All Shook Up

Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew has got the Jeff Beck Group cranking out "All Shook Up" from Beck-Ola right now, and if that raw, growling take on the old Elvis Presley number does not get your engines revving, you might need to check your pulse. Beck and the boys took what had been a bouncy little rocker and turned it into something heavier, a bluesy stomper full of that metallic edge that pointed the way toward the hard rock and heavy metal sounds still shaking rooms years later. Rod Stewart is out front with those serrated vocals, Ronnie Wood locked in on bass, Nicky Hopkins adding the piano color, and Tony Newman pounding the drums while Beck rips through the guitar with those slide antics and feedback that mark the whole album. The sessions themselves were a quick affair, done over six days in April of 1969 at De Lane Lea Studios, and the sleeve carried Beck's own note admitting that with all the competition out there it was almost impossible to come up with anything totally original, so they had not, but the accent was on heavy music. Sit back and see if you can find a small place in your heads for it, he wrote. Rod later looked back in his autobiography and called the choice of not one but two Elvis hits a sign they were still lagging behind the contemporary way of doing things, though the reworking of "All Shook Up" still lands with plenty of punch. He had his own issues with another track on the record, saying the lyrics he came up with for "Spanish Boots" were a load of old nonsense about monasteries and tapestries and putting your boots on, the kind of thing that makes him cringe now. Those sessions also featured the usual run of confrontations between producer Mickie Most and an increasingly moody Jeff, the kind of friction that seemed to follow the guitarist from one lineup to the next. The album title itself is a pun on the old Rock-Ola jukebox company, and the cover art borrows René Magritte's surreal painting of a giant green apple filling a room, the sort of image that fits a band more interested in shaking things up than playing it straight. Beck had already swapped out the previous drummer because he wanted a heavier direction, and bringing Hopkins in full-time helped fill out the sound, but the whole thing still felt like a bridge between the blues-rock of their first album Truth and the louder territory that was opening up around them. The group was booked for Woodstock not long after, yet the lineup fell apart before they ever got there, another one of those near-misses that left the record standing as a snapshot of what might have been.

That restless energy traces right back to how Jeff Beck got started in the first place. Born Geoffrey Arnold Beck in Wallington, Surrey, he was the kid who heard Les Paul play "How High the Moon" on the radio and decided the electric guitar was for him even after his mother dismissed the sound as all tricks. He built his own early instruments out of cigar boxes and a fence post with frets painted on, the kind of homemade contraption that got him through the early years while he worked odd jobs as a painter and decorator, a groundsman on a golf course, and a car paint sprayer. Those manual trades kept him going until the music started to take hold. He played around with local outfits like the Nightshift and the Tridents, absorbing the blues and rock and roll that were floating through the clubs, and his sister introduced him to another young guitarist named Jimmy Page. When Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds, Page was the first call, but he passed and recommended Beck instead. Beck did not even own a guitar of his own at the time, so the band loaned him the red Fender Telecaster Clapton had been using for those first gigs. He stepped in during 1965, brought a wilder, more experimental edge to tracks like "Heart Full of Soul" and "Shapes of Things," and stayed with the Yardbirds for roughly twenty months before heading out on his own. From there he put together the Jeff Beck Group with Stewart on vocals and Wood on bass, the lineup that cut Truth and then Beck-Ola, records that still get spun by crews who appreciate the freeform album-rock approach. The guitarist never settled into one style for long, moving from the heavy blues-rock of those early group records into jazz fusion, instrumental work, and collaborations that kept people guessing, yet the core of what he did always came back to that inventive touch on the instrument. Fans who want to dig deeper into the catalog can check the Jeff Beck official website, follow along on the official Facebook, the official Instagram, and the official X account. Those pages keep the stories and the music circulating for anyone still listening. Over here at THE ZOO, the Zoo Crew keeps the deep cuts and the artist backstories rolling for the Zoo Freaks, the same freeform spirit that runs through records like Beck-Ola. "All Shook Up" still sounds like the moment when a classic rock and roll song got grabbed by a band that was ready to push it somewhere louder and grittier, the kind of track that fits right into a set built on album sides and the stories behind them. The Jeff Beck Group may not have stuck around long enough to hit every festival they were booked for, but the records they left behind still hold up when you drop the needle and let the band do the talking.