Highway to Hell: AC/DC, Bon Scott, the Night Stalker, and a City Under Siege

A copy of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell thumbed a ride into the Vogue.  The LP looked like it had seen some shit along a patch of bad road.  Matt did some morticianesque cometic surgery on it and brought it back from the dead.  The record looks beat but it plays okay.  At least to Lou’s ears.  He is deaf to the snap, crackle, and pop of a VG minus LP.  Dusty grooves forever.  

Death permeates Highway to Hell.  Released in late July 1979, AC/DC’s sixth studio album was the first of three produced by Mutt Lange and the last album to feature lead singer Bon Scott,who choked to death in his car of alcohol poisoning on February 19, 1980.  The title track would become Scott’s anthem after his death, a perfect encapsulation of his life and lifestyle.  The album would be AC/DC’s breakout and go on to reach multi-platinum status, before Back in Black solidified their blue-chip status as a mega-band. A band that could survive anything, even the death of an iconic singer.

But when Lou thinks of death and Highway to Hell, the album closer “Night Prowler” comes to mind.  The song has become linked to one of the most notorious serial killers in American history, Richard Ramirez, The Night Stalker, who claimed more than fifteen victims and committed additional rapes and attempted murders in Los Angeles in the early 1980s.  Ramirez was a huge fan of AC/DC, particularly of “Night Prowler”.  An AC/DC hat was left at one of the crime scenes and Ramirezwore AC/DC shirts.  The agents of censorship latched onto this fact and claimed that songs like “Night Prowler” celebrated and encouraged violence amongst its listeners.  AC/DC would later claim that the song was an innocent song about a boy sneaking into his girlfriend’s bedroom at night, but lyrics like “And you don’t’ feel the steel/Til it’s hanging out your back” or “As you lie there naked/Like a body in a tomb/Suspended animation/As I slip into your room” or “I’m the night prowler (make a mess of you”) Yes I will” make clear that Ramirez could definitely listen to this song as a way to psyche himself up before he committed his crimes.  “Night Prowler” would be his theme song.  Sad that AC/DC denied the content of the song.  If you are going to be edgy and transgressive, stand by it.  Please AC/DC embrace the sleaze.  “Night Prowler” is not some teenage love song.  Admit you made a mistake or went too far but do not re-write the song after the fact.

The entire city of Los Angeles was terrorized by The Night Stalker, and the murders were news across the nation.  Lou remembers following the story on a nightly basis like he followed The Atlanta Child Killer before it.  You could not get away from this stuff.  From the TV to the newspaper to the supermarket checkout line, the coverage was everywhere.  There is nothing outside an act of war that compares to the feeling of a city under siege by an active serial killer.  The sheer feeling of release when Ramirez was tracked down by the city’s population in the streets played out like a scene in a Hammer horror film with a terrorized village armed with pitchforks and flaming torches tracking Frankenstein or Dracula.  The capture of Ramirez was like a scene out of Fritz Lang’s M, one more example of Lang being ahead of the game and predicting the future.  See Metropolis and realize that everything new is really old.  Been there done that back to the beginning of time.

Lou lived the serial killer experience firsthand in the early 2000s in the DC area during the DC snipers’ reign of terror.  When you pumped gas you hid in your car, when you went to the supermarket you ran in a zig zag.  Lou knows this is true because he did it himself.  One of the murders occurred at a Home Depot about a mile from Lou’s house.  The police at one point believed that the snipers were travelling in a white van, and at the time the bookstore Lou worked at used a white van for deliveries.  Lou drove in that van often and let Lou tell you that the looks he received were those of sheer panic and suspicion.  Lou felt he was close to being pulled out of his van and put through some serious questioning if not retaliation.

Lou’s mother had her own experience in this regard in Beantown in the early 1960s during the Boston Strangler’s spree.  As Lou remembers it women at the time would go out in little packs at night for the sheer thrill of taking their lives into their own hands.  Or putting them in Albert DeSalvo’s hands as the case may be.  Lou did not do that.  He ran in zig zags everywhere and stayed inside if he could.  It was a different time back in Lou’s mother’s day.  Everyone was six degrees of separation or less from someone who was murdered by the Boston Strangler, and everyone knew someone who had fucked JFK.  It was a simpler time.  The world was smaller.  Or something like that.

On a related note, 2025 was a down reading year for Lou, but one of the best books of the year was Caroline Fraser’s Murderland:  Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers.  Fraser won a Pulitzer Prize for a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder in 2018, and it is rare that a writer of such talent slums itdown in the filth to write about serial killers.  For the most part, books on serial killers are of the pulp or tabloid variety.  Murderland is an exception.  Make no mistake, the book is sensational, but it is well-written, even poetically so, and wellresearched.  The book merges personal memoir and true crime, as well as accounts of environmental and transportation disasters and meticulous documentation of corporate evil.  The book is riveting even if you do not take seriously her link between high levels of lead exposure and serial killers.  The evidence she gathers is compelling and Lou will say it again,very eloquently stated.  The book is lyrical in spots and downright angry in others like a sermon laying waste to the sinners. Even if you do not believe that environmental poisoning made serial killers commit evil, you cannot deny that the corporations that poisoned the environment where serial killers lived, breathed, and, ultimately, killed are evil.  There is a lot of smoke coming out of those 700-foot-high smokestacks.  Surely there is fire as well.

As for Highway to Hell, Bon Scott went out on a high note, singing a song that would play at his funeral (or should have) and define his whole existence.  Not many singers have done that.  Sung out like they went out, but Scott always talked the talk and walked the walk.  Down the highway to hell, which has become hard rock’s equivalent to going down to the crossroads.  Bon Scott like Robert Johnson died in order to live forever.

Suggested Sites and Sounds:

The Night Stalker and AC/DC:  40 Years Ago: AC/DC and the ‘Night Stalker’ Murders

M Chase Scene:  "M (1931) - Intense Chase Scene: A Symphony of Escape | Original Music by Felipe Egaña Labrin"

DC Sniper at Home Depot:  FOX 5 Archives - 10.15.02: Respected FBI Analyst, Linda Franklin, killed - YouTube

The Search for a White Van:  Monster: DC Sniper - S3 E4 The White Van

Murderland:  A Review:  Toxic Waste in the Time of Serial Killers in "Murderland" - Chicago Review of Books