Rattlesnake Shake
| "Rattlesnake Shake" | |
|---|---|
| Single by Fleetwood Mac | |
| from the album Then Play On | |
| B-side | "Coming Your Way" |
| Format | Vinyl, 7" |
| Recorded | 1969 |
| Genre | Blues rock |
| Length | 3:32 |
| Label | Reprise |
| Songwriter(s) | Peter Green |
| Producer(s) | Fleetwood Mac |
"Rattlesnake Shake" is a song by British rock group Fleetwood Mac, written by guitarist Peter Green, which first appeared on their 1969 album Then Play On. The track was considered the high point of its parent album, and it was also one of the band's crowd-pleasers in the late 1960s.
Although "Oh Well" was a hit in the UK, that song was not the group's first single released in America. Instead, Clifford Davis, who was Fleetwood Mac's manager at the time, selected "Rattlesnake Shake" to be released in the US since he thought it would become a big hit, but it did not chart anywhere. After the failure of "Rattlesnake Shake", "Oh Well" was chosen as the second single. "Oh Well" fared much better, and became the band's first song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
According to Mick Fleetwood, the double time shuffle near the end of the song was not intended to happen. Instead of removing the shuffle the band decided that they really liked it, so they kept it. Mick Fleetwood ranked the song in his top 11 favorite Fleetwood Mac songs of all-time list since he was able to participate in bringing out the character of the song. It incorporated the freedom to go off on a tangent, to jam – the classic ‘Do you jam, dude?’ We learned that as players. You hear that alive and well in the double-time structure that I put in at the end, which on stage could last half an hour. It was our way of being in The Grateful Dead.
In a Q&A, Peter Green revealed that "Rattlesnake Shake" was about masturbation. In 2014, Mick Fleetwood confirmed this in his autobiography "Play On", stating that "Rattlesnake Shake" is an ode to masturbation as a cure for the blues. "I'm named in it, as a guy who does the rattlesnake shake to jerk away my sadness whenever I don't have a chick. That was an appropriate immortalisation of my younger self, to be sure." Green also said the band used a tape of a real rattlesnake to create the rattling effects heard at the end of each chorus.
The song has been very well received; the magazine Rolling Stone has hailed the track as Peter Green's best song along with "Albatross.Ultimate Classic Rock also received the track very warmly, and ranked it #7 on the Top 10 'Peter Green Fleetwood Mac Songs' list.Paste Magazine also rated the song at number #19 on the 20 Best Fleetwood Mac Songs Of All Time.
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