Guess Who Did This One

Song 238: This week's playlist track is Shakin' All Over by Guess Who, written by Johnny Kidd. I missed this one the first time around, in the summer of '65, like a lot of other classics in that era, due to the fact that my family didn't approve of that devil's music that I liked, so at first I mostly only listened to RnR on visits to friends, or at odd moments when I could sneak off to some hidden corner with the transistor radio in hand. In the early '70s, on my own, assembling a record collection, I started catching up on a lot of music I had missed, and I only had to hear this track once to know I wanted it -- I really really really wanted it. I had already heard a few Guess Who cuts, and I had read a Rolling Stone review of one of their LPs that suggested the band's name amounted to a sly admission of their inability to craft an original sound. Guess Who we are on this record? Led Zeppelin. Guess Who we are on this one? The Doors. So suggested the RS review, and it seemed justified, as I had myself mistaken one of their songs for Zeppelin, and another one I mistook for a Doors track the first time I heard it on the radio. Therefore, Guess Who was not a band of musical visionaries with a serious and important unfolding message to share, unlike the Airplane, the Stones, Dylan, John and Paul (and George), the Band, Hendrix, etc. -- the RnR judge had ruled that Guess Who was only in it for the money. Then when this song came crackling out of my speakers, I couldn't identify the band (Guess Who!), but on finding out, the news didn't dampen my desire to get the record -- I was practically Shakin' All Over just from the need to hear the track again. If they were only in it for the money, in this case, that was OK -- I would gladly give them my money for a copy of this record -- because when they rocked hard enough to wake the devil, as they did on this cut, they rolled out one of the finest guilty pleasures in all of the devil's music.