Dave Grohl Joined AC/DC for 'Highway to Hell' as the Power Up Tour Closed at MetLife

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — There is a particular kind of electricity that only happens when a plan falls apart and something better takes its place. On Friday night at MetLife Stadium, AC/DC closed out the Power Up tour — a two-year victory lap behind their 2020 album of the same name — and for one song, the biggest rock band on the planet made room on its stage. Dave Grohl walked out with a guitar, took his place near rhythm guitarist Stevie Young, and tore through "Highway to Hell" with the band, singing backing vocals while the stadium roared. It was the kind of moment people talk about for years. It was also, by every account, the fulfillment of a dream that started when Dave Grohl was eleven years old and didn't know he was allowed to have it.

The invitation came, as these things should, in the middle of the show. Brian Johnson told the crowd that a friend had asked earlier in the day whether he could sit in for the song. "A very good friend of ours asked us today if he could come up and join us for 'Highway to Hell.' And we said, 'Yes, Dave, you can.'"

What followed was as loose and joyful as rock and roll gets at stadium scale. Grohl played rhythm guitar and sang backing vocals through the 1979 classic, then bowed to Angus Young before the two embraced — the schoolboy-uniformed guitar hero and the grinning Foo Fighter, sharing a stage that AC/DC almost never shares with anyone. That is worth underlining: this is a band with a half-century of history that does not do guest spots. When AC/DC opens its stage, it means something.

Grohl had already earned the night's goodwill before AC/DC played a note. Foo Fighters were the surprise opening act — a last-minute fill-in after the tour's scheduled opener, The Pretty Reckless, couldn't make the rescheduled date — and midway through their set, Grohl told the MetLife crowd the story he'd clearly been carrying all day. When he was eleven, he saw AC/DC's "Let There Be Rock" concert film at a midnight movie, and it rewired him. "I didn't know that rock and roll was sweat, and blood, and fucking tears," he said — and decided on the spot that he wanted to do that for the rest of his life. Standing on the same stage as the band that gave him the idea, he called Friday night living his childhood dream again. Then, a few hours later, the dream walked onstage and handed him a guitar.

The whole evening was a study in rock-and-roll contingency planning. The MetLife date was originally scheduled for September 25, but a nor'easter bearing down on the Northeast forced a postponement, and the show was rebuilt for October 2 — with Foo Fighters sliding into the opening slot. It was the second time on this tour the Foos had played understudy: they also opened AC/DC's September 8 show in St. Louis after The Pretty Reckless had to bow out, with singer Taylor Momsen in Seattle performing alongside surviving members of Soundgarden. Touring at this scale is a fragile machine — as this week's tour news keeps reminding us — and Friday was a case study in how the machine holds together. When the opener falls through, you call the biggest rock band in America.

And what a machine it was. The Power Up tour — named for the band's seventeenth studio album, released in 2020 — opened in Germany in May 2024 and rolled for the better part of two years, carrying AC/DC through Europe and North America on the strength of a catalog that has sold more than 200 million records worldwide. Friday's show was the last date on the books, and as the house lights came up, there was nothing on the calendar behind it.

Which is, inevitably, where the speculation starts. Johnson is 78. Young is 71. Every final date on an AC/DC itinerary now arrives with a whisper of "is this it?" — the same question that trails every legacy act's last scheduled night, from Wu-Tang's openly billed farewell run to every "see you down the road" that wasn't. But AC/DC gave the crowd no farewell, no valediction, no long goodbye. Johnson's closing words were a door left open, not one shut. "We have to say, bye bye now. Hope to see you again soon!" he told the crowd. (Some reports rendered the sign-off as "Good night, hope we'll see you again" — either way, the message was the same.) The future is unannounced. That is not a goodbye; it's a to-be-continued with no date attached.

If Friday was an ending, nobody on that stage performed like it. The Asbury Park Press review noted that Johnson's voice held up across a two-plus-hour show — no small thing for a singer who, a decade ago, had to step away from touring over hearing issues that briefly looked career-ending. At 78, he sounded like a man with unfinished business, and the band behind him played like it knew exactly what it was doing.

And then there's Angus. Still in the knickered schoolboy outfit after all these years, still duck-walking across the stage like the floor owes him money, still a force of nature at 71. During "Let There Be Rock" — the same song that rewired eleven-year-old Dave Grohl's brain at a midnight movie — Young was lifted thirty feet into the air on a riser, soloing over a stadium that had waited a week through a nor'easter to see him do it. Some guitarists age into elder statesmen. Angus Young aged into a perpetual-motion machine.

It was, all told, a hell of a way to close a tour: a postponed date, a substitute opener, a surprise guest, and a band that has been doing this since 1973 playing like the calendar is somebody else's problem. Stadium rock had quite the week — but Friday night at MetLife belonged to the old guard, and to the kid from the midnight movie who grew up, started one of the biggest rock bands of his generation, and finally got to play "Highway to Hell" with his heroes. "Yes, Dave, you can." Yes, he could.