Greatest Songs Ever: “You Shook Me All Night Long”
It was early 1980, and AC/DC were about to throw in the towel. The band had formed in Australia seven years earlier, powered by the manic onstage cavortings of short-trousered ax imp Angus Young and a blues-juiced assault that suggested Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath at a kegger. Over the course of seven albums, they laid waste to their homeland and exported that success to Europe. But the mysterious death of their notoriously hell-raising frontman Bon Scott brought the celebrations to a quick halt.On the morning of February 20, Scott was found dead in a car in London. The precise circumstances of his death were never ascertained, but he had been on a drinking bender the night before, and, unable to rouse him from the car, his friends had left him to sleep it off. He never woke up.
The band was in shock for months, uncertain if they could — or should — continue. “We really didn’t know what to do,” Angus later recalled. “Funnily enough, even Bon’s parents said that we should go on, and that made us feel better.”
Replacing a frontman as charismatic as Scott seemed impossible, however, until they recalled having seen a leather-lunged youngster with an awesome vocal range some years earlier, performing in an obscure Brit band called Geordie.
Things had not gone well for Geordie, and by the time AC/DC tracked Brian Johnson down, he was already beginning to feel, at 33, over the hill. Johnson lacked Scott’s slithery onstage allure, but his turbo-charged voice more than compensated, and his rough-hewn personality fit perfectly.
The new lineup headed for Compass Point studios in the Bahamas with a clutch of songs written before Scott’s death, meeting up with reclusive producer “Mutt” Lange, who had helmed AC/DC’s previous album, Highway to Hell.
Things were already going well when inspiration struck Johnson in the recording booth. “I was in this little concrete shell thing with a window, and it came to me,” he recalled. “I’ve always been into motor cars, and cars and women are pretty much the same: They go fast and then let you down. Then they bring you right back up again when you see the new model.” He hit on the line “She was a fast machine/She kept her motor clean,” and it became the spark of “You Shook Me All Night Long,” a simple tale of a seismic one-night stand.
For all its seediness, the song, Johnson believes, came from a higher place, calming his anxieties about his new gig: “I don’t give a fuck if people believe me or not, but something washed through me and went, ‘It’s all right, son, it’s all right.’ This kind of calm. I’d like to think it was Bon, but I can’t, because I’m too cynical.”
Spiked with a swaggering Angus Young riff and promoted via an outrageously erotic video brimming with leather-clad, be-zippered lovelies, “You Shook Me All Night Long” gave AC/DC their first American hit, propelling its parent album, Back in Black, to multiplatinum status.
The song has subsequently proven to have legs as long as the women in its video and has transcended its genre and inspired a bewildering range of covers (including an impassioned makeover by Tori Amos, an unholy duet between Anastacia and Celine Dion, and a glossy pop treatment by Mrs. “Mutt” Lange herself, Shania Twain). And, of course, no bar jukebox or strip club has been the same since.
