Final Friday for Stevie Wright

The life of Stevie Wright was celebrated last Friday – an appropriate enough day given The Easybeats’ best known hit – at a two-hour public funeral which filled St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney.

Fans mixed with the singer’s peers including John Paul Young, Angry Anderson, Tim Rogers, Phil Jamieson, Glenn Shorrock and Warren Morgan with The Easybeats represented by drummer Gordon “Snowy” Fleet.

“Stevie was clearly the most charismatic performer Australia had ever seen,” director and documentary maker Paul Clarke told the congregation. “Stevie we’re all here for you – your hard road has ended. We’ll never forget how your music shaped us, how your friendship illuminated us, sometimes challenged us.

“Your life force was impossible to ignore, undeniable. You were part of shaping our culture and our nation. You were always known as ’Little’ but it feels to us right now that a great musical warrior has fallen.”

“He was born to perform,” remembered David Albert, CEO of Alberts, whose relationship with Wright went back to the Easybeats days 50 years ago.

Music videos, documentary footage and family photos were screened while the sheet music of She’s So Fine was handed out to the gathered.

His son Nick Wright, looking back at Wright’s dark side of fame, recalled, “Every kid dreams that his father would be famous, his name up in lights but be careful what you wish for. In spite of the element of tragedy that would always haunt his life, I’ll never give up on that bond.”

Friday On My Mind was the song that turned Wright into Australia’s first international rock star, and the one voted by 100 music industry executives in a 2001 APRA poll as the best Australian song of all time.

Yet it’s the 11-minute Evie that’ll be most associated with him, with memories of his emotional performances of the song especially during the 1979 Concert of the Decade on the steps of the Sydney Opera House before 180,000 or during the It’s A Long Way To The Top tour. At the funeral, John Paul Young and Warren Morgan performed Pt. 2 of the song with a mesmerising moment when the church’s choir came in on the second verse.

Tim Rogers did an acoustic version of Wright’s autobiographical Hard Road (introducing it as “this isn’t a hymn but it is a spiritual” and adding, “How does a wannabe like me get to sing for my hero?”) which encapsulated the life of someone who walked the walk.

Most bands of that era exuded a scowling rebellion, a rejection of parents’ values and an embracing of the “sex, drugs and rock and roll” lifestyle. Yet it was Wright who most epitomised the image, leaving school and home at the age of 16 to help form The Easybeats, because the fame and fortune of music was the saviour of many a working class migrant kid. When The Easybeats split at the end of the 1960s, there was no money, no “family” and even worse, no adulation.

Clark said, “It turned out Stevie had an addictive personality. He wanted to be where the good times were and there was little understanding of how to bring him back.” Yet for all that, Wright took it on the chin like a black-eyed bruiser. He never expressed bitterness or disappointment about the cards that life dealt him. He was still hoping to make new music. Clarke pointed out, “That fire remained.”

Stevie Wright died on December 27 in Moruya Hospital on the NSW South Coast, a week after he turned 68, after falling ill with pneumonia. He’s survived by Nick, his partner Fay Walker and two grandchildren.