Songfacts®:

• In this song, Eddie Money sings about a wild night with a reckless gal. She takes him for a ride in her daddy's car, blows out the speakers and gets high. Later on, she treats him to a strip tease. The whole time, there's plenty of shakin' going on.
• Money wrote this song with his bass player, Ralph Carter, and with Elizabeth Myers, a composer who usually worked on commercials. The album was produced by Tom Dowd, whose illustrious career included production work for Aretha Franklin, The Allman Brothers and Rod Stewart.
• The girl in this song is named Rosanna ("Rosanna's daddy had a car she loved to drive"). That was a popular name in 1982, the year Toto released their "Rosanna."
• If you listen carefully at the 1:03 mark, you can hear that Money sings: "Her tits were shakin' till the middle of the night," which is published as "We did some shakin' till the middle of the night."
  
  "I said it and I thought it was funny," Money told Rolling Stone. "I was high. I didn't give a s--t."
  
  Money isn't the first to slip some tit into a track: The Beatles did it on their song "Girl."
• Money was in the middle of a string of hits when he released this song. No Control was his fourth album, and by this time he had established himself as a purveyor of upbeat rock songs with loads of pop appeal.
• The video was directed by Mark Robinson, whose credits include Tommy Tutone's "Jenny (867-5309)" and Pat Benatar's "Shadows Of The Night." The "Shakin'" video stars Apollonia Kotero, who became a Prince protégé and starred in his movie Purple Rain in 1984. According to Money, she posed two big challenges:
  
  1) She was a terrible dancer. You'll see she resorts to some kind of sprinkler-head move when she's shakin' it.
  
  2) Her boyfriend was on the set and was the jealous type.
  
  Money also points out that the video was the first to show cars souped-up with hydraulics and bouncing up and down - something seen in many rap videos of the early '90s.