Birthdays today include Connie Kay, the longtime drummer/percussionest for the Modern Jazz Quartet . . .
The Modern Jazz Quartet, "Kansas City Breaks"
! No longer available. . . Memphis soul legend Ann Peebles . . .
Ann Peebles, "I Can't Stand the Rain"
! No longer available. . . Marco Pirroni, guitarist with Adam and the Ants . . .
Adam and the Ants, "Stand and Deliver"
! No longer availablePete Ham of Badfinger also co-wrote what proved to be Harry Nilsson's biggest single hit . . .
Badfinger, "Without You"
! No longer available. . . but what happened to him and the band was maybe the worst disgrace of the 1970s, and that's saying something
considering what ended up having been done to the Bay City Rollers. At a time when they were beginning to try downplaying
their early connection to the Beatles (they tired of the Beatle comparisons even though they enjoyed working with individual
ex-Beatles, particularly George Harrison), disaster began to strike Badfinger and not let go.
The trouble began with the chaos of Apple Records in the wake of the collapse of the Beatles' would-be Apple Corps
empire, and it didn't help that the only artists making any money for Apple the label were Badfinger and the Beatles,
whether their formidable catalog or the releases of the ex-Beatles. It continued when Badfinger discovered their
manager, Stan Polley, made all manner of movements with Badfinger's monies, on the pretext of investing for the
band but in reality seemed aimed at keeping much of their money away from them. When Apple Records finally
collapsed, Polley did manage to wring Badfinger a new deal at Warner Bros. Records, which upset Harrison until
he realised Allen Klein---the Beatles' controversial manager---was trying to stuff a less favourable new deal down
Badfinger's throat.
Badfinger was already wrung by too much touring as it was. Plus, their first Warner album was released too close
on the heels of their last Apple album. The next Warner album,
Wish You Were Here (recorded and released
over a year before the Pink Floyd album of the same name), should have been a triumph---it got some of their
best reviews---but at the time it was released the hanky panky involving Badfinger's finances began to explode.
The millions put into an escrow account to protect the group suddenly vanished.
Wish You Were Here was
withdrawn a few weeks after its release, supposedly on the advice of lawyers for both the band and Warner Bros.
Pete Ham decided to get out while the getting looked good, but the getting only looked worse from there. Ham
and the rest of the band discovered the hard way that they'd been driven deep into debt despite their hard
work and weren't likely to see anything of what they earned for years to come, if at all. Desperate, Ham committed
suicide in 1975. A third Warners album was recorded but unreleased; the label dropped Badfinger, and the surviving
band members fell into rounds of suits and countersuits for several years in several countries.
Finally, Tom Evans---who'd been, with Ham, the co-primary source of Badfinger's songwriting---and Joey Molland
decided to give Badfinger another try. In 1978, a new lineup (drummer Kenny Harck and guitarist Joe Tansin
completed it) cut an album,
Airwaves. When the two new recruits left the band before the album was finished,
Evans and Molland brought in former Stealers Wheel drummer Pete Clarke (who knew a thing or three about legal
quagmires, since such things blocked Stealers leaders Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan from recording for an almost
four-year period after that band's demise) and former Yes keyboardsman Tony Kaye. This lineup toured the U.S.
and cut another album,
Say No More, but their relationships collapsed as the legal quagmire metastasised, with
each of them sometimes leading their own versions of Badfinger while they were at it. Then, Evans and Molland
had a violent telephone argument, after which Evans---like Ham before him---hanged himself in 1983. It was
said that Evans never quite got over Ham's suicide, and that was exacerbated thanks to Evans having seen
Ham's lifeless body almost immediately---Ham's wife had called him first. Evans left a suicide note that's also
said to have included zingers at Stan Polley.
The saddest part: Badfinger's earlier albums, the Apple Records albums, remained popular. (And, the only Apple
Records recordings other than those by the Beatles as a band and as solo artists to remain in print into the
current century.) Badfinger is credited with laying the groundwork for much of what became known as "power pop"
as the 1970s moved along. Former record producer Dan Mantovina's biography/history of the band,
Without You:
The Tragic Story of Badfinger, now fetches as much as $500 as a collectors' item. The only book in print to
have anything to do with Badfinger now seems to be Michael A. Cimino's biography of Joey Molland,
Badfinger
and Beyond.
As for Stan Polley, he was an American entertainment manager whose clientele also once included such as Al Kooper,
Lou Christie, Charles Calello (the longtime music arranger for the Four Seasons), songwriter Sandy Linzer (he co-
wrote the Toys' "A Lover's Concerto" and several Four Seasons hits including "Let's Hang On!" and "Working My Way
Back to You" with his collaborator Denny Randell), and 1960s/1970s WABC (New York) disc jockey Bob Lewis. (He
usually called himself Bob-a-Loo on the air.) It was Warners suing Polley over those missing millions from that
escrow account (it was set up to receive Badfinger's album advances and other monies, supposedly to secure the
band and its members financially) that shoved Badfinger's morass to the points of no return.
Polley was finally forced to plead no contest to misappropriating funds in a 1991 case involving a start-up company
aimed at building airplane engines. He died in 2009.
Badfinger, "No Matter What"
! No longer availableJoey Molland is the only surviving original member of Badfinger. He lives in Minnesota and tours with a band that
plays mostly Badfinger's music in concert. Badfinger got an unexpected shot in the arm when the finale of
television's
Breaking Bad featured Badfinger's "Baby Blue" in its soundtrack. The song was one of the most
heavily purchased online downloads in the wake of that episode.
