2

STEVIE WRIGHT

“Evie” (1974)

The Youngs get a bad rap from some people who’ve come into their orbit. There’s no denying it. But if you wanted an example of how kind and selfless they can be, there’s no looking past George Young and what he did for two members of The Easybeats who were dealing with personal tragedy.

The first recipient of George’s kindness was Harry Vanda. In 1966, just 20, newly married and the father of a baby boy, he’d come home and found that his young wife, Pamela, had overdosed on sleeping pills.

“When The Easybeats went on their very first tour of England, Harry’s wife committed suicide the night before,” says Mark Opitz. “And George put his arm around him and said, ‘Don’t worry, son, you’re with me.’ And that’s the way it always was. From that day on, George had his arm around Harry’s shoulder the whole time. And that’s not to say Harry wasn’t a valuable part of their partnership. I like to call George the heart and Harry the soul of that situation.”

The second was his old writing partner Stevie Wright, who, concealing a hidden drug addiction and stuck in a career lull after the disbanding of The Easybeats (at one point he sold men’s apparel), was gifted probably the best song Vanda & Young ever worked on in their lives, the 11-minute and eight-second, three-part epic “Evie.” It was written (according to legend) about George’s own daughter, Yvette, and Chris Gilbey confirms this is true: “George talked at that time about ‘Evie’ being inspired by his daughter, yes. But I tend to think that it was more about attaching a name with two syllables to a brilliant song idea.”

In an interview with The Age in 2004, Vanda would not be drawn on its meaning: “Over the years, everybody keeps asking what the song is about, and we’ve never answered it, and we’re not going to now.”

It was a song, though, that was never intended to run so long. It started life originally as three separate songs but it became one organically in the studio.

Like “Good Times,” then, “Evie” was effectively a hit by accident. But it was a much more significant one in the context of Vanda & Young’s songwriting career, having been offered to their old bandmate under the benevolent watch of Ted Albert. Their selfless gesture went some way to make up for the hurt Wright had felt in being shut out as a songwriter for The Easybeats, when Vanda had emerged as George’s go-to creative partner.

Opitz says it was the song where “George and Harry really stretched their legs.” Doug Thaler thinks it’s “unbelievable, an amazing piece of songwriting.” Shel Talmy says it was “very reminiscent of things I did with The Who and The Kinks.” While Snowy Fleet says it still touches him so much he gets “a lump in my throat” when he hears it.

“It’s a damn good song,” says Wright, confirming it’s the song he’s most proud of but, all the same, he was never convinced about the slower Part II.

“I said, ‘George, they’ll think I’m Engelbert Humperdinck or something.’ But it turned out as usual I was wrong.”

So wrong that it went to #1 in Australia for six weeks and stayed on the charts for half a year.

*   *   *

In 1974 the flamboyant Queen was just starting to get big. Rock operas such as Jesus Christ Superstar (a local production of which Wright had starred in), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Lou Reed’s Berlin and The Who’s Quadrophenia were all the rage. Wright’s comeback album, Hard Road, made up of six of his own original compositions and three from Vanda & Young, required ambition and a grand vision. “Evie” was to be a song that showed that Australia could write rock sagas with the best of them.

And it was a crucial chapter in the AC/DC story, with a young Malcolm Young, not far out of his teens, contributing the solo to the rocking Part I.

“It started the whole thing,” says Opitz, “where Malcolm’s confidence—being the elder of Angus—would have grown and with George being the mentor: the successful older brother. Malcolm just wanted to be in a rock band. I think you have to take that maturation process into account.”

Wright’s influence would also extend to Bon Scott. The AC/DC icon admitted as much in 1978: “The Easybeats were the last rock band that I really liked. We’re taking over where they left off.”

Two years later, according to Wright, he was asked to front AC/DC for the second time.

“They asked me to join AC/DC after Bon Scott died. I said, ‘No, I can’t do that. I haven’t got the range that Bon had. I can’t see a change to my key.’ That’s what happened. George asked me. There used to be a café on the corner in Kings Cross [in Sydney]. He took me around there because they were playing a seedy sort of bar. And he said, ‘Now I’ll tell you something.’ So I sat down. And he said, ‘Say no if you want; you know I’ll understand completely.’ And I said, ‘Well ask me.’ And he asked. And I said, ‘Are you all right?’ But for reasons to do with choice of key I declined. I had nowhere near Bon’s range.”

On the surface, the story seems unlikely. AC/DC wasn’t playing any seedy bars in Kings Cross in 1980. They did have a residency at the Hampton Court Hotel on Bayswater Road in early 1974. More likely is that Wright has his memories mixed up.

“That incident did happen in the early ’70s,” says Wright biographer Glenn Goldsmith. “That was before Bon joined and they were looking for a replacement for the original singer. AC/DC were actually playing a gig in Kings Cross.”

In 1979 Wright was a clean but recovering heroin addict. AC/DC’s aversion to hard drugs is well known and Wright had been caught using smack in the studio during the making of his 1975 album, Black Eyed Bruiser. The comeback was over as quickly as it had started.

“That was the end of Wright’s recording career with Alberts,” writes Jane Albert in House of Hits: The Great Untold Story of Australia’s First Family of Music. “[Ted] Albert, [George] Young and Vanda knew there was no point continuing once they realized heroin was involved. They had turned a blind eye to Wright’s other addictions, but heroin was a different matter.”

As it was for Angus and Malcolm.

In Highway to Hell Clinton Walker tells the story of Scott’s heroin overdose in the company of sisters Judy and Christine King in Melbourne in 1975. Mick Wall rehashes it in his 2012 biography of AC/DC with more than enough descriptive license. AC/DC’s former manager Michael Browning tells Wall: “It’s news to me that it was heroin … the brothers experienced the fall of Stevie Wright, who got addicted to heroin, so it was a huge no-no.” Yet no current or former member of AC/DC has confirmed the story and that it was heroin. Until now.

“When I found out about it I’d say it would have been down the line a bit,” says Mark Evans. “We were in Canberra, playing a place called The Harmony Club, a German beerfest place. I remember sitting on the bed when I got back to the hotel. The tag was the Banjo Paterson Motor Inn; this squarish tag, emerald green. I remember looking at it and saying to Phil [Rudd], ‘What’s going to happen?’ There were some doubts about Bon at that stage. He’d had a problem or he’d had an OD, very early on. It was just a dabble … Bon just made a bad decision. It was only one bad decision.

“It’s not something I’m particularly comfortable talking about, I’ve got to be honest with you. But from what I was led to believe and came to believe, it was a very, very isolated incident. I never saw any evidence of anything remotely like heavy drugs [when I was in AC/DC]. I remember when it happened. It was all very in-house. That was it.”

But Evans also confirms something more shocking: that because of the overdose there was talk about dropping Scott from the band—even before they got to America.

It was something he couched in vague terms in Walker’s 1994 book: “I think [Angus and Malcolm] viewed Bon to be ultimately disposable. In hindsight, it seems preposterous, but at the time he was always in the firing line. And there was a lot of pressure, mainly from George and record companies. I think within that camp, there’s been a certain rewriting of history about how they felt about the guy. No, that’s wrong: how they felt about the guy professionally. Because there was no way you could spend more than 30 seconds in a room with Bon and not be completely and utterly charmed. The guy was captivating; he was gentlemanly, but he had a rough side to him, and he was funny.”

Nearly 20 years later, he’s more forthright.

“There was a moment of madness. That’s all I can put it down to. There was disquiet. I have to put this into perspective here: in any decision like that I had absolutely fuck-all influence. It was just something that filtered through the band: that things weren’t looking good [for Bon]. There was mention of another singer. But it never got to that point.”

What were the Youngs saying?

“There wasn’t a lot said at the time. It was [a case of]: ‘There may well be a change coming.’”

So when you say Scott overdosed, you’re talking about heroin?

“Yeah.”

*   *   *

Could Wright have been that “change” Evans spoke about? It’s an intriguing possibility. But there are other factors to consider in Wright’s claim that he was asked to replace Scott, regardless of whether his recollection of events is scrambled by years of drug abuse, deep-sleep therapy and alcoholism.

Members of AC/DC did like to stay at the Hyatt Kingsgate above the Coca-Cola sign in Kings Cross. Wright would wow the 2SM Concert of the Decade at the Sydney Opera House in November 1979, just months before Scott’s death. By reliable accounts Wright had been clean for two years up until that show, was jogging in the mornings and wasn’t going anywhere near heroin, contrary to the statement in Wall’s biography that he was “in the midst of a full-blown heroin addiction.” According to Goldsmith, he’d been offered a job as a product manager by Alberts and started on the same day Scott died: February 19, 1980. It’s also well known that Ian “Molly” Meldrum went on ABC-TV’s Countdown touting Wright as a replacement for Scott.

But Alberts still categorically denied any such move was afoot: “We don’t know where he got that from. There’s absolutely no truth in the rumor. Stevie’s got his own thing to do and AC/DC have theirs.” Additionally, in the Goldsmith book, which carries a co-writing credit to Wright, no mention is made of any approach. In fact, Goldsmith writes: “Stevie was never in the running and the thought had never crossed his mind. Bon had a high tenor voice and Stevie a high baritone. The vocal style of the track ‘Black Eyed Bruiser’ was very AC/DC, but Stevie could never have kept that up all night.”

I ask Goldsmith if it were possible Wright was considered for AC/DC in 1980.

“If that’s the [interview] transcript clearly he is mixing up the two stories,” he replies. “Can you imagine AC/DC playing a seedy bar in Kings Cross after Bon died?”

Mark Evans is also reluctant to give it any credence: “I’m not sure about that. George at that stage wouldn’t have had the power to offer him the gig.”

As is Chris Gilbey: “I would suspect that this would not be true. George was really, really down—and rightly so—on drugs. Drugs caused the break-up of The Easybeats, reputedly. They were absolutely Stevie’s downfall. There is no junkie that you can ever trust, and Stevie was a junkie. So I can’t imagine George ever doing more with Stevie than having a nice conversation.”

All the same, Rob Riley says there is no doubt in his mind “Bon got some of his performance characteristics from Stevie,” though Wright himself, displaying characteristic humor even in poor health, bats the suggestion away.

“A lot of people have said that,” he says. “I find it hard to believe because he was so good that I admired him. It’s funny because I pinched a lot off Bon.”

*   *   *

These days Marcus Hook Roll Band, Stevie Wright and AC/DC session drummer John Proud lives in Lismore, on the New South Wales north coast, and manufactures handmade, solid timber snare drums and drum kits for a living. He doesn’t get a whole lot of calls about his time with AC/DC, even with a passing resemblance to Phil Rudd.

Best known for his fusion jazz work with Crossfire, Proud came into the Youngs’ fold while doing a residency in a “kind of semi-acoustic rock, Eagles type of thing” in an Indian curry house in North Sydney, where he was clocked by George Young. Three or four months later, Proud got the call from George to sit in on the Marcus Hook sessions at EMI Studios that produced Tales of Old Grand-Daddy. He only heard the record for the first time in 2011.

“I never got a copy,” he says. “I don’t think I got any credit on the album. I saw one secondhand copy in Ashwood’s record shop in Sydney many years ago and stupidly I didn’t buy it. A friend burned it for me off the Internet and gave it to me and I put it on and I went, ‘Fuck! That’s pretty good.’ After 30-odd years, because I’d never heard the finished tracks and never heard anything played on the radio from it, it was quite a pleasant surprise.”

It was during these sessions that Proud was asked to join AC/DC by Malcolm Young. Proud remembers a fearsome rapscallion.

“He was a little bit of a toughie, a street punky kinda kid. You wouldn’t want to have a few drinks with him and say the wrong thing or he’d fuckin’ give you the Glasgow kiss. You wouldn’t want to cross him. It’s like a terrier, you know. You see a Jack Russell going for an Alsatian.”

Mark Evans laughs at the description: “There’s no doubt about any of the Youngs’ tenacity. Thank goodness none of them are six foot tall. There would have been bits and pieces of people all around the place.”

Proud never actually met Angus in the studio.

“When we finished, Malcolm said to me, ‘Look, I’m going to get a band together with my little brother.’ So I went out to the family house in Burwood and met Angus, who was still a young schoolboy. He used to just hang around and play guitar all the time and smoke. I think he was a chain smoker back in those days, from memory. And they played me a couple of tunes that they wanted to do; I can’t recall if they were covers or originals. But, as I was more interested in being a studio drummer and had a fair bit of work doing residencies in Sydney and was a few years older than Malcolm and married, I didn’t fancy living in Melbourne for $50 a week. I believe that was what each of them got as a wage when they first moved down there. I was also keen to play black American music. You could say that I might have missed the chance of a lifetime. C’est la vie.”

He laughs and takes a moment to reflect properly. It’s not every day you turn down AC/DC.

“I was a few years older than them and I don’t think I would have been able to handle the social aspects of it.”

Did he ever stop and think “what if?”

“Oh yeah, but I didn’t for many years. I don’t listen to the radio much. I didn’t realize how big AC/DC were internationally. I probably would have died a death like Bon Scott. I just wasn’t interested in playing a lot of that really loud music. To me, it was a little bit too straight. A bit too hard rock.”

Too straight is not a barb you often hear directed at the Youngs. But this is coming from a man who enjoys playing eight-minute prog-jazz songs and lives in hippie-friendly Lismore. However, after working on Hard Road with Wright, Proud did go on to record drums for AC/DC’s debut 1975 album, High Voltage, an association that will forever see him listed as a former AC/DC member on some zealous fan sites.

He only recalls playing on one song.

“They couldn’t get this one track. I was in the studio recording for George and Harry and they asked me if I would have a crack at doing an AC/DC thing. And I don’t even know what tune it was. So I don’t even know how I even got paid, mate.”

I play him “Little Lover,” the song he’s reputed to have cut.

“It sounds vaguely familiar. It sounds like my style, but there might have been some overdubs put on top. I can’t remember what I put the drums down to. It was always just a guitar with George and Harry. We used to do all the recording sessions dead straight. There was no alcohol or drugs or anything.”

An interesting observation considering Mick Wall’s contention that the studio was “stocked with booze and dope and cigarettes.”

“We used to sit around for half the night drinking coffee, telling stories—or mostly them telling me stories. I think Malcolm and Angus were lucky to have brothers like George and Alex.”

That Alex again. The “fourth Young” is a mysterious figure and was “very talented; all the brothers thought so,” according to Stevie Young. Grapefruit band member John Perry will say only “after the split we lost contact” and that he believes Alex died in Germany in 1997. (Alex’s wife, Monica, is alive and well.) But curiously, as “George Alexander,” he wrote a song for AC/DC, “I’m a Rebel,” which was recorded as an eight-track demo by the band during a break in Hamburg in 1976 though never released. It ended up finding a grateful home in 1980 with Accept, having been offered the unwanted song by Musikverlage Oktave, owned by Alex’s music publisher, Alfred Schacht.

But the German heavy-metal band weren’t so impressed with Alex when he came into the studio. Guitarist Wolf Hoffman told Canadian website Metallian in 2002: “This George Alexander guy came in and coached us a little bit how he wanted it and we played it. In fact, we didn’t really like the guy. I don’t think he really cared. I don’t think he liked us very much. We didn’t like him pretty much. In those days we didn’t know what he meant when he was talking about terms, legal terms. We were too green.”

Something no Young will ever be when it comes to business.

*   *   *

Another Stevie Wright and AC/DC alumnus is Tony Currenti, who has had to put up with a lifetime of having his name butchered as “Kerrante,” “Curenti,” “Ceranti” and everything in between. (To add insult to injury he’s listed under “Current” in the index to the Wall biography, though the English author at least manages to get his name right in the one mention he gets in the book.)

Currenti migrated to Australia from the comune of Fiumefreddo di Sicilia, Sicily, in 1967. His father bought him a piano accordion when he was five years old and he’d play drums on it (and whatever else he could bash into oblivion) with spoons.

“I got belted for breaking every chair my mother had,” he laughs over a coffee and cigarette in the southern Sydney suburb of Penshurst, where he runs a pizzeria with his son, Anthony.

Currenti never saw a drum kit before he got to Australia but one day shortly after he arrived in the country, aged 16, he was walking down King Street in Newtown and heard a band practicing in a church hall and asked if he could audition. Despite never even so much as sitting down at a drum kit before, he was better than the drummer they had, who also doubled as the singer.

“Instead of playing on chairs I just transferred to a set of drums.”

It’s an extraordinary story. It beggars belief that it hasn’t already been told.

“Nobody’s been in touch with me,” says Currenti. “But they have mentioned my name. The first biography they wrote [Walker’s Highway to Hell], they misspelled my name.”

In 1974 Currenti was playing drums with a group largely made up of Greek and Italian immigrants that had started out being called Inheritance, later changed its name to Grapevine and finally settled on the very Anglo-sounding Jackie Christian & Flight (but which was also known, confusingly, as Jackie Christian & Target). Konstantinos Kougious & Flight wasn’t going to wash and to this day Currenti believes the problem at the time for the band was prejudice. Australia has changed a lot since 1974.

“Nobody really liked wogs and that was our downfall,” he says. “It’s a gut feeling of mine but every time we went to a radio station they were happy to meet us but within five minutes they worked out we were a bunch of wogs. Didn’t want to know us. I couldn’t help but get that feeling straight away.”

Currenti first met Bon Scott in 1968 when the future AC/DC legend was doing “bubblegum pop” with The Valentines. Grapevine and Fraternity shared a residency at a nightclub called Jonathan’s in Sydney.

Then came High Voltage.

Currenti was asked by Harry Vanda and George Young to fill in for AC/DC’s regular drummer, Peter Clack, who is claimed in some quarters to have done the drumming for “She’s Got Balls” but this is disputed by Currenti. He says he played on every song on the original High Voltage apart from “Baby Please Don’t Go,” which had already been recorded before he came into the studio and, according to Currenti, took two weeks for Clack to lay down. He went on to cut the rest of the album’s drum tracks in four nights, from around midnight to four or five in the morning, at the rate of $35 an hour—what his father would make in a week. He also says “Little Lover” is one of his tracks.

“No chance,” laughs Currenti. “No disrespect to John. But it’s definitely me. There are certain rolls in there that nobody else would have done except me. If you’ve got a style of your own, you know. ‘She’s Got Balls’ is the same. It’s definitely me. I think I know my style. No doubt. No doubts at all.”

With his bald head, crinkle-cut tanned face and generous girth bearing testament to decades of pasta, pizza dough, cigarettes and Chianti, Currenti is just about the unlikeliest looking ex-AC/DC player imaginable. He’s been in the pizza business since 1979. But in 1974 he came under the aegis of Vanda & Young, who wrote and produced the catchy single “Love” and its rockin’ B-side, “The Last Time I Go to Baltimore,” for Jackie Christian & Flight. It’s a lost Alberts classic.

“I was recording with Jackie Christian and I got asked to stay back,” he says.

Clack, meanwhile, just wasn’t cutting it and soon afterward would be axed from the band altogether.

“I did everything except ‘Baby Please Don’t Go.’ All of it, the lot—including the single ‘High Voltage,’ which got released at a later date [and on the US version].”

A performance credited to Phil Rudd.

“I remember doing it. I remember recording it. If George and Harry rearranged it afterward, I’m not quite sure. It’s hard to tell on that song. It feels like it’s been re-recorded on top, if you know what I mean. Phil might have played on top of it. It sounds like there are two lots of recordings. If you listen to ‘High Voltage,’ it feels like it’s been double tracked but [the original recording has] not [been] wiped off, especially the drum sections. So whether they got Phil to play over the top or left it, I can’t say for sure. All the rest, no doubts at all.”

So what about the claim it was only recorded in March 1975, four months after the High Voltage sessions?

“No, no. It got recorded long before then. It was held back to be released later as a single. We did a proper recording and I knew there was going to be a single out of it. The tracking—guitar, bass and drums, minus the vocals—got recorded in four nights. The first night, [AC/DC bass player] Rob Bailey was present. The other three nights it was George playing bass. It was a combined effort between the two of them. So they took another week or so to finish it off. That I remember because I was making coffee for all of us.”

He lets out a big laugh. It’s a startling claim by Currenti given that “High Voltage” is considered the first of AC/DC’s classic anthems and existing accounts of the song’s creation clash with his recollection.

In the Murray Engleheart biography Alberts’ A&R vice-president, Chris Gilbey, who came up with the title for the album and the follow-up song, the cover art, as well as the idea for the lightning bolt in the band’s name, mentions a “rough mix” of the song being presented to him by Vanda & Young just before the album was to be released.

He confirms this to me: “The album was recorded and George and Harry brought it in for me to have a listen. At the time there was no album title and ‘High Voltage,’ the song, had not been written or conceptualized. I suggested to George and Harry that the logical title for the album would be High Voltage. AC/DC and High Voltage seemed pretty logical as a connection. I also suggested it to Michael Browning. George came back to me a few days later and told me that the band loved the title. So it was full steam ahead with the title.

“Then, literally, the week that the album was shipping to retail, George came into my office with a monitor mix of a new song that the band had recorded called ‘High Voltage.’”

It wasn’t the only time AC/DC would create a song named after an album they’d already recorded: they did it again with 1979’s “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” on Highway to Hell, almost a year after the live album of the same name.

“I listened to ‘High Voltage’ and thought it was really strong,” says Gilbey. “All George had was a monitor mix done when they’d cut the track. It had no reverb on it. But it was more than a rough mix. George and Harry would only take out of the studio material that they were truly satisfied with. If it had just been a rough, the only people who would have heard it would have been George and Harry themselves.”

George asked if the album could be pulled to include the new track but Gilbey said it wasn’t possible.

“It wasn’t that it would have cost money to redo artwork or to remaster and repress the vinyl. It was getting product through the production process. You have to understand that back in those days it really took a lot of time compared with now to get product manufactured and out to retail, and it wasn’t just the disc itself. It was the thought of having to explain to retailers—who were just getting to know the name of the band—that the album that was in the catalog wasn’t going to be ready for another two months. That would have been a killer not just for the band but for Alberts as a label. Not to mention the relationship with EMI and all the people working there who kept on seeing Alberts as a competitor to their own A&R output.

“The album went out and it started selling really well. Meanwhile, George and Harry went into the studio to do a proper mix of ‘High Voltage,’ the song. They came in to see me and told me that none of the mixes that they had done of ‘High Voltage’ had the energy of the original monitor mix and they wanted to get it out as is. The original monitor mix was the track that was ultimately used for the single. They may have subsequently remixed it.

“But ‘High Voltage’ was recorded after the album of that name was recorded, mastered and in the release schedule. If you figure that an album back then took about six to eight weeks to get into the release schedule, [the song] would have been [recorded] within probably two months of the album being mastered.”

They are two wildly diverging accounts of the making of one of AC/DC’s most important songs but the admission of the original monitor mix being used and being polished enough to take out of the studio and Currenti’s insistence he can hear himself on the song makes his case compelling. There is, however, no questioning Currenti’s contribution and his appalling lack of recognition. The man’s name—when you think about it, perfect for a band called AC/DC and a track called “High Voltage”—doesn’t bob up anywhere on the Australian or international releases of High Voltage, TNT, ’74 Jailbreak, Backtracks or any other releases on which his playing may or may not have appeared. The American version of High Voltage—featuring possibly up to three Currenti drum tracks out of a total of nine—sold three million copies. On ’74 Jailbreak, three of the five songs contain Currenti’s drumming, including the brilliant Young/Young composition “Soul Stripper,” a highlight of the original Australian LP. The cobbled-together EP, released in the United States in 1984, officially sold over a million copies. Only in occasional dispatches on the Internet does Currenti get some credit. But he has no quibbles with not getting a slice of the band’s fortune.

“I’ve always been proud to have been part of it. I’m very happy with it. The recognition is enough to say I was involved. I got paid for the sessions. I didn’t expect anything else.”

In the family restaurant Currenti now runs, Tonino’s Penshurst Pizzeria, there’s a framed shrine to AC/DC on one of the walls, showing pictures of a younger, slimmer, hirsute Currenti from the 1970s, the cover of the American issue of High Voltage and various clippings from local newspapers.

“My pizzas are as good as my drumming—or my ex drumming,” he laughs.

Like Proud, he was asked to join AC/DC.

“Twice in one week. I remember being offered the job but couldn’t tell you who exactly made the offer. I felt it was a band decision; that they would have been happy for me to be part of the band. George and Harry were very keen and very happy for me to join. It was very complicated. I was already in a band and I had an Italian passport. They mentioned going to England and I couldn’t go anywhere, mainly because I was eligible for the army. I would have had to have gone to Rome first and been drafted. I specifically said, and I didn’t even mention Jackie Christian & Flight, being loyal to them, ‘Look, if your plans are to go to England I can’t join the band because I can’t travel with you.’ It was as simple as that.”

It was a decision that proved costly. While AC/DC were taking off in early 1975, Jackie Christian & Flight couldn’t get off the ground and broke up.

“I would like to have joined AC/DC,” he says. “I just couldn’t travel with them overseas. They were a bunch of guys that wanted to get places. Bon and the Young brothers were very attuned to what they wanted to do. I knew they were going to make it—it was a matter of when rather than if. They were totally different to everyone else. They had the right backing. They had the right idea. They had the right gimmick.

“Working with Vanda & Young was the greatest experience I ever had and AC/DC was part of that. Even though I was never part of the band, for those four nights I felt part of the band. I enjoyed my time with them immensely. I’ll treasure it for a long time.”

Currenti was asked up on stage for a couple of songs at Chequers in Sydney in early 1975 to play with them, Phil Rudd letting Currenti use his kit. Later that year Currenti also got another chance to perform with AC/DC while gigging with his new band, The 69ers, in Canberra. He claims he got a phone call to fill in for two weeks for Rudd, who had broken his hand in a fight. But this time Currenti declined because of his 69ers commitments. The job went to Colin Burgess. The 69ers broke up in 1976.

So AC/DC and Currenti were once close. But when he tried to make contact with the Youngs when they passed through Sydney on the Black Ice tour, he got short shrift from the band’s local minders.

“I tried very hard to get in touch with AC/DC. I couldn’t do it. Somehow I hit a brick wall with them every time. Sam Horsburgh was a disappointment to me. He remembered me. And when I rang up Alberts, he said, ‘Where the hell have you been? You don’t remember me but I remember you recording High Voltage.’ I said, ‘Look, I’m out of the scene totally. I know AC/DC have got a concert in Sydney and I’d like to meet up with them if I could.’ And Sam gave me great hope of doing it. I went and saw him at Alberts.”

Horsburgh, says Currenti, told him he would do whatever he could to help arrange a meeting with the Youngs. But come concert time, nothing eventuated so Currenti went out to the stadium with his son. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t get backstage to see them. The most he could do was get a phone number for one of their aides. He was told it wasn’t possible to meet them that night, it was “too late” and the band was leaving for Brisbane the next day.

“I got the feeling no one really collaborated to let them know I was there. I’m sure if they had known, the boys would have made an effort. It’s a pity. I would have been prepared to wait to see them but the manager suggested it wasn’t possible. I had four blockages in my leg. An artery was blocked in four places. I couldn’t walk. My son had to stop with me every 20 meters. I was in pain. Consequently, I had a little toe cut off because it went gangrenous. I have 70 percent feeling in my right leg; my left leg is going as well. Even now I can only walk 100 meters. I don’t think AC/DC got the message. But in the future I’d like to think I’ll meet up with them because part of me is in [that band]. I don’t want anything. I’m quite pleased and happy with the situation. There’s no problem at all. I can assure you I’m not after royalties.”

It’s bewildering to contemplate that a man who says he was asked to join the biggest rock band in the world can’t get to meet them. After working with AC/DC, laying down tracks for Hard Road follow-up Black Eyed Bruiser, trying to form a backing band with the drug-addled Stevie Wright and coming to grips with the break-up of his other bands, the magic wasn’t there any more for Currenti. He packed it in, and began making pizzas instead. In April 2014, though, he returned to the stage for the first time in nearly 40 years.

“After playing with Vanda & Young and AC/DC I got no enjoyment out of it,” he says. “It was easy to give it away. With a pizza shop it’s not possible to be a musician. It’s one or the other.”

The quote of a lifetime.

Nowadays, when Currenti goes back to visit his family in Italy he’s feted as a hero. It wasn’t always that way.

“In 1985 I took over a copy of High Voltage and left it there and nobody knew anything about AC/DC, especially in Sicily,” he laughs. “If my parents didn’t understand the words it wasn’t any good. In 2002 I went with my kids and everybody knew about AC/DC. And I said, ‘But you’ve had my AC/DC album here for the last 17 years and it’s still in my mother’s glory box!’”

*   *   *

So, with so many questions about who played what on AC/DC’s first album, who sat behind the drum kit on “Evie?”

During the recording for Hard Road, John Proud would do the drum tracks to guitar or piano, but never got to play on the album’s masterpiece. The versatile George had got there before him (though interestingly, Tony Currenti recalls doing the drumming for Part III).

“When I first met George and Harry, they’d just come back from England,” says Proud. “They said, ‘We’ve got this song that we recorded in England for Stevie.’ George told me that he played some of the drums or all of the drums on it. I think I played on just about all the other tracks. Again, I never got a copy of the finished album. Maybe I was a bit slack about it. To be honest I didn’t realize that I was a part of history at the time. It was just another session. I was playing with some pretty hot players around town and I preferred to do that.”

But at Wright’s free concert at the Sydney Opera House in June 1974, in front of 2500 people (and 10,000 on the steps outside) with a band featuring Malcolm and George, Proud played the song live. That day, AC/DC supported Wright. Malcolm was 21, Angus 19. A month later they signed to Alberts, who issued a press release giving their respective ages as 19 and 16. It also praised Peter Clack and his expensive Slingerland drum kit (“the first of its kind in Australia … underneath the pride of having that beautiful kit beats the heart of a dedicated musician”), Rob Bailey (“whose bass playing is the foundation of that SOUND of AC/DC!”) and Dave Evans (“he’s the VOICE that IS AC/DC!!”). All three were collateral damage within months.

“It was great,” says Proud. “It was like being in The Beatles, if you can imagine all the screams and the volume that The Beatles would have encountered. When we went onstage, all the girls—there were a lot of teenyboppers—just went crazy.”

It’s a day Wright cannot even recall.

Five years later at the Concert of the Decade, on a bill that included Skyhooks, Sherbet, Dragon and Split Enz, Wright performed all three parts of “Evie” in front of a sea of 150,000 people by Sydney Harbour with a band that boasted Ronnie Peel, Warren Morgan, Ray Arnott, Tony Mitchell, Ian Miller and two unbelievably sexy backing singers in sisters Lyndsay and Chrissie Hammond, better known as Cheetah, another Vanda & Young project. It blew everyone away. On his biggest ever stage the impish, suntanned, reborn singer—full beard, mop of unruly curls, mouthful of broken teeth—gave it everything. Spinarounds. Swinging arms. Fist shakes. Karate kicks. Cartwheels. Jesus Christ Superstar moves. A display of exhilarating abandon, athleticism and serious singing chops. Nothing less than the performance of his life.

Anthony O’Grady was standing by the stage: “Stevie was so hyper he was almost levitating.”

*   *   *

On Boxing Day, 2004, a 9.2-magnitude earthquake in the Indian Ocean off northern Sumatra triggered a tsunami that devastated the nearby coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, killing 230,000 people.

The response of the international community was swift, including Australia’s rock fraternity, which came together for the WaveAid charity concert at the Sydney Cricket Ground on January 29, 2005, with the aim of raising donations for charities helping victims of the disaster. One band that played that day was The Wrights, a supergroup of Australian musicians from various outfits including Powderfinger, Jet, Grinspoon and You Am I that had originally got together with producer Harry Vanda to record all three parts of “Evie” as a way of raising money for Wright, who had fallen on hard times. It was released as a single the following month and went to #2, three decades after it had first appeared in the charts.

Phil Jamieson of Grinspoon sang Part III in the studio and recorded Part II, but couldn’t nail it. In the wash-up, the “Engelbert Humperdinck” section was performed by Bernard Fanning of Powderfinger.

“I always loved Stevie’s voice and I thought that all three parts of the song showed how versatile it was,” he says. “I was more than happy to sing the ‘Engelbert’ section, which has that vulnerability that isn’t really on display in Part I. Again it’s a pretty difficult song to sing and sound as convincing as Stevie does. I remember hearing it when I was really young—along with ‘Black Eyed Bruiser’—pumping over the AM airwaves in the family Falcon 500, so when Nic Cester [from Jet] asked me to be a part of it I jumped at it.”

“Part III was pretty hard,” says Jamieson. “Mind you, when Stevie performed that on the Opera House steps he was doing backflips as well, so I’m pretty sure you’re going to have a bit of trouble singing and doing backflips at the same time. It was challenging. I was very nervous singing that song. It wasn’t an easy song to sing by any stretch of the imagination.”

Wright has his sympathies: “It’s a hard song to sing because it’s so long. But you do get a break in the slow part to get your wind together for Part III.”

“‘Evie’ was my earliest memory of listening to a song on the radio,” continues Jamieson. “I remember being with my dad in the car and him turning it up. I might have been four or five. So for me it’s a really formative song. Part I is quite a tricky, difficult part. For Kram [of Spiderbait], it wasn’t an easy song to play on the drums. It’s as straight ahead as AC/DC but it’s a bit groovier. The drums are doing this crazy shuffly straight thing underneath it all. But the first part’s an amazing rock song. And I think that’s why it was such a hit. Nic Cester can sing the phonebook, so he did a great job vocally on it as well.”

It was the job of Tim Gaze from Wright’s backing band, the All Stars, to play Malcolm Young’s solo on Part I when the song was first taken on the road. He was living at Newport Beach on the northern beaches of Sydney and would drive his neighbor, Wright, into the city with him for rehearsals. There he jammed with Angus and Malcolm.

“I always thought that solo was really funky, because it had this spontaneous throwaway thing about it I liked—the way Malcolm hit that low string and let it ring while he did the big rundown—kind of street savvy and, as history has shown, a great guitar player in the old school of bending and vibrato. I love it. As far as playing that solo goes, it would have been slightly different each night, so I guess I did it in my style at the time, which was still pretty raw at that stage.

“There is no doubt at all that ‘Evie’ is a crafted piece of thoughtful writing, like the way it has been proffered as a song with three distinct sections or emotional journeys. And the playing by all those who are on it is just great. When George and Harry go to work on something, they sure as hell bring it out the other side just how they want, and ‘Evie’ is a classic example of their efforts.”

*   *   *

That this incredible song never topped the charts overseas is an injustice as much as Wright’s life has been tragic and wasteful. Perhaps had it got the airplay and acclaim it deserved it may well have changed the course of that life and Wright would not be where he is today, which is living virtually broke on the south coast of New South Wales (save for the occasional royalty check) and using up the few favors he has left.

In February 2012, in a rare public appearance during a performance of Stevie: The Life and Music of Stevie Wright and The Easybeats, a touring Australian tribute show about his life put together by the actor Scott McRae and producer Chris Keeble, Wright sang the “Engelbert” section. (He’d later fall out with the pair, accusing them without basis of ripping him off.)

It was heartbreaking to see the shrunken, ghostly, frail man he’d become but inspiring to see how the song—and singing it, with all the sweetness and emotion he’d mustered to record it—lifted him. Like he was Stevie Wright, rock star, again. Not Stevie Wright, junkie.

“Sharing the stage with the man that had consumed the last few years of my life was an amazing experience, regardless of the fact that I had to keep my eye on him and do my best to help him shine,” says McRae. “It was in a way a reward for all my work, a thank-you and a moment that would stay with me forever.”

Nearing his 65th birthday, Wright could still hold a tune.

“It was a moment that I knew I may never see again, and I believe the audience thought that as well,” says Keeble. “It was unrehearsed, unplanned and an incredibly bittersweet moment. He hit every note. There was absolute silence from the crowd. He just filled the air and owned the space like the showman he is or perhaps was.”

But America just didn’t get “Evie” or Wright. Like it didn’t get most things coming out of Australia at that time.

Jim Delehant was the head of A&R for Atlantic Records from 1969 to 1981 and first got wind of “Evie” when Coral Browning, the sister of AC/DC manager Michael Browning, turned up in his office in New York with a copy of Hard Road.

“I loved ‘Evie’ and Hard Road,” he tells me, ruefully.

Delehant signed a deal immediately and “thought it would happen here too” but it was a dud. A promotional trip to the States had been a disaster because of Wright’s heroin use. His mind was not on the job. While there he’d asked, according to Glenn Goldsmith, “someone from the record company” for smack. Desperate for a fix, he’d flown home to Sydney early. “Evie” and Hard Road bombed. Yet in a consolation of sorts, Rod Stewart had a stab at the title track and Suzi Quatro later covered Part I.

“I got it played,” says Steve Leeds, who first started at Atlantic in 1973 and rose to head of album promotion. He now works as vice-president of talent & industry affairs at SiriusXM, a satellite radio station in New York City. “Atlantic got first dibs on anything Vanda & Young put out. But nothing happened. It was just here and there, you know. ‘Evie’ wasn’t like everything else. Radio was looking for things that were familiar and sounded the same. Homogenized. It didn’t make waves.”

But Coral Browning’s next package from Australia would do the complete opposite.