The AC/DC song that almost became a folk tune: “What the fuck is this”
Rule number one about AC/DC is that they do whatever the hell they want. They have their music down to a science of making swinging rock and roll, and no matter how much trends might change throughout their history, they will always be serving up that same sleazy brand of rock and roll until they can’t do it anymore. Producers tend to want to push anyone towards the money, though, and that meant that ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ came dangerously close to mellow territory.
Then again, AC/DC doesn’t really make a mellow track. For as long as they have been together, it seems like they just write the same rock and roll song over and over again… that song just happens to be one of the greatest works of all time. When Bon Scott passed away, though, they were going to need the goods if they were going to do him proud.
Brian Johnson managed to put his own spin on the band while still having that same screeching tone Scott was great at. However, he wasn’t as confident in his craft as everyone else. Although legendary producer Mutt Lange was brought in to make Back in Black into the gargantuan record it would become, he did have some words about how ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’.
Compared to the classic opening where Johnson comes screaming in singing about a woman being a fast machine, Lange thought they were doing it all wrong. He wanted something that was more in line with softer music, but the rest of the guys were never going to unplug just to satisfy a producer.
As Johnson remembered, Lange told the frontman everything sounded too cluttered, saying, “Mutt said, ‘You know Brian, there’s too many words in it’. I [changed] that and then Malcolm [Young] heard it, and he stopped and said, ‘What the fuck is this? Do it back the old way. It rocks the old way.’”
Looking back on the original version, Angus said the version they heard sounded a lot rootsier, explaining, “It sounded a little bit folky. Like folk rocky.” While all of the members of AC/DC are men of many talents, there’s a good chance that even they couldn’t have sold a sex song played like a country-style ballad.
Considering how the track is built, nothing else would have worked except for Johnson’s opening lines. ‘Back in Black’ might benefit from having gaps in the lyrics, but this is not that kind of song. This about cutting right to the chase for sleazy rock and roll, and hearing him singing like a rabid dog is exactly what people want to hear when it blares out of the speakers.
With a pedigree like Lange’s as a rock juggernaut, he did have a certain folk spin on his future projects, too, eventually trying to work up the Def Leppard classic ‘Love Bites’ into a Don Henley-style country song before they settled on the guitar-heavy version that most people know today.
Lange may have gotten his wish later in life when working with Shania Twain, but AC/DC weren’t about to roll over just because one person told them to. They were rock and rollers before anything else, and if it didn’t rock when they started playing it, what was the point in trying to work on it at all?
