Credit: Far Out / Cal Montney / Los Angeles Times / UCLA Library
Thu 14 May 2026 22:00, UK
Bands break-up everyday; seemingly, there is something about being cooped up in a tour bus or a recording studio with the same few faces that doesn’t tend to breed harmony. Rarely, though, are these band break-ups predicted by the bands themselves, much less within the lyrics of their biggest hits. Then again, most bands aren’t Creedence Clearwater Revival.
From the muddy, acid-dripped audience at Woodstock back in 1969, John Fogerty and CCR looked as if they were on top of the counterculture age, single-handedly popularising swamp rock and establishing themselves among the tightest rock outfits of the era. Behind the scenes, though, the wheels had been falling off the group for quite some time before they eventually decided to call it quits in 1972.
Unlike their hippie contemporaries, CCR always made a point to remain sober on stage, so it wasn’t an overabundance of mind-bending substances and addiction that derailed the group, as was so often the case during the late 1960s. Instead, it was sibling rivalry that eventually brought the band to its knees, along with the contributing factors of too much money and too little sleep.
Since the group’s days as The Blue Velvets during the early part of the 1960s, its core had been built around the brotherhood of Tom and John Fogerty, but as they progressed, those two brothers found themselves consistently at odds with one another. The root cause of that sibling rivalry is far too complex and psychological to delve into within the confines of this particular article, but it certainly seemed as though Tom was growing fed up with his younger brother dictating the direction of the group.
Either way, Creedence was plunged into increasingly vicious sibling spats during the late 1960s, to the point where it was clear something had to give. By the end of 1970, the writing for the band’s future was on the wall and, in dejection, John Fogerty wrote of his all-time finest tracks, ‘Have You Ever Seen The Rain’.
Written during a particularly dry, particularly edgy recording session as nothing more than a means of “filling in the gap”, Fogerty was thinking of the imminent demise of CCR when he conjured up the song. “The setting for that was, there could be a blue sky, but way over there, out of your vision, is a storm or rain clouds,” he told Guitar Player in 2025.
“Something in the upper atmosphere is pushing the rain over, and it falls on you, but you look up, and it’s a clear sky.”
John Fogerty
“And to me, here is our band going up in the bluest sky you ever saw, and yet everybody’s grumbling and unhappy and miserable,” he continued. “And I couldn’t understand that. That was what caused me to write this song.”
Further reading: From The Vault
That tension between Tom and John Fogerty was also a key contributing factor to the track, and only a few months after its release in December 1970, Tom left the band entirely. In doing so, the guitarist essentially sparked CCR’s long march to disbandment.
A swangsong LP, Mardi Gras, arrived in 1972, and it proved beyond all doubt that CCR, one of the greatest groups of the hippie age, was dead, and John Fogerty was rapidly reaching the end of his tether. So, less than two years on from Fogerty’s premonition on ‘Have You Ever Seen The Rain’, the band finally went their separate ways.
