‘You Shook Me All Night Long’: The song AC/DC thought sounded too folky
Hard rock has always been at the heart of everything that AC/DC does. When fans gather to see them in stadiums today, they know they are getting decades of music from a band that has consistently been one of the biggest voices in guitar music for the last few decades. The ethos lies at the heart of everything they do, and it’s something they are unwaveringly true towards.
Before the band committed to writing their album Let There Be Rock, they pondered what sort of album they should make. Hard rock was on the way out, as punk and new wave became the biggest new genres in the world. There was a moment when the band considered betraying their instincts and going with modern trends, but then Angus and Malcolm Young remembered the music they loved, they decided to stay true to that heavy guitar sound.
“I thought it was great because everyone else in the world was into whole other genres – there was punk music, there was new wave; it was all this other stuff that was coming out,” said Angus when discussing Let There Be Rock, “And I just thought, ‘This is pure magic’. And that album defined AC/DC in my eyes. That’s when I went, ‘This is a great band’.”
From that moment on, it became clear to AC/DC that the best thing they could do was stay true to what they knew, which meant continuing to make exciting guitar music. In doing so, they cemented themselves as one of the best rock bands of all time with some of the most exciting riffs ever committed to sound.
When Angus was talking specifically about the track ‘Bad Boy Boogie’, he spoke about how good Malcolm was at writing these guitar lines and making them unique in their simplicity. “[It] has got a flavour because it’s got a little bit of a twist in it,” said Angus, “It sounds easy but Malcolm had a little twist that I don’t think many could do […] How clever was he to do that? I still play it just for the fact that he just changed that little note around.”
This upbeat attitude towards hard rock music persisted even when the band changed around. When Bon Scott, unfortunately, passed away, and Brian Johnson joined the line-up, AC/DC continued making great rock ‘n’ roll and were open to collaboration when doing so. However, it’s interesting to hear that one of their most successful songs since was a struggle to put together at first.
“The boys were in and I was singing it,” said Johnson before reciting the words to ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’, “They took me out and said, ‘No Brian, there’s too many words in it’, and I said, ‘Oh, what do you mean?’ And he said, ‘I think it should go like this’.”
The band proposed a revised version of the song with the same words but spaced out further apart. So, after every line, there is a silent line with just an instrumental. The moment the band heard it this new way, they immediately hated it, with Angus Young admitting, “It sounded a bit folky.” They reverted back to Johnson’s original structure and ended up writing what has now become one of their most famous tracks. At the heart of that song lies the thing that continues to separate AC/DC from other bands for all this time: killer guitar.
