Just got home from Illinois, lock the front door, oh boy!
Got to sit down, take a rest on the porch.
Imagination sets in, pretty soon I'm singing,
Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
There's a giant doing cartwheels,
A statue wearing high heels.
Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn.
A dinosaur Victrola listening to Buck Owens.
Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band.
Won't you take a ride on the flying spoon?
Doo, doo doo.
Wond'rous apparition provided by magician.
Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band.
Won't you take a ride on the flying spoon?
Doo, doo doo.
Bother me tomorrow, today, I'll buy no sorrows.
Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
Forward troubles Illinois, lock the front door, oh boy!
Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn.
Bother me tomorrow, today, I'll buy no sorrows.
Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
Got to sit down, take a rest on the porch.
Imagination sets in, pretty soon I'm singing,
Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
There's a giant doing cartwheels,
A statue wearing high heels.
Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn.
A dinosaur Victrola listening to Buck Owens.
Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band.
Won't you take a ride on the flying spoon?
Doo, doo doo.
Wond'rous apparition provided by magician.
Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band.
Won't you take a ride on the flying spoon?
Doo, doo doo.
Bother me tomorrow, today, I'll buy no sorrows.
Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
Forward troubles Illinois, lock the front door, oh boy!
Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn.
Bother me tomorrow, today, I'll buy no sorrows.
Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
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Boy , this Fogerty song is talking about locking the door to smoke and then travel through the effects of marijuana ... Then you say if you do not want to travel on a flying spoon and see things provided by a magician! But if you do not want to see the truth in the song the problem is yours alone. In normal state no one can see elephants playing in the band or giant tumbling and at the end he says : Today I do not want problems and watch the back door for me smoking quiet ! Fogerty just wanted to write its version of Lucy in the Sky with diamonds .
It is NOT about drugs.
It is simply about childish imagination and the things that it can conjure up.
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. :-)
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.
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
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.