Oz Rock’s Most Tragic Tale: How Everything Went Wrong For Stevie Wright

It was a moment of triumph, a comeback so immense, it rivals John Farnham’s You’re The Voice. Fifty years ago this week, Stevie Wright topped the Australian charts with Evie, the start of a six-week reign on the Kent Music Report.

But no one knew that the singer was harbouring a dark secret.

There are no bones about it: Evie is the greatest epic in Australian music. It is a three-part rock opera that strangely mirrors Stevie Wright’s own story, capturing the heady days of youth followed by the highs and lows of love and a tragic twist.

In his last major interview with Judith Durham’s biographer Graham Simpson in 2002, Wright revealed how Vanda & Young had written the song especially for him. “Evie/Stevie,” he smiled. “Stevie, let your hair hang down!”

Wright then provided a rundown of the song: “It’s mainly about a guy and a girl gettin’ it on, being young, dancing, going out, foreplay ... Then he finds he reaches a deeper stage in their love and he’s not just going out rockin’ on. And then every man’s fear – don’t let me lose her now.”

Part One was a reminder of Wright’s young years when anything seemed possible. “I got some money in my pocket/ I got my car keys in my hand,” the song starts. “I got myself a couple of tickets to see a rock ’n’ rollin’ band.”

Wright was just 17 when he formed The Easybeats with George Young, Harry Vanda, Dick Diamonde and Gordon “Snowy” Fleet. They were all migrant kids – Wright had come to Australia from Leeds in England with his family when he was 10. The Wrights initially settled in Melbourne before moving to Sydney, where they lived in an army house just near the Villawood Migrant Hostel, where the band formed.

While still a teenager, Wright co-wrote a string of classics: For My Woman, She’s So Fine, Wedding Ring, Sad and Lonely and Blue, Women (Make You Feel Alright), Come And See Her, I’ll Make You Happy and Sorry. He always looked back fondly on his days with The Easybeats. “It was magic for me. I was a teenager, and I don’t think I could have had a better time. Heaps and heaps of ladies.” He paused before adding: “And heaps and heaps of ladies. Adulation, hysteria … you could not have had a better time.”

The singer in Evie Part One is impatient and impetuous. It’s all about good times; you can worry about the consequences later. “Come on, babe,” he sings, “you know there ain’t no time to mess around.” 

But in Part Two, the singer is forced to grow up fast when he discovers that Evie is pregnant. He struggles to communicate exactly how he feels but manages to say: “Evie, I’m nothing without you … Oh Evie, so much in love with you.”

In the UK, George Young forged a new songwriting partnership with guitarist Harry Vanda. Stevie Wright would never write another hit for The Easybeats.

In Part Three, the singer’s life is changed forever when Evie dies in childbirth. “When I woke this morning, I was king of the world,” Wright sings. “It seems so unreal, but I just can’t understand that with each passing minute, the one that I love is slipping away from me.”

Wright was just 21 when The Easybeats broke up. He then worked at the House of Merivale in Sydney, selling suits, before being lured back to the music world. He starred in the stage production of Jesus Christ Superstar, where he tried heroin for the first time at a party celebrating the final Melbourne show.

Evie and Wright’s first solo album, Hard Road, came more than four years after The Easybeats split. Clocking in at 11.11 minutes, Evie is the longest song to top the charts, eclipsing Russell Morris’ The Real Thing (6.20 minutes), The Beatles’ Hey Jude (7.12), Don McLean’s American Pie (8.42) and Taylor Swift’s All Too Well (10.13).

Wright joked that radio DJs loved the song because it gave them a chance to go to the toilet. He also noted the genius of Vanda & Young presenting the song in three parts – the rock stations could play Parts One and Three, while the softer stations would find Part Two more suitable for their format.

Chris Gilbey – the man who put the lightning bolt into AC/DC’s name – was Alberts’ A&R man when Evie was released. He’ll never forget the phone call from Trevor Smith telling him that he’d placed the song on high rotation on 2SM, then Sydney’s top music station. “I can still feel the chills now,” Gilbey says. “High rotation back then was once every hour. So we had an 11-minute song on the radio once an hour on 2SM. 

“Evie established Alberts’ reputation for the development of a uniquely Australian rock ’n’ roll sound.”

John Tait, author of Vanda & Young, Inside Australia’s Hit Factory, explained Evie as “a tragic tale told in three parts: boy wants girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. It was a ballad sandwiched between two rock songs. Each one could have been a hit in its own right.”

AC/DC’s Malcolm Young played the solo in Part One, while Harry Vanda provided the lead break in Part Three.

Vanda & Young had asked Michael Chugg, then a young booking agent, to manage Stevie Wright. He remembers the record went “berserk”, but all was not well. Chugg discovered that his artist was addicted to heroin. The manager was heartbroken. “Stevie, you’re a fucking superstar,” he cried, “why are you doing this to yourself?”

“It couldn’t go on,” Chugg adds. “It just got ridiculous because Ted [Albert] didn’t know, Fifa [Riccobono] didn’t know, Harry and George didn’t know.” 

The truth finally came out during a recording session at Alberts. “George and Harry are in the booth, and Stevie’s in the voice booth, and I’ve walked past the voice booth and the little prick – on the fucking ledge inside, he’s got the alfoil, and he’s doing heroin,” Chugg recalls. “And I’ve walked around to George and Harry and said, ‘Listen, come with me. I just want you to know what I’ve been going through for two and a half years.’ And they walked around, and he couldn’t see us, and I said, ‘He’s been doing smack, he’s been doing it for three years.’ It was very painful and emotional.

“The world was Stevie’s oyster,” Chugg reflected in his memoir Hey, You In The Black T-Shirt. “This was the shot at managing an artist who could have a number-one hit all over the world.”

Atlantic Records in the US took out a two-page ad in Billboard to herald Wright’s arrival in America. But two days into his promo tour, the singer got on a plane and headed home to Sydney, going straight to see his drug dealer in Randwick. “In one fell swoop,” Chugg notes, “Stevie’s overseas career was dead.”

As Wright sang in Part Three, “Before I know it, I’m losing you.”

The Alberts family tried to help. The company’s longest-serving employee, Fifa Riccobono, remembers a heart-to-heart chat with the artist: “I said to him, ‘How can you do something that makes you feel so bad?’ And he said, ‘That one high makes up for ten lows.”’

John Paul Young supported Stevie Wright on his first solo tour. “This was at the start of Stevie’s well-documented problems,” JPY recalls, “and there were times when the situation took on a comical look. In sheer madness, he headbutted a Louvre door in the motel; his head went straight through, and then we spent quite a bit of time trying to extricate his head from the Louvres.”

Suzi Quatro heard Evie when she played with Wright in Australia in 1975. She covered Part One on her 1978 album, If You Knew Suzi…

When Bon Scott died, Molly Meldrum suggested that Stevie Wright would become AC/DC’s new singer. But he was unaware of the extent of the singer’s problems.

Wright did a reunion tour with The Easybeats in 1986, a show at Selina’s in Sydney in 1992, before a showstopping turn at the Long Way To The Top tour in 2002. The singer was damaged – he could no longer walk – but his rock ’n’ roll spirit was unbroken.

In 2005, an Aussie supergroup, The Wrights – featuring Nic Cester, Bernard Fanning and Phil Jamieson on lead vocals – celebrated Stevie Wright by covering Evie (after doing Part One at the 2004 ARIA Awards). It hit #2, but it was kept out of the top spot by Nelly and Tim McGraw’s Over and Over.

Michael Chugg still wonders what might have been if Wright hadn’t suffered the disease of addiction. “To watch it all disappear for Stevie like that was unbearable. I admit that at least some of my anger towards him was due to my own investment, personally as well as professionally. I wanted to manage the number one act in Australia. I wanted to have a hit worldwide.

“We were so close to it, so very close. Everything was set up for him. He could have been a superstar. Perhaps that was what drove him to do what he did. He had a self-destructive nature. It was like he couldn’t handle the thought of success.”

Part Three of Evie features a poignant plea: “Won’t somebody help me, won’t somebody, please.”

“I wish I could have done something to help him,” Chugg admits, “but I couldn’t.”

Stevie Wright died two days after Christmas in 2015, a week after his 68th birthday.

Warren “Pig” Morgan – who played on the original version of Evie – joined John Paul Young to perform Evie Part Two at Wright’s funeral.