Badfinger

At some point in 1981, I was listening to a local radio program called "The Source", and the host had been doing a bit of a radio documentary on the British invasion (of music, that is.) He then played four songs, three of which made a bigger impression on me than anything ever has before or since, even moreso than the Beatles.

Those songs were "No Matter What," "Day After Day," and "Baby Blue." They were so well performed. So well recorded. So melodically written. "Day After Day" particularly seemed like an old and dusty memory, something I vaguely remembered being blasted out of the transistor radio at the beach or something, when I was young. After the songs played, the host mentioned that the band's primary songwriter had committed suicide in 1975. I couldn't believe it. The songs I had just heard were so full of life - what could drive a man who wrote with such zest for life to give up on life entirely?

I chased down every record I could find, even the exceedingly rare "Wish You Were Here," an album that had been pulled from the shelves a week after being issued. I have a vinyl collection of Badfinger that is probably worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars - original Apple records. I found a record store owner who was big on seventies music, and had seen every show by every band that blew through town in the early seventies. And he told me a little about Badfinger's passing through town in 1974 or so, and his impressions of that. A co-worker where I volunteered at the Children's Hospital had also seen them play, and I hounded him about the details for that too. I'm sure I annoyed him.

The mystery continues for me to this day. Although I have all of Badfinger's published albums, an enormous amount of archival material remained, and interest in the band combined with the Internet's ability to get rare music sold has made this material marketable. In late 1974, the band's corrupt management ordered the band to produce a CD in two weeks. In frustration, the band went into the recording studio and knocked off 33 minutes of music to try and get fed (the band members were literally starving as their management embezzled all their funds - these difficulties were the reason for Pete Ham's April, 1975 suicide.)

The album was titled "Head First" and the tapes were sent to Warners for listening. Warners knew what was going on, of course. They were well aware that the band's management was using the band to try and force recording advances out of the record company. They rejected the tapes, and the album was never released. The master tapes were lost. Decades later, as interest in the band revived, it turned out that the keyboard player had mixed down versions of the recordings, and "Head First" was released by Rykodisk.

As I listened to the first track the other day, I had the same reaction as I had when I first heard Badfinger all those years ago. Pete Ham, who could bear to live only another five months, was singing a song called "Lay Me Down," a song filled with a soaring hope and a sheer joy of being alive, even though the song made clear that he now saw moments of joy as a fleeting refuge from the troubles - "Take and give take and live all the love that we have found and just send all our problems away," he sings.

It is profoundly sad when we allow the world to scrape all the joy off of our being until the last shimmering veneer of it is barely holding off the blackness. Suicide is a shattering, devastating thing - families never recover from it. That this young man, so far from suicidal in his joyful songs, would have all his hope drawn out of him in five months is a sad and sobering reality. We must always be mindful of those around us, watching carefully that nobody is ever so fully robbed of their joy that they have none left to carry on with.