ABSTRACT
“Where Has John Fogerty Gone?” asked Dave Marsh from the pages of Musician, Player, and Listener in April 1981. 1 Ironically, the music of Fogerty’s former band seemed to be everywhere. That previous November, Fantasy had released The Concert, a live CCR set from 1970, and, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, CCR’s songs were heard regularly in films: Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978, “Hey Tonight,” “Proud Mary,” and, of course, “Who’ll Stop the Rain”), An American Werewolf in London (1981, “Bad Moon Rising”), Twilight Zone—The Movie (1983, “Midnight Special”), and The Big Chill (1983, “Bad Moon Rising”), among others. Many performers—Dave Edmunds, Emmylou Harris, the Minutemen, and Alabama, to name a few—paid homage to CCR on albums or in concert. Bruce Springsteen began to perform “Who’ll Stop the Rain” in response to Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency and John Lennon’s death. (Inexplicably, Springsteen omitted his powerful rendition from Live 1975/85.) In a 1982 interview, Joe Strummer praised Fogerty for some ten minutes and wondered about his absence before returning to the music of the Clash, and, in her Rolling Stone 4½ of 5 stars review of The Concert, Debra Rae Cohen pined “for another dose of the original.” 2 Clearly, as the Reagan era unfolded, rock listeners were anxious to hear from the driving force of CCR.
