Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (12 page)

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.”