Posts Tagged ‘Pete Ham’

BADFINGER – ” Straight Up “

Posted: December 14, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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If any band appeared poised to carry on the mantle of the Beatles at the dawn of the ‘70s, it was Badfinger. Signed to the Beatles’ Apple Records label, the British quartet—Pete Ham, Tom Evans, Joey Molland and Mike Gibbins–had already scored two Top 10 hits by 1971. The first, an irresistible, bubble-gum-y tune titled “Come and Get It,” had been written and produced for the band by Paul McCartney. The second, a punchy burst of pop-rock titled “No Matter What,” was penned by Ham, whose extraordinary song writing skills were fast becoming evident.

Such was the backdrop for Straight Up, Badfinger’s third LP. Released in the U.S. on December 13, 1971, the album is rightly considered a landmark in power pop. “That’s what the kind of music we made came to be called,” said Molland, speaking about the “power pop” tag with this writer in 2012, “We viewed ourselves as continuing in the tradition of the music we grew up with, which was everything up to and including the Beatles. That meant Welsh traditional songs, folk songs, American rock and roll and American vocal bands. We gave the music a hard edge, because we liked rock and roll, but we also made the songs melodic.”

Sessions for Straight Up got underway in January 1971 at Abbey Road Studios, with Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick assisting Ham and Evans with production. Under pressure to work quickly—a two-month spring tour in America loomed—the group completed 12 tracks by March. Powers-that-be at Apple rejected the recordings as “too crude,” however, and George Harrison was brought in to oversee a new round of sessions beginning in late May.

Harrison, an avid Badfinger fan, had already worked extensively with the group, enlisting all four members a year earlier as part of his ensemble on the 1970 opus, All Things Must Pass. “[Of all the Beatles], he was definitely closest to the band,” Molland later told Vintage Rock. Harrison’s overarching plan for Straight Up was to come up with something “more sophisticated.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bflD9n0U7dY

“George wanted to smooth things out,” Molland recalled. “He wanted to make more of an Abbey Road-style album. He took our original version of Straight Up, went through the songs and lyrics, and arranged them very much as he did his own music. And then he had us play those arrangements. It turned out great, although to this day I think some of the original versions are closer to what the band was about.”

Molland went on to praise Harrison as an “extremely pleasant” collaborator. “He didn’t act like a ‘rock star’ or a Beatle,” he said. “It was all very comfortable. He had no qualms about strapping on his guitar and playing a bit with us. In fact, I think he enjoyed doing that, as much as he enjoyed everything else. He worked on lyrics with us, and he got excited about the songs as they went down. He started sensing that it could be a hit record.”

Indeed, the majestic bridge on Straight Up’s signature ballad, “Day After Day,” consists of a slide-guitar duet played by Harrison and Ham. “Pete and I were in the studio, working out the parts, and George came in and asked if we minded if he played on it,” Molland remembers. “Of course we said, ‘No, we don’t mind!’ I gave him my guitar, and he just went to work on it.” All told, Badfinger completed five songs with Harrison—“I’d Die Babe,” “Sweet Tuesday Morning,” “Suitcase,” “Name of the Game” and “Day After Day.” Other personnel involved in the Harrison sessions included Leon Russell, whose piano work figures prominently in “Day After Day,” and Klaus Voormann, who contributed electric piano to “Suitcase.” Russell added guitar parts to the latter song as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XonFZjuyc6E&feature=emb_logo

Unfortunately, the sessions with Harrison screeched to a halt in late June, when the former Beatle flew to Los Angeles to work with Ravi Shankar. While in L.A., Harrison agreed to stage the “Concert for Bangladesh“, which effectively ended any chance of his resuming production work on Straight Up. With Harrison’s blessing, Todd Rundgren was brought in to complete the sessions. Despite (or perhaps due to) ongoing tension between Rundgren and the band, the project was completed in just two weeks. High points from the Rundgren sessions included “Take It All,” a Ham-written meditation on Badfinger’s performance at the Harrison charity concert; and “Baby Blue,” a fuzz-riff-driven masterpiece that’s since become a classic-rock staple.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yqOaQqgJdI

Molland was pleased with the results, but he was also determined that Badfinger not lose its edge and become a pop lightweight. “We had pop hits, sure, and we were proud of them, but we wanted to be known as a rock band,” he later told Music Radar. “We didn’t want to be one of these twee groups like Marmalade. We placed a lot of value in having great songs, but when it came time to hit the stage, we played two-hour shows and got into jams, the whole thing. If you went to see Badfinger, you got a rock show; it wasn’t just about seeing this group that had some songs on the charts.”

Straight Up, of course, went on to achieve considerable commercial success—including a 32-week run on Billboard’s Top 200 Album chart. The single “Day After Day” peaked at #4 on the Hot 100 chart, and its followup, “Baby Blue,” fared nearly as well. Reviews of the album were generally favourable, and more importantly, the LP’s legacy and far-reaching influence has endured. All of which makes the overarching Badfinger story all the more sorrowful.

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Sadly, what should have been a glorious and lengthy future for Badfinger ultimately became a tragedy of Shakespearean dimension. Victimized by unscrupulous management, the group split up just three years after Straight Up was released. Two of the band’s founding members—Pete Ham and Tom Evans—eventually took their own lives. For their many fans, the sorrow lingers, but nothing can diminish the brilliance of what Badfinger accomplished.

“We were forever striving to do something great,” said Molland. “We paid close attention to what our peers were doing, to what the bands of our era were doing, and we wanted to be as good as any of them. All these years later, the music of a lot of those bands hasn’t stood the test of time, but the Badfinger stuff carries on. I think Pete and Tom would be surprised. I know they would be very happy.”

  • Pete Ham – vocals, guitar, keyboards
  • Joey Molland – vocals, guitar, keyboards
  • Tom Evans – vocals, bass, guitar
  • Mike Gibbins – vocals, drums, percussion, keyboards

The album, ultimately titled Straight Up, was released in December 1971

BADFINGER – ” Come And Get It ” Classic Songs

Posted: December 6, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Badfinger – 1970 -This was a rock band from Swansea, that had all the potential in the world and was coming into its own between 1970-1972. Their first three albums on Apple including “No Dice,” (1970) and “Straight Up,” (1971) were best sellers and featured four consecutive, exquisite singles “Come and Get It,” (produced by Paul McCartney) “No Matter What,” (produced by Mal Evans) “Day After Day,” (produced by George Harrison, and “Baby Blue,” (produced by Todd Rundgren).

All but the last reached Top 10. They also wrote and recorded “Without You,” a song that Harry Nilsson covered and rode to the top of the charts.

Their story is often told today as a tragedy but before the suicides of core members Pete Ham, in 1975, and Tom Evans eight years later, Badfinger was one of the great pop-rock bands of its time. And it was “Come and Get it,” written by Paul McCartney and released on the Beatles’ Apple label, that started the ball rolling.

They began in 1961 as the Iveys, from Swansea, Wales. By the late ’60s the personnel had stabilized as Ham (vocals/guitar/piano), Mike Gibbins (drums), Ron Griffiths (bass) and David Jenkins (guitar). A couple of changes later, and the classic line-up emerged, with Evans replacing Griffiths and Joey Molland taking the place of Jenkins, but not before the still-developing quartet experienced some optimism and some disappointment.

Things first started happening for the Iveys in 1968 when Mal Evans, the Beatles’ assistant, became their champion at the company. It took him a while but he (with some nudging from cohort Peter Asher) finally convinced the Beatles to sign the Iveys. Their first single, “Maybe Tomorrow,” was released to little fanfare, bombing in the U.K. and peaking at No#67 in the United States. It wasn’t until the second half of 1969 that the Iveys’ fortunes began turning around. McCartney, having been told of the group’s frustration with its Apple deal, offered the Iveys a song he’d written for the film The Magic Christian, “Come and Get It.”

He also offered to produce the recording—as long as the band copied his demo and didn’t try to change a thing. It was further suggested by Neil Aspinall, the head of Apple, that the Iveys change heir name to Badfinger. Finally, they were on their way. Released on December 5th, 1969, in the U.K. “Come and Get It” took off on both sides of the Atlantic in early 1970, reaching #4 in the U.K. and #7 on the American Billboard singles chart. It established Badfinger as one of Apple’s success stories, with two more top 10 singles following in both markets, “No Matter What” (#8 in 1970) and “Day After Day” (early 1972). “Baby Blue” landed at #14 in the States, and there were a few quasi-successful albums during the original Badfinger era—No Dice(1970), Straight Up (production begun by George Harrison, finished by Todd Rundgren; 1971) and Ass (late 1973).

Badfinger moved on to Warner Brothers and two other labels but their best days were behind them. Unscrupulous management by Stan Polley after Apple Records dissolved destroyed the band literally. Pete Ham hung himself in 1975, but the surviving members soldiered on for the next six years, with little success. Tom Evans, who never recovered from Ham’s death, took his own life by hanging in 1983, and tragically, Badfinger was no more. Sad, since their music surely benefited from the Apple Records brand and by production work from two Beatles. By the way, the Iveys (Badfinger’s original name) was Apple Records first signing in 1968.

There were other highlights during their initial run all four Badfinger members played at The Concert For Bangla Desh  Ham, Evans, and Molland played acoustic guitars while Gibbins played percussion , but the self-inflicted death of Ham by hanging at age 27 effectively ended their glory days. The surviving members would carry on in various guises on other labels, and Molland still leads a Badfinger group today, but rock historians will always look back on those few years in the early ’70s as Badfinger’s time to shine.

BADFINGER – ” So Fine The Warner Bros Rarities ” Record Store Day 2019

Posted: March 10, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Real Gone Music has announced its offerings for the 2019 Record Store Day celebration, taking place at your local brick-and-mortar shop Saturday, April 13th, and they include a pair of rarities releases from two beloved bands,

Badfinger, So Fine–The Warner Bros. Rarities(2-LP Red Vinyl Edition) (2,000 copies)

Most folks point to Badfinger as the greatest power pop band of all time. But, with four accomplished songwriters in Tom Evans, Mike Gibbins, Pete Ham, and Joey Molland, and the creative assistance and imprimatur of The Beatles, Badfinger should have been bigger stars than they were. Their four albums for The Beatles’ Apple label get most of the attention, and understandably so, with hits like “Come and Get It,” “No Matter What,” “Day by Day,” and “Baby Blue.” But their subsequent two albums for Warner Bros. represent their true creative peak, reached even as the band–and the lives of the members of the band–fell apart.

In late 2018, Real Gone Music, together with Badfinger biographer Dan Matovina, took a fresh look at Badfinger’s brilliant but ill-fated Warner Bros. albums, Badfinger and Wish You Were Here. Not only did the two CD releases offer the first new remastering of the original albums since their maiden release on CD, but they also each boasted an extra album’s worth of unreleased bonus material featuring alternate mixes and newly-discovered songs. The releases caused a flurry of fresh interest in the band, and a furor among Badfinger fans, who to this day rank as some of the most passionate in all of rock and roll.

Now, exclusively for Record Store Day, Real Gone Music is bringing the previously unreleased material that premiered on its Badfinger CD releases to vinyl for the first time. Each disc on the 2-LP set, So Fine–The Warner Bros. Rarities, presents the alternate versions of the songs on each album in the order they originally appeared, followed by one previously unreleased song (in the case of Badfinger, “Love My Lady”; in the case of Wish You Were Here, “Queen of Darkness”). Along with piquant quotes from producer Chris Thomas, Matovina’s liner notes include for the first time track-by-track breakdowns of the differences between the alternate and original mixes.  John Golden has cut the lacquers for these releases at Golden Mastering.

BADFINGER – ” The Story “

Posted: February 28, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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There are ill-starred outfits… and then was Badfinger. They were the first band signed to The Beatles’ Apple label, but financial mismanagement and industry pressures proved their (tragic) undoing.

Talk about your bad mojo. It would be hard to find a band with as tragic a back-story as Badfinger, not one of whom, but two, of its original members hanged themselves. And this despite a string of at least five timeless tunes, and plenty of other good songs to boot. The problem is that corrupt management—in the form of the New York mob-connected Stan Polley who made off with the bulk of the band’s profits, leaving Badfinger’s members practically penniless. It proved to be too much for the band’s songwriting team, Pete Ham and Tom Evans, leaving Badfinger to be remembered as much for its morbid history as its status as a great power pop band, They were England’s answer to The Raspberries.

The quartet formed in Swansea, Wales in 1961 as The Iveys. After much struggling they found themselves part of Apple Records’ stable of artists and hit pay dirt with “Come and Get It,” a Paul McCartney written and produced record, at which juncture they changed their name to Badfinger, supposedly after an early iteration of “With a Little Help From My Friends” entitled “Bad Finger Boogie,” so named because an injured McCartney was reduced to using one finger. They then proceeded to produce a number of hits, but saw no money.

But what a legacy they left behind! It’s not all here on Timeless… The Musical Legacy (you owe it to yourself to also check out 1990’s The Best of Badfinger, Vol. 2, which includes such great tunes as “Just a Chance” and “Shine On”) but it’s a powerhouse record nonetheless, and convincing proof that Badfinger was more, and much more, than the band that brought us the delectable “Day After Day.”

Speaking of “Day After Day,” has there ever been a song so luscious, from its wonderful melody to its great guitar line to the dual slide guitars—played by Ham and George Harrison, whom the band joined at Harrison’s 1971 Concert for Bangladesh? It’s so lovely it’s easy to forget how sad it is. Meanwhile, the band proffers a low-key version of its “Without You” which Harry Nilsson turned into a megahit—but the vocals on the choruses are to die for, as is the lovely melody. And the organ is great. “Rock of All Ages” is an anomaly; a full-scale rocker that reminds one—no matter how much Badfinger hated the inevitable Beatles comparisons—like nothing so much as a Paul McCartney screamer. The guitar solo is raunchy, some honky-tonk piano comes in and out—and the boys shout out the lyrics like the Fab Four in full rock mode. .

I’m not a fan of “Dear Angie”; it’s slow and sounds like an atavistic throwback to a prior time, and the guitars are too polite, the vocals too perfect. In short it’s too neat a package for my tastes, right down to the strings that end it. As for “Come and Get It,” it’s power pop perfection; the joint vocals are great, the drumming is wonderful, and the story is that the band wanted to do their own take on it but that Paul McCartney, the song’s producer, laid down the law, saying in effect it’s my way or the highway. We’ll never know what Badfinger would have done with it, but I have no doubt that Mac was right on this one. I dislike “Maybe Tomorrow” for many of the same reasons I dislike “Dear Angie”—it’s far too treacly, and the strings are too distracting and conservative, and I’d love to hear this one stripped down, because the vocals show signs of life, and without the accoutrements they might have saved the song.

“No Matter What” may be my favorite Badfinger tune, from its raucous guitar to its great group vocals (“Knock down the old grey wall/Be a part of it all”) to the stagger step the band takes toward the end. “Baby Blue” is also a miracle of songwriting, especially in its transition from slow opening to mid-tempo middle. Then there’s the guitar-heavy interlude followed by a brief solo, and once again some fabulous group vocals, leading to the needle-sharp guitar note that ends the tune. “Believe Me” reminds me of the Beatles—there, I said it—chiefly because the vocals remind me of John Lennon, but the band’s sudden shift from soft to loud is so, so cool. As are the dueling guitars, and the piano, and like they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I like this one regardless of whether it’s mildly derivative.

“Name of The Game” is a lovely ballad with great lead and backing vocals, a comely piano, and a chorus guaranteed to move you. What wonderful vocals! I may prefer The Raspberries because they provided more big guitar riffs, but I’ll go with Badfinger when it comes to vocals any day, the great Eric Carmen be damned. Meanwhile that piano rides atop the rest of the band to the end of the song, and it’s luvverly. “I’ll Be the One” offers up more great vocals, but this tune mixes them with a tune that is largely Beatles and a guitar that is country honk-era Stones. Somehow, the mix not only works, but is sublime.

“Apple of My Eye” is a ballad and I’m not wild about it, despite the wonderful harmonies and the big transcendent choruses, which add some crunch to the apple. Oh, hell, I guess I do like it, or as much as the odd “Suitcase” anyway. This one’s heavy on the slide guitar—it may indeed be the only Badfinger song where the guitar is more prominent than the vocals—as well as the organ, but the vocals are still cool, and this is probably the furthest they ever got from power pop. LP closer “Timeless” is a bit too “Renaissance Festival” for my liking, what with the flute and the madrigal-like vocals. But then the piano comes in, followed by some big guitars that have George Harrison written all over them. I like the extended guitar solo, which is followed by some heavy-duty power chords, but then they return to the vocals, which just don’t do it for me.

In early 1970, The Beatles released their final album Let It Be. Closing with the rockin’ ‘Get Back’, the group’s sound was rather distinct, leaving it almost impossible for anyone to mix up the band with anyone else.

Unfortunately, late 1970 also happened to see fellow Englishman Badfinger release their third album, No Dice. Released on The Beatles’ Apple Records and featuring the single ‘No Matter What’, listeners began to wonder if this was the Fab Four reunited, or if it was a solo project by one of them.

To make things more confusing, Badfinger actually took their name from a working title of a Beatles song, and guitarist Pete Ham played a Gibson SG which was given to him by none other than George Harrison, making it almost seem as if they were trying to mess with us at some point.

Badfinger is almost certainly the most screwed-over band in rock history; for sure no other group got ripped off to the extent that two of its four members opted to end their lives. And beyond being a tragedy, it’s a pity, because there is nothing to suggest that Badfinger didn’t have more great music in them. We were all betrayed by the band’s shady manager, who died in 2009 and is hopefully rotting in Hell. I can’t listen to “Come and Get It” and “No Matter What” without wondering what might have been. They could have been more than contenders. They could have been more than that band that sounded so much like the Beatles.

BADFINGER – ” No Dice “

Posted: December 9, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Badfinger Take Another Bite Of The Apple

One of the most important groups in the development of the Apple label, were Beatles protégés Badfinger, who released their second album under that band name, No Dice, in the UK on 27th November 1970.

The band had made their debut on Apple when they were still named the Iveys, with 1969’s ‘Maybe Tomorrow,’ co-produced by the up-and-coming Tony Visconti and Beatles sideman Mal Evans. After renaming themselves Badfinger, they released the Magic Christian Music album early in 1970, which contained their major hit single ‘Come And Get It,’ written and produced by Paul McCartney.

They followed that towards the end of the year with No Dice, which was notable for including both their second hit 45 ‘No Matter What’ and the original version of ‘Without You,’ which would be turned into a global hit in 1972 by Harry Nilsson.

No Dice was the album on which guitarist Joey Molland joined the Badfinger line-up as replacement for Ron Griffiths. While Ham was the major writing contributor (penning ‘No Matter What’ and other tracks), Molland co-wrote four tracks on the record. Evans shared production duties with another Beatles collaborator, Geoff Emerick.

Oddly, Badfinger not only missed the UK chart with No Dice, but never made the album listings at all in their native country. In America, though, where Magic Christian Music had reached No. 55 in a respectable 17-week run, the album went as high as No. 28, with 15 weeks on the chart, the band’s best-ever ranking. After the No. 7 success of ‘Come And Get It,’ ‘No Matter What’ followed it into the top ten, at No. 8.  single.