Watch Billy Joel (on Guitar) and Axl Rose Cover AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” in L.A.

Music Features Billy Joel
Watch Billy Joel (on Guitar) and Axl Rose Cover AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” in L.A.

The fact that Axl Rose is the lead singer of AC/DC—at least, its most recent lead singer—is a little confusing. How it happened isn’t that hard to understand, but there’s something vaguely perverse about Guns ‘N Roses and AC/DC colliding in a kind of space-time wormhole that spits them out in 2017 as old men. It’s like something that would happen to Marty McFly.

It does shed some light, however, on why there’s a video here of Rose and Billy Joel playing AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” at Dodger Stadium this weekend. Rose has been singing it anyway, and Joel was on tour in L.A., looking for a guest. If you’re wondering how “Highway to Hell” could possibly not suck when played on a piano, you can stop: Joel actually plays guitar on this one, which is fun to watch in its own right.

Here’s the video:

Rose also joined Joel for a duet on Joel’s 1978 single “Big Shot,” which, in its way, makes even less sense than the “Highway to Hell” cover.

Finally, here’s Joel playing “Big Shot” in 1987, an exclusive live clip from the bottomless Paste Cloud.

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