All three Badfinger songs with a Beatles connection
Badfinger were one of the first groups signed to the Beatles’ new record label, Apple, in the late 1960s. In an earlier incarnation, they were known as The Iveys and had enjoyed moderate success in Europe with the song Maybe Tomorrow. Despite this, the Apple hierarchy decided that Iveys as a band name was not in keeping with the group’s new power-pop direction and was considered hackneyed for the time. The Beatles’ road manager Neil Aspinall chimed in and suggested the new name Badfinger (supposedly a reference to the Beatles’ song With A Little Help From My Friends, which had a working title of Bad Finger Boogie).
Badfinger’s association with The Beatles at the time garnered them high praise, but also haunted them a bit, as comparisons to the Fab Four became repetitive and tedious for leading songwriters Pete Ham and Tom Evans. They continued to enjoy some success in the US for the next three or four years, but were hampered by the bad management contracts they signed along the way. The endless stream of negative ramifications that followed these signings caused enormous tensions within the band and proved toxic to their career.
The first of the three Badfinger songs to have a direct connection to the Beatles gave them their biggest UK hit:
* Come And Get It – from the Magic Christian Music album, the song was written by Paul McCartney and the final recording was almost a mirror image of McCartney’s demo version in which he played all the instruments. It charted in the top ten worldwide, taking them with the label of ‘new Beatles’ (for better or worse).
* No Matter What – from the album No Dice, initially produced by Beatles roadie Mal Evans, until final production was completed by one of the Beatles’ regular engineers since 1966, Geoff Emerick. There was no question that they had achieved a much stronger sound here than anything they had done as The Iveys. A standout lead vocal from Pete Ham, who drew favorable comparisons to Lennon and many other heavy rock exponents of the day, including Free’s Paul Rodgers and Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan.
* Day After Day – from the 1971 album Straight Up, initially produced by George Harrison, whose involvement was suddenly cut short by his Concert For Bangladesh commitments. Final production credit went to Todd Rundgren. To my ear, it sounds as if the lucid slide guitar on the track could only belong to George.