Badfinger – Lost & Found ‘Head First’

After gathering dust in a Warner Brothers tape vault for 50 years, Head First now gets a proper release. MICHAEL BJÖRN talks to surviving member Bob Jackson about the long lost BADFINGER album

Nineteen seventy-four was a busy year for Badfinger, but for the wrong reasons. By October, they had already released two albums for Warner Brothers, the record company they had signed with when Apple Records crumbled. The self-titled Badfinger unsuccessfully collided with the release of Ass, their final album for Apple, and the stellar Wish You Were Here became the victim of continuing financial altercations between their manager Stan Polley and Warner Bros.

It was also financial motivations that saw Polley pushing for yet another album as he booked Apple Studios for 11 days in December. That’s hardly enough time to pull yet another album out of the hat, but that was beside the point. “Stan Polley said, ‘Put what you want on it, it doesn’t matter,’” remembers Bob. “We talked about this as a band and couldn’t see the sense in it. But what could we do?” Bob Jackson, formerly lead vocalist and keyboardist of hard-rock band Indian Summer, had in October replaced main songwriter Pete Ham. Pete had suddenly left due to tensions in the band, but had just as suddenly returned. This had briefly turned them into a five piece for a UK tour with Man, until guitarist Joey Molland instead left, reconstituting them as a four piece.

With little time to think, they brought together what material they could muster up and entered the studio. However, Chris Thomas, who had been producing them since the Ass album, thought it was all to rushed and bowed out. He was replaced by Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise who had made their names discovering and producing Kiss.

Lack of preparation and time for rehearsals made the recordings chaotic, and rumours about financial wrongdoings were swirling. “Everyone was discussing these things; all the difficulties about the recording, the knowledge that something was wrong in the management…” remembers Bob. “The one thing we maintained though, is we wanted to make a really good job of it.” And despite all odds stacked against them, they did. With all excellent Pete Ham demos that since have appeared, it seems the album could potentially have been based on stronger material. But it isn’t easy to think straight under duress — and Pete Ham’s thoughts weren’t necessarily straight at this point anyway.

Still, there is much to like here. The opening track ‘Lay Me Down’, that Pete Ham hurriedly put the final touches on in the Apple Studios lounge before recording, should have been a monster hit in any fair world. And the dynamic ‘Passed Fast’ co-written by Tom Evans and Bob Jackson is another winner. “We wanted to make it quite dramatic,” comments Bob who was likely influenced by the drama around them at the time. Such influence is also present on his lugubrious ‘Turn Around’. “It was like look at the terrible place we were in,” explains Bob. That same place is also visited by Tom Evans’ on the claustrophobic ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Contract’. “The general feel is a bit doomy and gloomy, lyrically,” agrees Bob. “Superficially, you think, well, that’s a happy go lucky kind of tune,” he continues, referring Evans’ ‘Hey Mr Manager’. “But when you listen to the lyric, it’s like, ‘Whoa!’ It’s a cry for help.”

Sadly, the project was immediately caught up in legal battles with Warner Bros when Polley took the advance that had been placed in an escrow account. “We were in the middle of it. Our cheques stopped, it really was awful,” says Bob. “And of course, that led to the chain of events that led to Pete getting so depressed.” Pete Ham committed suicide on 24th April, ’75, and there was no more Badfinger.

For 48 years the master tape was thought lost, and the only available copy of the album was a rough engineering mix that Bob helped get released in 2000. But then he came across remixes on YouTube that implied someone had access to the master. After much wrangling with Warner Brothers, it turned out they had them after all. Stan Polley had told the producers not to mix the master tape in London, but instead bring it back to the USA. “They did, and that was handed in to Warner Brothers,” concludes Bob, who now managed to get access to it and also the right to finally mix and release it. “I really wanted to make it true to the rest of the Badfinger catalogue,” says Bob. “It was a central tenet of mine not to have it step outside.” And the result indeed fits in the Badfinger catalogue. It might not be up to the masterful Wish You Were Here, but the fact that they could make Head First in next to no time with rampant confusion all around them, shows they were still a band at their musical peak. “Everything that the band was going through, all the problems and hurdles… it kind of brought us together quite quickly,” concludes Bob with both sadness and pride.

Head First by Badfinger is out now on Y&T Music