by Fink, Jesse
George Young, of course, made sure his two younger brothers didn’t make that mistake. As always, he was far too clever by half.
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 session
s 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.)
