Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (13 page)

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
.