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#330944 - 11/03/2010 14:07 I'm Shakin'
Robotic
pooh-bah

Registered: 06/04/2005
Posts: 2026
Loc: Seattle transplant
The story of a search for a song.

Around 1987 I had the great opportunity to travel to London with my junior college and stay over there taking classes for a quarter. As soon as the idea was in my head to go, I started hanging out at the local pub in Palo Alto called The Lancashire Tavern.
The place is still there, although now it's called the Rose and Crown and a few small changes here and there.

Well, a couple times a week I'd head over to 'The Lanc' to drink beer and throw darts. I'd bought a set of darts and was set on making darts my game.

Man, those were good times. One thing over at the pub- they had this great old jukebox to make music for the place. No modern CDs or anything like that- this thing took quarters and flipped 45s.
A true marvel of a bygone era. ...and man, that box was stacked with classics! I wish I knew what happened to that machine.
There was one song on it that I'd never heard anywhere else- and me loving the music of the 50's and 60's that was saying something. The song had this wild sax bump that was really catchy.

Years later I went back to my old pub to see how things had changed. Well, the new name had brought with it a new jukebox- one of those CD playing ones that has about a thousand songs in it from hundreds of albums to choose from. What a shame to have lost that piece of musical memorabilia. The new player took dollar bills and was full of modern music. It was quite a blow.

I always kept a part of that song and the title in my head and occasionally over the years it would pop up and haunt me for a while. I couldn't remember the name of the artist, but I figured eventually I'd figure it out.

Since the internet was born I've done a couple of searches trying to find it, but with limited success. Eventually, last year I found a recent version of the song done by a modern-era Rockabilly group called The Blasters (from Downey, CA, no less!). That version is pretty good.

So, a week or so ago I went looking again to see what I could find.
I started with The Blasters entry on wikipedia and found the song on one of their albums
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blasters_%28album%29
That listing showed the author of the song to be Rudy Toombs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Toombs
and that article said the song was a hit for Little Willie John
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Willie_John
Well, that was easy, eh?
There must be some video versions up somewhere... so googling got me these results
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=I%27m%20shakin%27&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#

and what do you know- there it was among a slew of other covers-
I'm Shakin' by Little Willie John

I found it on multiple albums available through Amazon.
Awesome.
One just arrived yesterday.

Here's The Blasters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB2kogSjyQU

Very true to the original, just pumped up a bit in all the right spots.

Oh- and a more modern song with the same title by a band called Rooney (most of the google returns) has nothing whatsoever to do with the song I like.
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#330947 - 11/03/2010 15:40 Re: I'm Shakin' [Re: Robotic]
canuckInOR
carpal tunnel

Registered: 13/02/2002
Posts: 3212
Loc: Portland, OR
Originally Posted By: Robotic
The story of a search for a song.
Dang... I thought this was a thread about the big one hitting California.

Ah, well... at least I got a cool tune out of it. smile

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