll Stop the Rain uses bad weather as a metaphor for catastrophic weather, following a biblical tradition dating back to the Flood: “For as long as I can remember the rain has been falling/Clouds of mystery poured confusion on the ground/From the depths of ages, good men tried to find the sun”.

This rain is the one Bob Dylan prophesied would fall seven years earlier in A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall. The boys are bogged down in Vietnam and Jimi Hendrix, at the end of the Woodstock festival (State of New York), on the morning of Monday August 18, 1969, buried the American anthem under a carpet of feedback. Creedence played there on Saturday night, between Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin. The day before, a downpour fell on the site.

Read the first part of a series on the festival: Article reserved for our subscribers August 15, 1969 in Woodstock: an air of freedom and traffic jams

Responsible for the scenic device, Chip Monck had to improvise “speaker”. He asked spectators to come down from the scaffolding towers and offered to“stop the rain”, by the sheer force of the collective will. Would we believe it? It was on the typewriter of this lighting designer that the text of A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.

Vietnamese allegory

Barely returned from Woodstock, Fogerty writes that of Who’ll Stop the Rain thinking of this crowd that has “clumped together in an attempt to warm up”. The episode also directs him towards the story that follows the Deluge in the Book of Genesis: « I was thinking of the Tower of Babelhe confided to the Monde in 2005. This song evokes the disinformation and the confusion which maintain the high spheres of the capacity. It can be applied today to those companies that are often more powerful than nations. » What actually seems to announce in Who’ll Stop the Rain his view of “five-year plans and New Deals wrapped in golden chains”.

Only three stanzas and at least as many interpretations. This indicates the evocative power of a song. The Vietnamese allegory will be reinforced when the British filmmaker Karel Reisz adapts in 1978 Hell’s Warriors, a novel by Robert Stone about a war correspondent in Saigon who traffics in heroin. The film is renamed Who’ll Stop the Rain when the producers obtain the rights to use some Creedence hits, including the eponymous.

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