LINER
NOTES FOR BADFINGER'S BADFINGER
By
Richie Unterberger
When
Badfinger left the
Apple label for Warner Brothers in the early 1970s, there were sky-high
expectations for the band's financial and commercial future. It didn't
work out as hoped; in fact, from both monetary and personal angles, it
might have worked out worse than almost any deal of the era for a group
of Badfinger's stature. It did, at least, leave fans with a couple of
albums that, while not as renowned as the records they cut for Apple,
showed the group maintaining the qualities that had made them one of
the most beloved pop-rock acts of the period.
The situation
surrounding the group's switch from Apple to Warners is extraordinarily
confusing in some respects, and is in need of some background
explanation. Although Badfinger's stay with Apple, the company launched
by the Beatles in the late 1960s, had resulted in several hit records
and considerable critical acclaim, the band's contract was coming to
its conclusion. Apple was itself in considerable difficulty by the
early 1970s in the aftermath of the Beatles' split, and doing
considerably less in the way of artist development than it had at its
outset. Having scored four major hits ("Come and Get It," "No Matter
What," "Day After Day," and "Baby Blue") in the past two years, as well
as a couple of Top 40 albums (No Dice
and Straight Up), Badfinger
were a hot commercial property, and their management began to consider
different options.
"[Stan] Polley, our business manager, he was talking
to Allen Klein about resigning the band," said Badfinger
singer-guitarist Joey Molland in the Gary Katz-directed documentary Badfinger. "The deal we had with
Apple, where they paid our recording costs and paid us a royalty, they
were really good to us. They got involved with the band and all that
stuff, put a lot of faith of us. Well, Klein, of course, is not like
that at all. He's a strict businessman, and he thought it was absolute
nonsense that they paid the recording costs. And he thought we were
getting too much money in royalties, even though we were the
biggest-selling act on the label bar anybody. Well, our businessman was
a bit more hard-ass than Allen Klein, I guess, and he said, 'Well, hey,
I'm going to Warners.' They gave us all solo deals...and a lot of money
for publishing. So it was a great deal and we signed it."
Added drummer Mike Gibbins in the same film, "When
we met there to go over this contract, I was pretty bummed, 'cause I
wanted to stay with Apple. Everybody was leaving Apple, but Stan Polley
came up with this idea. 'You get producing rights, every one of you can
be a producer, go talent scout, do this, whatever you wanna do,' right?
And we were, 'Sounds good, doesn't it?' We said okay, we all signed
[the contract]. And Stan's attorney, or whoever, said, 'Well done boys.
You can whistle on your next album, you can fart. You're rich. You're
gonna be millionaires.' I was 21 years old, right? I walked out of that
place like I was walking on air. We just made a few million dollars, by
signing a bit of paper."
According to Dan Matovina's book Without You: The Tragic Story of Badfinger,
the Warner Brothers deal was indeed fairly lucrative. For six LPs
spread over three years (with four more optional ones in the following
two years), the band would be advanced $225,000 for each album
delivered, and $100,000 advanced for each album set of copyrights
delivered. The deal was signed on September 21, 1972, but was not to
take effect until about a year later. Therein lay the first major
complication of the transition: after signing to Warner Brothers, the
band still had a year to run on their Apple contract. During that time
they recorded their final Apple LP, Ass,
which still hadn't been released by the time they officially switched
to Warners. In fact, they began recording what would become their first
Warner Brothers LP, Badfinger,
not only before Ass had been issued, but before their Warners contract
had even started.
At Apple, Badfinger had been fortunate enough to
work with a series of illustrious producers, including Paul McCartney,
George Harrison, ex-Beatles road manager Mal Evans, Geoff Emerick (who
engineered most of the Beatles recordings from 1966 onward), Tony
Visconti (most famous for his work with David Bowie), Todd Rundgren,
and, for Ass, Chris Thomas. Thomas had worked with the Beatles on The White Album and produced Procol
Harum, and went on to help mix Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and produce
the Sex Pistols, Roxy Music, and the Pretenders. Badfinger were able to
continue working with Thomas when they were recording their first album
for Warner Brothers, although in Without
You: The Tragic Story of Badfinger, the producer recalled,
"They'd wanted to tour off the Apple album. They didn't want to record.
They hadn't time to prepare. Everyone was kind of mentally exhausted
going in."
Nevertheless, Badfinger
found the band retaining their knack for melodic pop-rock that was
neither too hard nor too soft, and—perhaps inevitably, given their
backgrounds at Apple and personal interaction with several Beatles and
key Beatles associates—undeniably Beatlesque. Another Beatlesque aspect
of the band was how the songwriting and vocal duties were spread among
all of the members. Pete Ham was the most noted of the group's
composers for having written all of the three originals that became big
Badfinger hits ("No Matter What," "Day After Day," and "Baby Blue"),
and is well represented on Badfinger
with four songs, as well as one co-written with bassist Tom Evans (who
wrote a couple other tracks on his own). Molland weighed in with three
tunes, as well as one ("Andy Norris") co-written with his wife Kathie,
while Gibbins contributed "My Heart Goes Out."
Certainly the album had its share of songs that
continued the Badfinger tradition of tuneful romantic pop songs that
were more Paul McCartney than John Lennon in their flavor. These
included Ham's "I Miss You," written for his first serious girlfriend,
Beverley Ellis, back in 1968; "Song for a Lost Friend," also about
their relationship (and originally titled "You Had a Dream"); "Lonely
You," about a different girlfriend with whom he'd only recently broke
off; and the folky Ham-Evans collaboration "Shine On," destined to
become one of the most popular of their Warner Brothers tracks among
Badfinger fans. Molland's "Give It Up" is often regarded as not only
his best Badfinger original, but one of their best hard rockers; the
track he co-wrote with his wife, "Andy Norris," is titled in honor of
the tape operator at Olympic Studios in London, where the album was
recorded.
There were also some songs that varied from the
usual Badfinger approach in both style and production. The guitars on
Gibbins' folky "My Heart Goes Out" approximate a mandolin-like sound
via the tape delays with which Thomas treated them, though Mike
admitted to mixed feelings about the cut in Without You: The Tragic Story of Badfinger:
"What Chris did sounds nice, but I thought it lost its soul. I
originally finger-picked it and I was making noise with the strings. I
kind of dug it, but he wouldn't have it." Thomas also experimented on
Evans's "Where Do We Go from Here," with electric piano dominating the
arrangement—an oddity in Badfinger's guitar-dominated catalog—and a
steel drum taking the solo. Ham's "Matted Spam" is perhaps the album's
most unusual track, leaning toward a funk-rock sound with beefy horns.
The record didn't make nearly the commercial impact
either Badfinger or Warner Brothers was anticipating, in part because
of the rather screwy timing of its release. The first single off the
LP, "Love Is Easy"/"My Heart Goes Out," was released in Britain before Ass had even been released
anywhere. Ass came out in the
US in November 1973, almost exactly at the time Badfinger was completed; Badfinger came out just three
months later, in February 1974. Both albums couldn't help but suffer
from being released so close to each other, with Ass peaking at #122, Badfinger stalling at #161, and no
hits generated by either LP. So close were they placed to each other on
the release schedule, in fact, that some publications reviewed both
records at once.
In spite of the glut of Badfinger product on the
marketplace, less than two months after the first Warner Brothers album
was issued, the band were back in the studio working on a follow-up.
That LP, Wish You Were Here—their
last for Warner Brothers, and the last recorded with Pete Ham in the
lineup—has also been reissued on CD by Collectors' Choice Music. --
Richie Unterberger
unless otherwise specified.
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