All You Need is a Furtive Shake

Another song-poem coupling for you today, and a pair of absolute classics of the genre from the great Gene Marshall who, of course, also worked under the names Gene Merlino and John Muir amongst others. 

Here are both sides of the late 1977/early 1978 Preview release Shake Your Good Stuff backed with the utterly bonkers All You Need is a Fertile Mind.

 

The lyric to Shake Your Good Stuff was composed by Herman Earl, although why anyone would want to admit to writing this rubbish is beyond me:

 

I want you, baby, all night long

I’m gonna love you like a, love like a bone

Shake your good stuff all day long

I want you baby to come into this house

I’m gonna love you like a cat love a mouse

Shake your good stuff all night long

Shake your good stuff till the cows come home

Shake it all night long

Shake your good stuff

Shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it

 

Just drivel. Copyright in these 140 seconds of utter nonsense was registered by Preview’s publishing arm Rivian Music in November 1977. I’ve not found anything else written by Mr Earl, but I would be surprised if this were his only attempt at pop immortality, and I would love to hear some of his other attempts at poetry or song lyrics.

 

I was always under the impression that the version of All You Need is a Fertile Mind that appeared on the Bar/None compilation The American Song Poem Anthology: Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush back in 2003 was dubbed from a substandard copy. Anyone who heard this album will know that the backing instrumentation on this particular track is muffled and distorted, and not up to Preview’s usual standard (if you can call it that). So imagine my surprise when I recently dug out my own copy of the 7” and discovered it was actually released like that.

 

The cut you have here has come straight from my personal collection, and it’s just as awful as the one Phil Milstein had access to when he was compiling The American Song Poem Anthology an essential collection, incidentally for anyone interested in the genre. It’s such a shame that the instrumentation is buried under the muddy production, as there’s a really interesting lead guitar break about 90 seconds in which is barely audible but well worth listening out for.

 

And those lyrics! Who couldn’t love a song that opens with the line ‘Wow! Look at all that pornography!’? All You Need is a Fertile Mind is one of the very few song-poems about masturbation, only in this instance the writer insists that your average onanist has no need to waste his or her (or their) money on porn magazines, a ‘material waste of photography’ apparently, when anyone with a dirty mind and a decent memory can knock out a quick hand shandy. Yeah! It doesn’t quite compare to the brilliance of the Who’s Pictures of Lily, but then what could?

 

All You Need is a Fertile Mind was written by Francis ‘Sonny’ Fernandes, with copyright in the song once again registered by Rivian Music in October 1977 and, like Mr. Earl, this appears to be the only one of Sonny’s lyrics to be given the full Preview package. A shame, as I’m sure there was much more in Mr Fernandes’s own fertile mind that was worth mining.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Stuff HERE

Download Fertile HERE