A hair metal classic, "Rock Me" finds Great White lead singer Jack Russell trying to sweet talk a girl into staying the night. She knows it might be morally questionable, but he has an answer:
If you stay the night, oh yeah
We'll make the wrong seem right
The entire first verse, where he makes his case, is done with mellow, subtle instrumentation. But when the chorus kicks in, so do the drums, and the guitars come alive. "Rock me, roll me through the night" Russell screams. "We'll burn in love tonight."
In the second verse, he's back to the sweet talk, but then it's back to the chorus, bigger than ever. We can assume she gave in and agreed to rock him through the night.
The song has an intriguing musical structure. The same bass note repeats throughout the verses with little guitar licks and even some harmonica layered in. "We never leave the note, but I'm doing a bunch of stuff that goes in different areas while that note just continues to drone along," Great White guitarist
Mark Kendall explained to Songfacts. "So, I'm actually picking up the dynamic slightly, despite the different things that I'm doing. It's almost like creating an atmosphere that kind of sucks you in, in a way, with the dynamic of that note that just keeps going."
The album version runs 7:19, with Russell's vocal coming in at the :47 mark. The single was cut down to 4:12, and the video version to about 5:03. In these condensed versions, the vocal comes in about 15 seconds in.
Jack Russell wrote the lyric, with Great White guitarists Michael Lardie and Mark Kendall writing the music along with their producer, Alan Niven, who was also their manager.
"Rock Me" was the first Hot 100 chart hit for Great White, who needed it to keep swimming. After releasing their 1984 debut album, they were dropped by their label, EMI, and issued their next one, Shot In The Dark, independently in 1986. It earned them a deal with Capitol Records, which gave the album a proper release, but they were under a lot of pressure to deliver a hit with their next one, Once Bitten.
"It was kind of a do-or-die record," Mark Kendal said in his Songfacts interview. "Had we not come up with something memorable, or something that people would want to have, it would have been career over right there. But when I heard 'Rock Me' back in the studio, over the speakers all blaring in front of the record company, I was getting chills. I was like, 'Oh, my God.'"
Kendall's instinct was right: The song made waves and helped the album go Platinum. Their next album, Twice Shy, went double Platinum.
The music video, directed by Nigel Dick, might be the only one ever made where a beautiful woman fires a harpoon gun. Great White used a shark theme in their visuals, with lots of women showing up in shark-tooth necklaces (and often little else). In "Rock Me," the girl also has a dress resembling scales and a fishing net. Perhaps she's a predatory mermaid hunting the great white shark.
Amateur guitarists often attempt this song and post the results on the internet. According to Kendall, they never get it quite right. "I still have yet to see somebody play the correct chord on 'Rock Me,' where I slide up the neck," he said. "That's like an A-minor up here though, and they'll do a little two-finger thing."
