The song has been recorded by at least 20 different artists, in styles ranging from folk to reggae to psychedelic rock. In 2010, Rolling Stone ranked it #364 on its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list.

In his memoir, Fogerty said he borrowed the guitar lick for this song from Scotty Moore’s work on Elvis Presley’s “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”.

Fogerty stresses that he wasn’t trying to hide that he’d borrowed the lick and was instead openly “honoring it.” In 1986, at an unspecified awards get-together, Moore grabbed Fogerty from behind and said, “Give me back my licks!”

Fogerty reportedly wrote “Bad Moon Rising” after watching The Devil and Daniel Webster. Inspired by a scene in the film involving a hurricane, Fogerty claims the song is about “the apocalypse that was going to be visited upon us”.

“Then I remembered one of my favourite old movies – a black-and-white 1941 film called The Devil And Daniel Webster, shot in that spooky, film noir way they did back then. It’s a classic tale where the main character, who’s down on his luck, meets the Devil and sells his soul to him. The scene I liked is where there’s a devastating hurricane; furniture, trees, houses, everything’s blowing around. That story and that look really stuck in my mind and they were the germ for the song.”

Given the time this was written, the late 60’s, there was a subtext to the meaning of the song:

“I don’t think I was actually saying the world was coming to an end,” Fogerty says, “but the song was a metaphor. I wasn’t just writing about the weather.”

The last line of the chorus, “there’s a bad moon on the rise”, is sometimes misheard as “there’s a bathroom on the right”. Fogerty occasionally sings the misheard lyric in concert.

“In the wonderful tradition of rock‘n’roll,” he explains, “people misconstrue the lyrics, and that’s what they thought I was singing. And when I hear the song on the radio now, I can see why they thought that – it does sound like it could be what I’m singing. So I do it for fun. I’m not one of these people that walks around going: ‘I’m a serious artist.’ I like to have fun.”

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