The song also belongs to those pieces in the John Fogerty catalog that he wrote for his son Josh who was three years old. Fogerty put the action “out my back door” to a place he could escape to. In the book a kid is watching a parade go by with wondrous and magical animals and characters. Seuss book called And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. "Lookin' Out My Back Door" may be considered one of the escapism songs of John Fogerty. It was also a certified platinum in early 1990's. The single was certified gold by the RIAA in the USA, for sales of over one million copies. "Lookin' Out My Back Door" peaked on the charts at #2 in the USA, #2 in Germany and #4 in Belgium. Both cuts ended up to the Cosmo's Factory album launched in summer 1970. 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."Lookin' Out My Back Door" b/w " Long As I Can See the Light" was the third 45 rpm Creedence Clearwater Revival released in 1970. 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.
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. 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. But he always goes back to saying "get out my back door," which is the only puzzling part. Then throughout the rest of the song all sorts of nonsensical things start happening, which come as a result of relaxing. Maybe he just got back from touring, a press conference or working, because he got back from Illinois. So he begins by saying that he gets home and wants to shut out the outside world. "Just got home from Illinois lock the front door oh boy! / Got to sit down take a rest on the porch. John Fogerty starts off the song by saying: 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.
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. General CommentI often do this song in karaoke, which is something I do about 3-4 times per month. 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. 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. "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. "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. Great things were to come, but not in the way the 50s envisioned them. My InterpretationI always thought that it was a commentary on how the 50s were.Īll 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.