Just got back from Illinois
Lock the front door, oh boy
Got to set down, take a rest
On the portch.
Imagination sets in
Purty soon I’m singin’
Doo-doo-doo, lookin’ out my back door.
Or so says the song by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Actually, I was listening to this song on the Chronicle, Vol. 1 by Creedence Clearwater Revival when I was travelling through Illinois on my way back from the vacation I just took (finally, after ages and ages of not taking one).
This song perplexes me a little because it’s got a really toe-tapping tune, but if you read between the lines of the lyrics, it’s basically a ’60s-’70s drug song (“There’s a giant doing cartwheels, A statue wearing high heels. Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn. Dinosaur Victrola listening to Buck Owens. Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band. Won’t you take a ride on the flying spoon?”).
I like the tune, and I don’t mind the psychedelic imagery, but don’t at all like the drug subtext of the song.
The way the song is written, the drug subtext is only required if you read between the lines. If you read the lines themselves, it isn’t there. In fact, all the bizarre things that the singer sees are explicitly attributed to the imagination of a road-weary traveller, not to drugs. This, no doubt, is a “plausible deniability” lyric included in the song to give kids listening to the song a defense to present to their parents (and also to keep CCR from getting in trouble for corrupting the youth–further than they already were, that is).
My solution is to enjoy the song by refusing to accept its subtext. In other words, to take it at face value and focus on the lyrics instead of what they would have meant in the socio-cultural context in which they were written. Yes, I know that the song was originally about drugs, but I don’t have to accept that just because it’s what the songwriter intended. I can take the song in whatever sense I want in the privacy of my own mind–especially when he’s put a harmless interpretation into the lyrics themselves.
It’s kind of like that episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 where Joel points out to the ‘Bots that you don’t have to accept the ending of the movie that the filmmakers give you. You can write your own ending, if you don’t like theirs.
I guess just about every conscientious Christian has to do something like this when appreciating items of popular culture that contain elements not in accord with the faith. Whether it’s a song, a movie, a TV show, a novel, or what have you, virtually everything has something bad in it. And that’s how it’s always been. It was the same in the Middle Ages, too. (In fact, when he was dying, Chaucer apologized for having included so much non-pious material in The Canterbury Tales). But that’s what we have to do, whether we’re dealing with art or simply with other people: “Test everything, and hold fast to what is good,” in the words of St. Paul.
So that’s how I handle “Lookin’ Out My Back Door.”
I was tickled to realize that, like the traveller in the song, I had “just got back from Illinois” (at least, I passed through Illinois). What was even more surprising to me, though, was something that happened with a different song on the CD: “Down on the Corner,” which is about a group of poor kids who have their own band. At one point in the song the lyrics say: “Poorboy twangs the rythm out on his kalamazoo.” I have no idea what this means. I suppose it was just John Fogerty being playful and needed a rhyme for
“kazoo” (which he uses in the next line of the song).
As it happens, I was listening to this song on my trip, looked up, and realized what town I was in at the moment: Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Weird, man. Weird.
Speaking of song lyrics…
I have always wanted to stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona hoping to see a girl in a flatbed Ford.
I heard on a documentary (VH1?) that CCR never really got along well with other bands because they never got into the whole 60’s drug thing. So maybe your made up interputation is more acurate than you thought?
I like the idea Jimmy, but I find myself unable to put a positive spin on ‘Highway to Hell’ or ‘Hell’s Bells” by AC/DC and many other songs of my youth. Sometimes you cannot remove the context of the writer.
…and that, Tim, would be the difference between SUBTEXT, which Jimmy is talking about, and TEXT, which you are talking about.
Bill writes:
I’ve *done* that! I was once passing through Winslow and, when I realized it, I hopped out and stood on a corner precisely to fulfill this song lyric.
Well, not the part about the girl in the flatbed Ford part (I’m a Chevy man), but the standing on a corner part.
Steve writes:
Yes, though I’ll reject parts of the text of a song if it suits me, as well. Thus when I’m driving along in my (Chevy) truck and singing a song that has *minor* objectionable elements in it, I’ll replace them with unobjectionable ones.
This only works to a point, however. I’m sure that things like the AC/DC songs Tim mentions would overwhelm this technique, making the number of re-writes needed so massive that it would totally kill the entertainment value of the song.
Call me naïve, but I believed John Fogerty when he said that this was a song he wrote for his son when the boy was very young. (I’ve never believed the Beatles on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” by contrast.) He wanted a song that his son could enjoy, and indeed, was very gratified to hear him singing “doo doo doo” with the radio one day. Might have been on VH-1’s Storytellers, or I read it somewhere. Sorry I’ve got no source.
Myself, I keep an eye out for a barefoot girl, sitting on the hood of a Dodge, drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain…