Lookin' Out My Back Door

Drugs? Please. CCR was probably the least drug-induced band of the time. All though they did there, experimenting they never performed high and Fogerty never wrote hi. He felt that the belief that drugs made people more creative was not only wrong but also sad. This song was written for his children. It’s about watching a carnival come through town through the eyes of a child. He was imagining what these strange things may look like to a kid. And that’s straight from the horse’s moth.

The song is about imagination and all the things that arise when a person relaxes and explores the world through their imagination

I think that drug and death themes are a lesser interpretation of literature. I think that John is simply retelling all of the wonderful things that imagination (also highly valued in this era) can produce. A lot of Creedence songs are just about everyday occorunces, everyday life. Story telling, that was the original purpose of music anyway.

Fogerty was recently interviewed about this song which he wrote shortly after the birth of his first son. It is NOT about drugs. It is simply about childish imagination and the things that it can conjure up.

I love this song, it's so happy. If I'm ever in a really bad mood, I'll listen to the CCR greatest hits CD... John Fogarty's voice has this really calming effect on me...

Anyway, no clue what this song is about, but I'm pretty sure it's NOT about drugs. Were you ever a child? Have you been around a child recently? Have you heard some of the crazywild stuff they can think up? It's a lot like this. Maybe something unpleasant happened in Illinois, and he wanted to forget, so he sat on his back porch (or looked out the back door) and drank a beer or something and pretended. Growups can pretend too. :-)

What does this mean to me? Well, I first heard on The Big Lebowski (great movie). Then I started hearing it on the radio. Around that time, I had just returned from a strenous C++ course far from home and had met disappointment in several other areas of human developmental behavior. So I got home, kicked back, and sat in my room, looking out my door....putting it all into perspective.

I always thought that it was a commentary on how the 50s were.

All the wondrous, trippy things that happen, I thought were't halucinations, but the illusions people had in the 50s that happy days were there again as the old song goes and that "Perfection" and great things were to come. Great things were to come, but not in the way the 50s envisioned them.

"Lookin' Out My Back Door" could be how people in the 50s were caught in an ideology that was going back in time and was backwards, how our culture was regressing instead of progressing, and "Doo Doo Doo" before that is commenting on how most people were celebrating these regressions instead of finding a problem with it.

"Bother me tomorrow, today I'll find no sorrow" in the 50s people were ignoring all of the cross-cutting cleavages and all the problems brewing in America and put it off to deal with it in the 60s when the problems had gotten way out of hand. It made dealing with the issues much more difficult and more dangerous because tension had been brewing for 10-15 years leading up to when people decided to start working to settle things.

On the surface, I feel it seems that it's about the 60s and tripping but I feel Creedence could very well have been using that as a vehicle to metaphorize how in the 50s people were tripping on their delusions of being able to remain a traditional society where nothing goes wrong.

Great song. Catchy tune.

ummm...if this were by The Beatles or Jefferson Airplane, I would have expected to see someone say it was about drugs, and they'd probably be right...but i don't think CCR was too into drugs...

this song's significance to me goes back to high school when i had mrs. vero-lynn for vocabulary enrichment...if we every found one of the words we learned in everyday use, we could bring it in for bonus...so when our word of the day was "apparition" i immediately was singing to myself "wond'rous apparitions provided by magicians..." i brought in my CCR tape (hey, it was still the 20th century) and got bonus!!!

thank you john

I often do this song in karaoke, which is something I do about 3-4 times per month. It's a crowd pleaser, and I do this song well, so I do this song when I don't want to try something new but want to do something good. I've always wondered what it means, and I don't think anyone has quite touched upon it - I don't quite think it's about all the wonderful things that can happen when you relax. Let me explain:

John Fogerty starts off the song by saying: "Just got home from Illinois lock the front door oh boy! / Got to sit down take a rest on the porch. / Imagination sets in."

So he begins by saying that he gets home and wants to shut out the outside world. Maybe he just got back from touring, a press conference or working, because he got back from Illinois.

Then throughout the rest of the song all sorts of nonsensical things start happening, which come as a result of relaxing. But he always goes back to saying "get out my back door," which is the only puzzling part. It's a big puzzling part because he says it quite a few times and it has to do with the title of the song.

Which leads me to think that this song is a commentary that even when he wants to relax, the outside world still finds a way to annoy him. Maybe the song is a dig at the loss of privacy when one becomes famous, but if this is what the song is about then I think almost anyone famous or not could relate to it. The strange images that he describes in this song remind me most of the many strange spam messages you might get through your email, which are things that manage to find their way through your "back door." Of course e-mail came after this song was written but it seems to be a good analogy.