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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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.
DESERT ISLAND DISC WATCH
Gary Glitter, singer (1981)
Jimmy Tarbuck, comedian (2004)
Imelda Staunton, actress (2005)
Another reason this was his first number one, rather than Hound Dog, Blue Suede Shoes or Heartbreak Hotel, is that the flood of Elvis 45s released when he first hit probably split the vote. Blue Suede Shoes, for instance, only reached no.9 – punters were spoilt for choice with Heartbreak Hotel released just 2 or 3 weeks earlier. He had new chart entries every month in 1956 from July onwards.
In 1957 HMV had only (!) released three singles before All Shook Up charted in June. Eight more Presley songs (double A’s were listed separately) would chart before 1957 was out.
It was also his last single on the purple HMV label with gold lettering, and properly beautiful objects they are too.