Did you know that the first lyric Brian Johnson ever wrote for AC/DC is also the first one fans heard?
“She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean / She was the best damn woman that I ever seen,” sings Johnson on “You Shook Me All Night Long,” the first single released off their historic Back in Black album.
Those were the first words the singer came up with as AC/DC pursued him to be Bon Scott’s successor.
Brian Johnson Auditions for AC/DC
The audition process is something Johnson recalled in a previous interview with Dan Rather and highlighted in a recently uploaded AXS TV clip.
Johnson received a call from a German woman who insisted he come to London to audition for a band, but wouldn’t say who. Without knowing who the band was, the singer declined until the woman on the phone slipped up and said the initials of the band are AC and DC, perhaps mistaking it for an acronym to shroud the band’s true identity in mystery.
Of course, Johnson realized the massive opportunity ahead and agreed to try out. He sang Ike and Tina Turner’s “Nutbush City Limits” and that the rest of the band had to learn it. A couple of weeks later, he was on plane to the Bahamas with the band and work at the legendary Compass Point studio is Nassau began.
The Back in Black Sessions
Convinced with Johnson’s singing ability, AC/DC then tasked him with his next role — writing lyrics.
“Malcolm [Young] came up, I think it was the second day, and said, ‘Can you write lyrics?’ And I said, ‘I’ll give it a shot,'” Johnson recalls, as he sequestered himself into his “horrible little room” that had “a hand basin and a desk and that was it.”
The singer also claims “a machete and a six-foot fishing spear” were within reach “because [of] the Tahitian drug dealers in the jungle coming down to steal everything.”
Curiously, Tahiti and the Bahamas are an ocean apart, divided by two contiguous continents — about 5,600 miles separate the geographical locations. Perhaps there is some embellishment there or a mix-up amid decades of tales that could fill countless lifetimes of experiences compared to most of us.
Brian Johnson’s First AC/DC Lyric
“I just heard this riff and I just wrote,” Johnson says, ready to pass Malcolm’s test. “I was a car fanatic then as well, so the first line I wrote down was ‘She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean.’ That was the first thing I could come up with —‚ ‘Best damn woman I had ever seen‘ and it just went on from there on.”
In just six weeks, AC/DC had what would become one of the highest selling albums of all time. It has been certified 26 times platinum in the United States and has sold an estimated 50 million copies worldwide.
Watch Johnson’s full recollection of that pivotal moment in AC/DC’s career in the video below.
Brian Johnson Talks About Back in Black With Dan Rather
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