The drug anthem Creedence Clearwater Revival intended as a children’s song
Whether it’s the 19th-century opium habits of Hector Berlioz or the perpetual acid trips of the Grateful Dead, drugs have always had something of an omnipresence within the musical realm.
Even during the LSD-fueled hippie age of the 1960s, though, it is worth remembering that not every hit song was rooted in illicit substances.
That didn’t stop sensationalist tabloids and overly anxious parental groups from determining that virtually every song in the hit parade was either influenced by or promoted drug use, and should therefore be banned. The Beatles bore the brunt of that drug-fueled paranoia, with accusations stemming the spectrum of believability from ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ being about LSD, to some of their songs promoting Satanic worship if you play them in reverse.
Admittedly, though, the Fab Four did ingest enough mind-expanding drugs to provide a degree of credence to those theories.
Creedence Clearwater Revival, on the other hand, were about as close to straight-edge as you could get within the counterculture age. From the very early days of the outfit, John Fogerty and the gang agreed to stay away from drugs or alcohol at their shows, vowing instead to “get high on the music”. Perhaps that goes some way to explaining why Creedence Clearwater Revival were among the most musically tight and consistent acts of that era, but that anti-drug stance never quite reached the masses.
Namely, the band’s 1970 stormer ‘Lookin’ Out My Back Door’ attracted a number of accusations of being inspired by Fogerty’s non-existent drug habits. To be fair to those accusers, lyrics like “Tambourines and elephants are playin’ in the band, Won’t you take a ride on the flyin’ spoon?” and “happy creatures dancin’ on the lawn” certainly seem to be in-keeping with the psychedelic imagery that was rife during the hippie age, and it isn’t too egregious to assume a band – particularly one which played Woodstock – decided to experiment with the drug world.
In reality, though, that classic song never came close to the realm of an acid trip, instead arising from the unfiltered mind of Fogerty’s three-year-old son, Josh. In fact, Josh apparently wrote the titular lyric of the song, inspiring his father to flesh it out into a fully-fledged country rock classic, and earning a number-two charting single in the process.
“I knew he would love it if he heard me on the radio singing – doot doot doo, lookin’ out my back door,” Fogerty once recalled of the song, painting a far more wholesome picture than those who were determined to make the song about drugs.
According to the co-songwriter, the rest of the vivid world painted by the track came from his own childhood, namely an old Dr Seuss book called And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which does seem to track with the mentions of elephants and happy creatures.
Far from being an acid-rock anthem, then, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Lookin’ Out My Back Door’ is much more akin to a bedtime story or lullaby for Fogerty’s infant son while he was out on the road sharing his wealth of musical talents with the wider world.
