Background
Having already created tension with his label, Geffen Records, with the previous year's Trans, Young offered the label in 1983 a country album he'd recorded the previous fall called Old Ways. Young's music had ample precedent for the influence of country music, including his two most successful albums, After the Gold Rush (1970) and Harvest (1972), as well as Comes a Time (1978). Geffen, however, reeling from the commercial and critical failure of Trans, rejected Old Ways and demanded "a rock & roll album."
As such, Young went into the studio and quickly produced a set of songs from the early period of rock & roll, including classics of the genre such as Jimmy Reed's "Bright Lights, Big City" and "Mystery Train," recorded by Elvis Presley in his early days at Sun Records. He also included some original tunes in the project, songs such as "Kinda Fonda Wanda" that had originally been written to amuse his wife. Young wrote the song "Wonderin'" long before the sessions for Everybody's Rockin'. It dates from at least the After the Gold Rush era, and was part of his setlist at solo acoustic shows in 1970.
According to Young, Everybody's Rockin' had been intended to be a concept album, with two additional songs, "Get Gone" and "Don't Take Your Love Away From Me," that would have "given a lot more depth to The Shocking Pinks." However, an infuriated Geffen Records cancelled the recording sessions, preventing Young from finishing the album, which they thus released as it was. The two songs later appeared on Young's compilation Lucky Thirteen.
Young explained the inspiration for the album in 1995, saying that "there was very little depth to the material obviously. They were all 'surface' songs. But see, there was a time when music was like that, when all pop stars were like that. And it was good music, really good music....Plus it was a way of further destroying what I'd already set up. Without doing that, I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing now. If I build something up, I have to systematically tear it right down before people decide, 'Oh that's how we can define him.'"
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