When Paul McCartney is asked about Badfinger, his eternally optimistic expression turns into a sad pout. He says, “Oh, Badfinger. Their story is a Shakespearean tragedy.” Indeed, the beatle, The band’s first supporter is right. Rock history has a place for Badfinger. Now we have to find out how much darkness that place can hold. The Welsh band was a diamond that fell into a bucket of rubbish. They recorded sublime songs and sold a lot, but they barely made any money, which was left behind in the hands of mafia middlemen. Their two leaders, desperate and ruined, ended up suffocating their sadness by putting a noose around their necks. First one, Peter Ham, at 27 years old; then the other, Tom Evans, at 36 years old. This is their unfortunate story.
Yes, Badfinger is a band from the seventies. But try playing them now, in 2017: their beautiful compositions do a cleansing job with YouTube and Spotify spitting out reggaeton macho and plasticized electronics. The relevance of Badfinger’s music is so powerful that the creator of Breaking bad, Vince Gilligan decided to close the last scene of the entire series, the one that millions of fans were waiting for, with a song by the Welsh, the sensational Baby blue.
Everything about Badfinger has a tragic twist that goes beyond the depressive, drug-saturated rocker. Their story has a component that goes beyond the musical: for many people who lived through it, losing Badfinger was like losing their innocence. The band revolved around Pete Ham, a guy with medium-length brown hair born in Swansea (Wales) in 1947 and with a remarkable sensitivity for composing beautiful pop songs, in the style of the most sophisticated Beatles. “He did it alone, at 19 years old, in a room in Swansea. Accompanied by a guitar, he composed all those masterpieces. Nobody in pop created something so good so young.” The speaker is Dan Matovina, biographer of the group, author of Without you: the tragic story of Badfinger.
When Matovina talks about “something so good” she is referring to the songs from Badfinger’s first album, Magic Christian Music (1970), the ones that made Paul McCartney so enamored that he signed them to the Beatles’ record label, Apple Records. In fact, it was the first release by the company created by the four from Liverpool. McCartney trusted the group blindly; he even lent them a groundbreaking song, Come and get it, the first success of the Welsh.
There was more beatles seduced by Badfinger, like George Harrison. Above all by the talent of Pete Ham, to whom he offers (and accepts) to accompany him in the legendary concert for Bangladesh in the Madison Square Garden in New York. And John Lennon, who asks them to collaborate on his album Imagine. It all seemed good news for Badfinger, except for one crucial issue: the money was not coming in. Their first manager, Bill Collins, gave in to pressure from Stan Polly, a shady American businessman who despised music, and put him in charge of the group’s finances. The group’s bête noire was born: Stan Polly, a swindler with a pile of lawsuits in his mailbox. It would later be discovered that he had ties to organised crime.
One of Polly’s first decisions was to break with the Beatles’ label, Apple, and join Warner. This led to the signing of a new contract from which Polly was the main beneficiary. Meanwhile, Pete Ham was composing with the other leader of the group, Tom Evans, rock songs that could be part of the best harvest of Lennon and McCartney. Records like Does not say (1970), Straight up (1971) or Ass (1973). And songs like Without you, Of which McCartney said: “It’s probably the greatest song of all time.” That song, in Harry Nilsson’s version, was at the top of the charts for several weeks. This situation should have made Badfinger millionaires. But no: the money stayed in the account of slimy Polly.
Wish you were here (1974) is the last Badfinger album to feature Pete Ham. Another great album that, like everything else in this story, is full of poison. Warner Records, fed up with Polly’s tricks, sues the manager and the band, who are in disbelief. Besides not having any money, Warner’s lawsuit could take away their homes. On the night of April 23, a desperate Pete Ham goes looking for Tom Evans. They go out for a few drinks and, amid the alcoholic fumes, they curse their fate. When they say goodbye, Ham says to his partner: “Don’t worry. I have a plan. I know what to do. Goodbye.”
They never saw each other again. Pete Ham was found hanged in one of the rooms of his house on the morning of 24 April 1975. He was 27 years old (a cursed age!) and his girlfriend, Anne Herriot, was eight months pregnant with the couple’s first child. This was not enough motivation to avoid the noose. Ham left a brief note pointing out who was responsible for his decision:
“I love you, Anne. And I love our future daughter, Blair. But I wasn’t allowed to love and trust people. It’s better this way. Pete.”
PS: Stan Polley is a soulless bastard. I’m taking him with me.”
The news of Ham’s suicide devastated his friend and colleague Tom Evans. “When Pete died, Tom went into a deep depression. His great friend had committed suicide. He stopped talking to people. He isolated himself. He felt alone and lost,” says Marianne Evans, Tom’s wife. in a BBC documentary. The group continued without Pete, under the leadership of Tom Evans and, to a lesser extent, bassist Joey Molland. They recruited two new musicians. One of them was Joe Tansin, who immediately saw that something was not right: “Tom was always very sad, no doubt about Pete’s death. And then there was a lot of drugs and alcohol. That became more important than the music.”
Still, this new formation releases two albums with notable moments; the last one, Say no more, In 1981, tensions between the musicians caused the band to split into two. The chaos was such that two Badfinger bands were on tour for a few months: Evans’ and Molland’s. That’s when the phone rang with more bad news for the weakest part of the group, Tom Evans: a Milwaukee promoter was suing him for five million dollars for a breach of contract that Evans was unaware of and that had to do with Polly’s cheating. It was a new nail in Evans’ grave. His partner, Marianne, speaks: “Tom didn’t sleep. He got up at three in the morning. I saw him there, head down. He kept saying: ‘What are we going to do? We’re going to lose everything.’ They had a six-year-old child.
On November 19, 1983, after a heated argument with Joey Molland over the money from the copyright of Without you, Tom’s son Stephem finds his father hanged in one of the rooms of the house. He was 36 years old and it had been eight years since the suicide of his friend Pete Ham.
Stan Polley spent the 1980s and 1990s beset by irregularities in his business dealings (both musical and otherwise), but he always managed to avoid jail. He died in California in 2009, aged 86.
Joey Molland, the only surviving member of Badfinger’s classic lineup, still plays the group’s songs in clubs. He turned 70 in 2017. He often performs as Joey Molland’s Badfinger. The group’s hardcore fans criticise him for appropriating the name of a band whose best compositions were written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans. He defends himself: “They have no idea what I’ve been through. I try to play their songs as best I can and keep them alive. Sometimes I make a little money; sometimes I don’t.”
Another controversial chapter in the history of the best band in history with the worst luck.
