LINER
NOTES FOR BADFINGER'S WISH YOU WERE
HERE
By
Richie Unterberger
When
Badfinger assembled to
record Wish You Were Here in
April 1974, business pressures were accumulating that would not only
accelerate the group's commercial demise, but also help ensure that
their best-known lineup's days were numbered. Although they'd made
their initial mark upon the rock world with singles and albums on the
Beatles' Apple label—with considerable encouragement and production
input from the Beatles themselves—as their Apple contract neared its
end, they'd struck a deal with Warner Brothers. However, their last
Apple LP, Ass, ended up being
released just three months before their first Warner Brothers album, Badfinger (also reissued on CD by
Collectors' Choice Music), came out in February 1974.
Both records ended
up
suffering commercially, yet in early April 1974, the band were already
going into the studio to record a follow-up. They had to; the Warner
Brothers deal specified six albums within three years, a ridiculously
prolific schedule by twenty-first century standards, but a pace that
was still not unknown even in the mid-1970s. Nor was there much
downtime granted in their hectic schedule, the band having just
completed their sixth American tour in three-and-a-half years. (A tape
of one of those shows, on March 4, 1974 in Cleveland, was eventually
issued on CD, with additional recording and post-production work, in
1990 as Day After Day: Badfinger Live,
though apparently it wasn't seriously considered for official release
at the time.)
As producer, Badfinger retained Chris Thomas, who'd
already produced their previous two albums; Thomas had also 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. For this project,
however, Badfinger began the sessions not in London, their usual
recording base, but on Caribou Ranch in Colorado, about 60 miles from
Denver. The new recording studio, where Joe Walsh's 1973 hit "Rocky
Mountain Way" had recently been cut, was co-owned by James William
Guercio, then fresh off production successes with Chicago (whom he also
managed) and Blood, Sweat & Tears.
"I remember the first night I got there we all met
and I was wondering how they were," recalled Thomas in Dan Matovina's
book Without You: The Tragic Story
of Badfinger. "I asked them, 'Are you really ready to make a new
record? Do you have enough material?' They were bringing up problems;
they hadn't had a chance to write any songs, they were upset about the
tour, their manager. They felt the reason they were in the studio so
soon was so the advance could get picked up. Then it was brought up
that nobody wanted it to end up like the last album. So I said, 'Look,
the way out of all of this is—let's just make a great album, the best
you've ever done!' Sure, everybody wants that, but I thought we should
make a very conscious effort to succeed. It was a pep talk."
In early May, Badfinger finished the portion of Wish You Were Here recorded at
Caribou Ranch, completing the album with Thomas at AIR Studios in
London. While the result was, like all of their previous recordings,
reminiscent of the Beatles in its varied pop-rock melodies, layered
guitars, and vocal harmonies, there were some differences in the
production, particularly on tracks with orchestral arrangements by Anne
Odell (who was responsible for the dramatic instrumental section that
opens "In the Meantime"). A couple others had contributions from the
horn section of the Average White Band, credited on the LP sleeve as
"Average White Horns." As on Badfinger,
the songwriting and vocals were spread among all four members, though
guitarists Pete Ham and Joey Molland (with four songs apiece) were most
heavily represented, while bassist Tom Evans penned just one, "King of
the Load."
"The atmosphere as far as recording the Wish You
Were Here and stuff, it was really pretty good," said Molland in the
Gary Katz-directed documentary Badfinger.
"I thought we were writing as good as we'd ever written. Wish You Were Here, a lot of people
say, is the best record the band ever made." But despite the good vibes
in the music, not all was well within the band. Upset by the group's
increasingly serious business and management problems, Evans had
briefly quit during the Caribou Ranch sessions, drummer Mike Gibbins
recalling in Without You: The Tragic
Story of Badfinger that "he couldn't write or play. He was
useless. He wasn't around half the time. We'd be doing backing tracks
with no bass." Then in August, Ham quit briefly, replaced by
keyboardist Bob Jackson, though Pete came back a month later, the band
doing a British tour as a quintet. And Molland, himself unhappy with
the group's management/business situation, quit on November 4, 1974,
the month after Wish You Were Here was
released in the US.
Critical reaction to the record was positive,
however, and the band (minus Molland, and with Jackson) wasted no time
starting work on a new album in November (the material, though unissued
by Warners in the mid-1970s, was eventually released in 2000 as Head First). Bud Scoppa praised Wish You Were Here fervently in his
Rolling Stone review,
enthusing, "At last, they've made an album (their sixth in five years)
that derives a general style from what the band constructed on [their
hit] singles: the captivating melodies, melancholy vocals and big
bell-like rhythm guitars outlining a stirring, full-bodied sound...Wish You Were Here is loaded with
songs that are both catchy and electric. Strategically placed horns (by
the Average White Band's sax duo) and strings enlarge the guitar
chordings to symphonic proportions, giving this record a creative
fullness and making it a wonderful album to play right through."
Concluded Scoppa, "Badfinger has been in the shadow of the Beatles so
completely and for so long that the idea of the group as an autonomous
unit takes some getting used to, even now. But—lyrical slightness
aside—they've always been a joy to listen to for their compositional
and arranging invention and for their vocal attractiveness. Wish You Were Here, their most
fully formed album, makes it clear that Badfinger—despite never having
won a substantial audience for themselves—have lost none of their unity
or their determination. And they're still one of the best singles bands
in the business."
As an early warning sign that all might not be right
with their relationship with their record label, however, no single
from the LP was issued in the US or UK, though Ham's "Know One Knows"
[sic] would have made an obviously commercial one (and was released as
a 45 in Japan). Yet much worse was to come, when Warner Brothers pulled
the album from distribution in early 1975 after its publishing division
initiated a lawsuit against Badfinger Enterprises due to $100,000
having been taken from an escrow account. "Wish You Were Here—it was like, Wish You Were Where?," observed
Gibbins in the Badfinger
documentary. "They pulled it off the shelf. As soon as it was done...I
can't believe they did that, you know? They should have at least made
some money off of it."
The record had already risen to #148 in the charts
without a single, tour, or much promotion, and according to Molland in
the Badfinger documentary, "I
know it was selling...until [business manager Stan] Polley took the
money from the escrow account. Unbelievable. He emptied a Warner
Brothers escrow account, and Warners pulled the record from the stores
immediately and sued Badfinger. We lost everything. Killed the record
dead, and I think that was a major disappointment to Pete, 'cause he'd
done some terrific numbers on that record, terrific songs. 'Dennis' was
brilliant, 'Meanwhile Back in the Ranch' was really, really on top
form. All of his songs on that record are really pretty strong. We put
a lot of our own money into the record, a lot of time, effort...the
record was killed, I left the band. I guess he had a song on the next
record called 'Keep Believin',' which was a song for me, Tommy and Mike
and everybody told me later."
And much, much worse was to come months later, when
Pete Ham, despondent over the band's financial problems, hanged himself
in his garage on April 23, 1975. Wish
You Were Here would not only be the last Badfinger LP on Warner
Brothers, the label for which they'd so hopefully and recently signed a
six-album deal. It was the last Badfinger album to feature Ham, Evans,
Molland, and Gibbins—the quartet who'd recorded the bulk of the group's
output, and the one that will be remembered as Badfinger's best and
most creative lineup. -- Richie Unterberger
unless otherwise specified.
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