Time Capsule: Badfinger, Straight Up
Every Saturday, Paste will be revisiting albums that came out before the magazine was founded in July 2002 and assessing its current cultural relevance. This week, we’re looking at Badfinger’s third studio album, an LP that critically and commercially flopped but has since become a cornerstone in power pop’s long, effusive, and charming canon.
Let’s just get it out of the way now: It was the series finale of a little TV show called Breaking Bad that got me hip to Badfinger, at least in a cordial, conscious sense. Through cultural osmosis I had absorbed songs like “Day After Day” and “Come and Get It,” and, thanks to Harry Nilsson, I knew all about “Without You.” But of course, it was that 62nd and last episode of the Vince Gilligan-created crime drama that turned me on to the band behind “Baby Blue”—a track penned by Pete Ham about a woman named Dixie Armstrong, only to get reclaimed by Breaking Bad as a cheeky nod to that sweet, sweet blue-tinted methamphetamine. Once I looked beyond the sync, however, I found a thing wort
Badfinger, cursed by tragedy as they may be, built a fascinating canon. They were originally called the Iveys, only to rename themselves Badfinger after hearing about the working title for the Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends”: “Bad Finger Boogie.” To that end, the band—Pete Ham, Mike Gibbins, Tom Evans, Joey Molland—were signed to Apple Records and even got pretty chummy with George Harrison. Such a high-profile origin, it has me wondering if Badfinger is, in fact, the most forgotten great band this side of Sgt. Pepper’s. Certainly the enduring interest in “Without You,” “Come and Get It” and “Baby Blue” would suggest that, no, Badfinger are remembered just as they’re meant to be.
But the thing about Badfinger is that, though Ham and Evans were very good songwriters, the band surrounded themselves with players and people with far more face-value than them. Their first album, Magic Christian Music, was produced by Paul McCartney, Tony Visconti and Mal Evans, and it features a string arrangement from George Martin and piano from Nicky Hopkins. McCartney wrote “Come and Get It” before an Abbey Road session, only to give it to Badfinger but demand they record it just as he had performed it on the demo. The band’s second album, No Dice, saw the return of Evans as producer alongside Geoff Emerick. Critics loved it, especially Creem (“Badfinger is one of the best songwriting groups around, one of the best singing groups anywhere, and now with an absolutely great lead guitarist in Pete Ham, they’re really one fucking whale of a group,” Mike Saunders wrote).
Badfinger’s third LP, Straight Up, remains their pinnacle—a resounding triumph that took decades for everyone to come around on. Recording spanned from May to October in 1971, as Emerick and the band tracked some recordings in-between tours but had them shelved by Apple. Harrison was tapped to oversee the record’s creation, not too long after he introduced Badfinger at one of their shows as repayment for them contributing to All Things Must Pass the year prior. Janis Schnacht wrote about it in Circus, saying that “for a while, most people watched George Harrison watching Badfinger, then everyone noticed how good Badfinger were—good enough to draw attention away from the former Beatle.”
Harrison would soon get tied up with the Concert For Bangladesh, leaving Badfinger in the hands of an American rock musician named Todd Rundgren, who had, by that point, not yet become the producer we know him as, as the guy who produced New York Dolls, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, and albums by XTC, the Psychedelic Furs and the Tubes during a 13-year span. The still-green Rundgren, however, pulled some seriously brilliant-sounding power pop out of the boys in Badfinger, a swift left turn from their heavier, rockier tone on the preceding two albums. When we attempt to decipher power pop’s apex, it’s hard to ignore Straight Up.
You could argue that not having Harrison produce Straight Up was the best thing that ever happened to Badfinger (though Badfinger would certainly disagree), as they were finally able to expel some of those handicapping Beatles associations away from the band’s identity—or they tried to, at least. Harrison wanted them to make something as “mature” as Abbey Road, and he played a lot of guitar on the recordings—even going as far as bringing Leon Russell in to play piano on “Day After Day.” Gary Wright, Al Kooper and Klaus Voormann also made contributions. Sessions went on pause while Harrison produced the Raga soundtrack with Ravi Shankar in Los Angeles, which is where, via Shankar’s urging, he made the decision to stage the Concert For Bangladesh in New York—thus making it impossible for his participation in the Straight Up sessions moving forward. Nonetheless, there was no bad blood there, as Ham, Evans and Molland joined Harrison on stage to perform a couple of tracks from All Things Must Pass—and Ham and Harrison even performed a duet of “Here Comes the Sun” together. Harrison wound up scoring a production credit on “I’d Die Babe,” “Name of the Game” and “Day After Day.”
Rundgren’s hiring is where Straight Up makes its crucial turn. Badfinger re-recorded two Emerick session songs—“Money” and “Perfection,” written by Evans and Ham, respectively—while Rundgren re-mixed “Flying,” overdubbed Molland’s ode to his wife Kathie, “Sweet Tuesday Morning,” and recorded Ham’s song about the Concert For Bangladesh, “Take It All.” Molland would write “Sometimes,” which became Straight Up’s opener, while Evans penned a tribute to Badfinger’s American audience, “It’s Over.” Oh, and Rundgren also finished all of Harrison’s songs, though he never received a co-producer credit for his efforts. “[Harrison] didn’t finish any of the songs, though he was perfectly willing to take credit for the songs that I finished,’ Rundgren said, years ago. The most important motion during the Straight Up sessions was the recording of “Baby Blue,” Ham’s tour-inspired magnum opus brandishing evocative guitar notes and sugar-sweet harmonies—all without sacrificing the heavy-headed riffage that encompassed Badfinger’s first two LPs.
Badfinger had a particular disdain for Rundgren, whose work ethic didn’t coalesce with the band’s—though there was a reverence for Rundgren’s technical prowess. “He was totally domineering and had little respect for their ideas,” Dan Matovina, Badfinger’s biographer, wrote in 1979. “Todd made the album slick and simple, and an abundance of the group’s natural energy was lost.” From my gathering, the band held a shared understanding that, with Rundgren at the helm, their creative control was stripped away and the encouragement they’d had with Harrison was all but lost. It’s an interesting juxtaposition to reckon with, how Badfinger made their best, liveliest and tightest album during a time of creative disarray—a time that Badfinger concluded had warped their original vision for Straight Up. As complicated and scornful as those sessions are remembered as being, the record oozes with studio perfection and possibility. After the Beatles’ breakup, few records that came out on Apple’s dime sounded this good. For all the reasons it is revered in the zeitgeist of the present-day, “Baby Blue” is, spiritually and canonically, one of the greatest rock tunes of its era.
Straight Up would fail to crack the Top 30 on the Billboard 200, but “Day After Day” would peak at #4 on the Hot 100. “Baby Blue” would crack the Top 15 soon after, but its release in the UK was cancelled by Apple—a decision clearly responsible, at least partially, for the album’s commercial failings. And still, Badfinger couldn’t shake the Beatles comparisons, as someone called the record Badfinger for Sale, on account of the cover’s photo striking a resemblance to Beatles for Sale. Rolling Stone panned Straight Up, considering the songwriting and production unlikable and marring the band for abandoning the gritty rock ‘n’ roll sound they’d founded themselves upon. “With Straight Up, Badfinger seem to have already reached the Beatles’ Revolver stage: a stultifying self-conscious artiness, a loss of previous essential virtues, and far too much general farting around,” Mike Saunders wrote. Ouch.
I’d reckon, though, that Straight Up is a pretty good record—and an unpretentious one, at that. Of course, when critics are pining for your band to make a record full of nothing but Beatles covers, I can’t imagine it’s easy to figure out where to go next. The way Ham and Molland’s guitars ache into Gibbins’s thumping percussion—paired with Ham’s baroque, effusive hum—makes the songwriting as versatile as it’d ever be for Badfinger. “Day After Day” has that typical George Harrison guitar vibe, thanks to his slide-playing, while “Name of the Game” is as much of a chart-ready default as a band could ever conjure. “Suitcase” exits the power pop realm for a country and blues-inspired lick, while “I’d Die Babe” is garage-y and psychedelic all at once, enraptured in those provocative, standalone, British Invasionistic melodies that have become guitar-pop cornerstones—despite Badfinger’s hard-fought attempt at get out from under the Fab Four’s haunting, unrelenting shadow. None of Straight Up sounds corporate or faux; you can hear its influence in modern power pop stylings spun out of records by Diners or 2nd Grade. It’s an album that sounds like a post-Beatles-breakup music industry yearning for something old to become new again. For Badfinger, it’s what 1971 sounded like—for better or for worse.