Highway to Hell was the 1979 album that broke AC/DC in America, but its success was not without sacrifice. With the band’s US label, Atlantic, demanding the Antipodeans deliver a hit, they urged the quintet to work with a producer who knew what American radio wanted, rather than with their longstanding producers George Young and Harry Vanda. The pair had successfully stewarded AC/DC to this point in their career (and, as older brother to guitarists Angus and Malcom Young, George was quite literally family). After a brief dalliance with Eddie Kramer (Kiss, Led Zeppelin), the band teamed up with Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the South African producer who would go on to have multi-platinum hits with Def Leppard (Pyromania, Hysteria) and Shania Twain (The Woman In Me), and who had recently produced The Boomtown Rats’ UK Number One single, “Rat Trap”. On previous AC/DC recordings, capturing the live vibe of the band had been deemed more important than perfect performances. But Lange was a stickler for precision with an ear for melody and harmony, qualities that elevated the band’s sweat-drenched rock’n’roll into something grander—and nowhere more so than on the anthemic title track (inspired by AC/DC’s gruelling touring schedule). Groove is the key word in songs like “Girls Got Rhythm” and “Shot Down In Flames”, while “Beating Around the Bush” and “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” are as adrenaline-charged as anything in the band’s catalogue, even with Lange’s more particular approach. While the LP’s title was cause for concern at Atlantic, who fretted it may impact the band’s success in America’s Bible Belt, it was the foreboding, bluesy closer “Night Prowler” that would years later garner the most controversy when it was linked with serial killer Richard Ramirez, said to be an AC/DC fan. Dubbed the Night Stalker by the media, he was arrested in 1985 and later sentenced to death for 13 murders. AC/DC strongly rejected the idea that the song had inspired such violence, with Malcolm Young professing that its lyrics—which included the lines “As you lie there naked/Like a body in a tomb/Suspended animation/As I slip into your room”—were about sneaking into girlfriend’s bedroom while her parents were asleep. Proof that Scott could never darken the mood for long, the six-minute epic ends with him uttering the catchphrase from Robin Williams’ late-’70s sitcom, Mork & Mindy: “Shazbot, nanu nanu”. In the language of Williams’ alien character it’s both a greeting and a farewell—an eerie note on which to sign off given that Scott would be dead within a year.