Stevie Wright was Australia's first international rock star, a figure of extraordinary charisma. By the time he was 20 he had amassed experiences both exhilarating and exhausting, even by the standards of the tumultuous 1960s.
The Easybeats stormed to No. 1 in   May 1965 with She's So Fine and the ferocious phenomenon of "Easyfever" spiralled. Airports, television stations, theatres and hire cars were reduced to rubble, fans were hospitalised and general mayhem reigned.
With their vital, urgent sound, the Easybeats gave Australian music a new identity and confidence. They were not only refreshingly original they radiated an aura of raw, rebellious excitement that proved irresistible to an isolated generation intoxicated by its own youth.
They had stepped into a void with urgent music of exceptional integrity leaving an indelible imprint. The early hits, which Wright co-wrote, came in a ceaseless cascade: Wedding Ring, Sad and Lonely and Blue, then three No. 1s in a row - Women (Make You Feel Alright), Come And See Her, and I'll Make You Happy - and a top five with the musically intriguing Sorry. Overnight, Australian pop and rock shifted from derivation and imitation to innovation. The stakes had been raised and Oz Rock would never look back. 
The Easybeats came along just when Australia needed them - really needed them. Australia had been taunted by the Beatles' arrival in 1964. The country wanted more. It wanted its own.
In a tiny Sydney radio theatrette, imaginative music publisher Ted Albert gave a hearing to a fairly ragged but unmistakably determined beat band that had formed in the austere Villawood Migrant Hostel earlier in the year. By the beginning of 1965 the Easybeats would have a manager, regular work in Sydney beat clubs, and a publishing and recording contract.
"There was a desire to write our own songs and that was what set us apart," lead guitarist Harry Vanda has reflected. "Up until that time, songs you heard on the radio came from somewhere mysterious. So we gave it a crack and started doing it ourselves." Well, at least to begin with, Wright and rhythm guitarist George Young did.
They became amazingly prolific writers. Wright had a knack for knocking out succinct rock lyrics and Young had an exceptional capacity for ingenious melodies and intense musical structures. What drove Easyfever was not just songs of singular excitement, with cheeky lyrics that urged on fellow members, but an explosive delivery centred on the impishly indefatigable Wright.
Wright, be he roaring through a bluesy rocker like For My Woman or breaking young hearts with the wistful In My Book, was electrifying. Only Normie Rowe could match him in this creation of frenzy. For fellow pop idol Johnny Young, Wright penned the happy-clapping Step Back, which topped the charts.
Stephen Carlton Wright was born in Leeds, England, on   December 20, 1947. He was the youngest but perhaps most experienced of the five immigrants who, in 1960, huddled together like puppies in a basket while gangs of local thugs cruised the perimeter of the Villawood Migrant Hostel hoping to dish out a hiding to any "reffo" they came upon.
Adopting an alias, Wright had fronted Chris Langdon and the Langdells and was brim with confidence and self-belief; something that would infect all the set-upon migrants making music in Adelaide's Elizabeth or Melbourne's Fishermans Bend.
The irrepressible Wright, only 16 when the first No. 1 exploded, was reaching beyond the front rows of howlers.
By the time the Easybeats were lodged in London in 1966, the creative balance was shifting. Young felt that he had to write with a fellow musician rather than a performer. The first Vanda and Young collaboration to emerge publicly was the song that stands as the team's most admired, acclaimed and recorded piece, the beloved working-class anthem Friday On My Mind - a global hit for the group - thanks to a large extent to Australian disc jockeys working on Britain's pirate radio stations - that has since been recorded by David Bowie, Peter Frampton, Gary Moore and scores of others. But what sold it so powerfully was Wright's vocal command, the basic charm of his delivery.
During a tour across Europe opening for the Rolling Stones in 1967, Mick Jagger was seen more than once catching the young singer's somersaulting, near-gymnastic stage presence from the side of stage. But come 1969 it was all over for the Easybeats, who were fraying at the edges after being buffeted by all the indulgences that a rock-star lifestyle had to offer in the 1960s.
Still just 21, Wright kept playing live back home, in bands and rock operas, and later his old comrades Vanda and Young welcomed him into their new Sydney studio, sending him to No. 1 with an unprecedented 11-minute single, Evie (Parts 1, 2 and 3). It was a mighty opus that went to No. 1 not once but twice - in 2004, members of Jet, Powderfinger, Grinspoon, the Living End and Spiderbait came together to perform it and named themselves, in tribute, the Wrights.
At the end of the 1970s a heroin-addicted Wright took the stage before what was said to be 100,000 people on the steps of Sydney Opera House for an emotionally overpowering delivery of the song.
There was to be a third solo LP after Hard Road and Black-eyed Bruiser, but Wright, a bruised warrior, just wasn't in good enough shape and sessions were suspended not long after they began. Dogged by heroin addiction for 20 years, his career was a roller coaster marked by arrests and rehabilitation. He was treated with controversial deep sleep and electroshock therapy at Chelmsford Private Hospital.
He joined studio group Flash and the Pan for an album. Over the years, there were seasons when the Stevie Wright All Stars/Stevie Wright Band hit the road, and many seasons when they did not. A live DVD and album showed Wright still had the capacity to deliver the sort of scorching rock for which he was admired internationally. However, Jack Marx's biography published at the end of the 1990s, Sorry: The Wretched Tale of Little Stevie Wright, was reviewed as "one of the most harrowing rock books ever written".
In 1986 the original Easybeats reformed for a national tour and arenas were full. That year Jimmy Barnes and INXS collaborated on a version of the Easybeats' Good Times, a 1968 single B-side which had supposedly caused Paul McCartney to stop his car on a motorway to ring the BBC and ask them to play it again.
For much of the past 30 years Wright had lived largely out of sight and in varying degrees of health. Enticed on stage in 2001 for the Long Way to the Top national concert tour of rock legends, he brought the house down each night with a passionate rendition of Evie.
Although Wright headlined the Legends of Rock festival at Byron Bay in 2009 that outing was the last that many Australians saw of him. In more recent years he appeared at some performances at a stage musical documenting his life story.
Stevie Wright is survived by his partner Faye and son Nicholas.