The night after Bono and his U2 bandmates became Kennedy Center Honorees, the frontman and New York Times best-selling author came to the Washington National Cathedral and talked about the beauty of “Highway to Hell.”
The second-largest cathedral in the United States was the setting Monday night for a conversation between Bono and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Jon Meacham, who’s currently serving as the Cathedral’s canon historian. They were there to discuss Bono’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, during a wide-ranging conversation that unsurprisingly touched on politics and faith. Perhaps more surprisingly, that conversation turned to the subject of Australian hard-rock band AC/DC, a subject that I have to assume does not come up often at the Washington National Cathedral.
After discussing his admiration for atheists — “It’s so brave to say, ‘No, I don’t believe in this. It’s fabulism. It’s there to give you comfort, but I’m too intellectually rigorous to run with this bullshit’” — Bono, a devout Christian, said, “I’ve just become a big fan of AC/DC. Their song ‘Highway to Hell’ blows my mind. It’s really one of the greatest songs ever written.”
At this point he asked Meacham if he could use his phone to look up the lyrics to “Highway to Hell.” “Wouldn’t you like to hear the lyrics of AC/DC?” he asked the large crowd seated throughout the neo-Gothic church. There were cheers in response. Of course we wanted to hear the lyrics of AC/DC, read by Bono in the same sacred space where multiple presidential funerals have been held and Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final Sunday sermon.
After advising Meacham about which Google search terms to use — “AC/DC, ‘Highway to Hell,’ lyric” — Bono admitted he only recently discovered the power of this heavy-metal classic while attending a birthday party where someone recited its words. Bono thought the reader was sharing a poem she had written, but his wife, Ali, explained to her husband — her husband, an actual rock star — that what he had actually heard were the lyrics to the 1979 hit.
“Living easy,” Bono began, reading with the solemnity of a priest from the iPhone Meacham handed to him. “Loving free. A season ticket on a one-way ride. Asking nothing. Leave me be. Taking everything in my stride. Don’t need reason. Don’t need rhyme. Ain’t nothin’ that I’d rather do. Going down. Party time. My friends are going to be there too.”
“That’s a powerful lyric,” Bono said. “That’s an invocation: My friends are going to be there too.”
Then he continued, just as solemnly: “I’m on the highway to hell. Highway to hell. Highway to hell.”
“I just want to say that’s the Jesus I believe in,” he said. “Because Jesus would want to be there, too, with his friends, and will always go the distance, will always find you where you are. That’s why I was such a fan of Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash could sing that song and it would be amazing.”
Bono then sang a few “Highway to Hell” lyrics in a remarkably accurate Johnny Cash voice, adding: “It’s the feeling of, if you feel rejected, if you feel like you’re going nowhere, I’m with you.”
Bono was not asked about whether U2 plans to tour in 2023 in light of the recent news, mentioned in a Washington Post article, that drummer Larry Mullen Jr. needs surgery and likely won’t be able to perform at all for the next year. Whenever U2 does get on the road again, though, it seems wise to expect them to cover at least one track off of AC/DC’s sixth studio album.
