You Shook Me All Night Long
You Shook Me All Night Long opens on a G major riff that Angus Young plays with the focus of someone who knows exactly what a stadium sounds like. Malcolm Young’s rhythm guitar locks against Phil Rudd’s drums. No excess. Nothing to argue with. Brian Johnson steps in on the verse with a delivery that is raw, precise and entirely his own. The band recorded the album at Compass Point Studios in Nassau in the spring of 1980. Producer Mutt Lange built the session around a sound that was bigger than previous AC/DC records without losing what made those records work. The track runs three minutes and thirty-two seconds. Every second is accounted for.
Bon Scott died on February 19, 1980. AC/DC had a record to make. They auditioned dozens of replacement singers in five weeks. Brian Johnson had been working as a tile layer in Gateshead. He had fronted a band called Geordie a decade earlier and had not recorded since. The Young brothers heard what they needed and called him back the same day. Johnson flew to London and wrote with the band almost immediately. Some people who knew Bon Scott have said that at least one lyric in this song was originally his. Malcolm Dome told biographer Jesse Fink that he saw the line “she told me to come but I was already there” written in Scott’s notebook before he died. AC/DC has never confirmed it. The credit reads Angus Young, Malcolm Young, Brian Johnson.
Back in Black is one of the best-selling albums in recorded history with an estimated fifty million copies sold worldwide. You Shook Me All Night Long was the album’s lead single and reached number thirty-five on the Billboard Hot 100 and number thirty-eight on the UK Singles Chart. The RIAA certified the single six times platinum. VH1 ranked it number ten on their list of the 100 Greatest Songs of the 80s. Rolling Stone placed it at number 287 on the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. AC/DC performed it with Steven Tyler at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2003. Robert Christgau called it the band’s only great work of art. Forty-six years ago today the record existed for the first time.