The AC/DC classic ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ gets a unique cover treatment courtesy of singer/songwriter Mike Errico, who’s offering it here as an exclusive premiere ahead of his latest album, Minor Fits.
Although he doesn’t usually work in the same hard-rock vein mined by AC/DC, Errico tells Ultimate Classic Rock that his long-standing love for the song is real — and his clever approach to playing it has its roots in his years as a young musician making ends meet by performing covers at a dive bar on Bleecker Street in New York City.
“I didn’t want to be a human jukebox,” explains Errico. “To me, if you want to hear a song done ‘right,’ go to the original and listen to it. But I was so confused about how to start out in music that I decided maybe I could tolerate doing covers if I twisted up a bunch of songs I liked and injected my own personality into the gig.”
The result, he says now, was “maybe the worst, most confusing, set in the world” — one that spanned reinvented versions of everything from Stevie Wonder‘s ‘Sir Duke’ to musical numbers, Sinatra songs, and Ozzy Osbourne‘s ‘Crazy Train.’
“Honestly, I had no idea what I was doing,” he admits. “I just knew I wanted to play.”