Released in 1979, AC/DC's Highway To Hell was the infamous last album recorded with singer Bon Scott, who died of alcohol poisoning in London in February of 1980. Officially chalked up to "Death by Misadventure," Scott's demise has forever secured the album's reputation as a partying primer and a bible for lethal behavior, branding the album with the fun chaos of alcoholic excess and its flip side, early death. The best songs on Highway To Hell achieve Sonic Platonism, translating rock & roll's transcendent ideals in stomping, dual-guitar and eighth-note bass riffing, a Paleolithic drum bed, and insanely, recklessly odd but fun vocals.
Joe Bonomo strikes a three-chord essay on the power of adolescence, the durability of rock & roll fandom, and the transformative properties of memory. Why does Highway To Hell matter to anyone beyond non-ironic teenagers? Blending interviews, analysis, and memoir with a fan's perspective, Highway To Hell dramatizes and celebrates a timeless album that one critic said makes "disaster sound like the best fun in the world."

Martin Windrow was born in 1944 and educated at Wellington College. Since the 1970s he has worked in book publishing as a commissioning and art editor specializing in military and aviation history. He is a series editor at Osprey and an authority on the French Foreign Legion. He is the author of the highly successful Men-at-Arms 300: French Foreign Legion since 1945 and Men-at-Arms 322: The French War in Indochina 1946-54. He is an Associate of the Royal Historical Society and of the Foreign Legion Association of Great Britain. In 2004 his major study The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam was published to critical acclaim in Britain and the USA.