ELVIS PRESLEY – “All Shook Up”
Look! It’s Elvis!
The boogie-woogie piano forming this song’s undercarriage sounds so generic to me* that I get the best results from listening to it like a riddim, a bolt-on beat for Presley to freestyle over. Helpfully, that way of hearing it also draws full attention to Elvis’ voice.
By this time Presley was already a superstar in the UK, he’d just not gone to #1 yet. Why did “All Shook Up” manage it? Because nobody had sung the word “love” like Elvis does here – half thrusting, half swallowing, with that half-breath after it acting like a full stop. Politely carnal, respectfully smouldering – “I’m proud to say she?s my buttercup” – and as passionately humble as an ideal 50s man should be, Elvis-love seems as natural here as the histories tell you it was. Plus for the UK there was an exotic element – what, pray tell, was a “fuzzy tree”? (I should save this for his ’58 hits, but I wonder if Elvis joining the army actually made him sexier for UK fans? The oversexed over-here US G.I. had had a generation to seep into folk memory, after all.) .
*(with one exception: that occasional drumbeat, which sounds like a plimsoll hitting a tabletop. Cool!)
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Tom in Popular • 1,424 views • Share/Save
Yes, and doesn’t he mention a volcano here too? Politely carnal indeed…
tom you know the story behind the writing of this song right?
What, the one about Otis Blackwell writing it but Presley getting a co-writing credit anyway?
When I was very young I thought the song was about some bloke called Moshukup.
The Suzi Quatro version used to make me feel like a fuzzy tree in my long-gone youth…
Plimsoll on a table top percussion, very nice! The similar effect on Treat Me Nice sounds exactly like Elvis is slapping his (then not so concave) belly to the beat.
“Wild as a bug” is pretty exotic, too.
“Her lips are like a volcano… when it’s hot”. As opposed to cold, grey, craggy and dormant.