by Fink, Jesse
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 e
nergy 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.
