BADFINGER: WISH YOU WERE HERE (1974)
1) Just A Chance; 2) You're So
Fine; 3) Got To Get Out Of Here; 4) Know One Knows; 5) Dennis; 6) In The Meantime/Some
Other Time; 7) Love Time; 8) King Of The Load (T); 9) Meanwhile Back At The
Ranch/Should I Smoke.
Wish
You Were Here may be no
masterpiece for the ages, and it might not have the most easily memorable,
stay-with-you-for-life Badfinger songs, but it is definitely the Badfinger-est
album of the all. A record, that is, which tries to dig as deep and to climb as
high as could be physically possible for these guys, without a single overtly
wrong twist or turn, a single glaring lapse of taste, a single court case of
the band trying hard to be somebody else. It probably would not have been a big
commercial success even if it did not undergo the proverbial «Badfinger luck»
treatment (due to legal haranguing
between Warner Bros. and the band's management, it was pulled from the stores
only seven weeks after the initial release; we cannot even technically call it
a «flop», since it did not have enough time to flop). But it is exactly due to
the fact of sounding like a Badfinger album, not like a «1974-oriented album»,
that it has aged much, much better than numerous hit records from that year.
With all the neuroses and psychoses pursuing
the band's members, I do not even manage to understand how they succeeded in
getting it so right after two
relative misfires in a row. Maybe things had temporarily settled down, and the
band just had a chance to sit down, catch a breath, and realize that, perhaps,
if they were not able to achieve success with stuff that they weren't too good
at (hard rock, funk, arena-rock, whatever), then they might be able to do better if they just concentrated on what they
did best — folk-based pop songs with «power» arrangements, with varying degrees
of complexity.
Chris Thomas is still retained as producer, but
who could tell? The production is no longer muddy: the guitar sound is
effervescently clear, and the vocals are for the most part echo-free (with one
or two exceptions) — there is simply no need to compensate for the melodic
weakness with extra varnish, since the melodies are anything but weak.
Furthermore, there is not a single song here — not one — that has any direct
connotations to a Beatles predecessor. On Wish
You Were Here, Badfinger are, for the first time in their life, fully
transformed into a self-sustainable band. Big tragic irony, considering all
that happened next.
Song-wise, Pete Ham is almost absent on Side B,
but his creations dominate Side A, creating a somewhat tilted balance of
quality. ʽJust A Chanceʼ is one of the band's crunchiest pop-rockers: the riff
may not be nearly as much in your face as on ʽNo Matter Whatʼ, but it's still a
good roots-rocky riff that earns extra points for subtlety — and the song could
have easily become a classic rock radio staple, if only there had been an
opportunity to cull a couple singles from the album. ʽDennisʼ is a slightly
veiled ode to Pete's little son, Blair, which starts off a little lumpy (not unlike,
say, a «prog ballad» à la Styx, with
a somewhat heavy accent on «anthemic» power chords), but soon picks up steam,
conjures some genuine fatherly love, and then ends in an optimistic explosion
of heavenly harmonies — the coda is a brilliant example of the band's «lush
pop» sensitivity, here rivaling the Beach Boys themselves in force of
expression, I'd say, if not necessarily in the technicalities (perhaps if Pete
Ham only had two brothers and a cousin...).
Most won'drous of all, and my personal favorite
Badfinger song of all time (yes, with these guys, I'm really quite a sucker for
conciseness and simplicity), is the orthographically silly ʽKnow One Knowsʼ,
which, as a chivalrous love confession, I'll take over ʽDay After Dayʼ, well,
day after day after day. Where that particular classic had a little blemish —
it was way too self-consciously designed
as a thing of «heavenly beauty ™» — ʽKnow One Knowsʼ is perfectly natural, and
it might even have been by pure supernatural accident that Pete (or was that
Joey?) fell upon that particular sparkling guitar tone when recording the
rhythm parts, the kind of deep ringing that affects the subconscious in such a
special way (later favored so much, for obvious reasons, by the Cocteau Twins).
The riff itself could hardly be any simpler, but this is gorgeous simplicity,
and taken together with Pete's catchy and ever so «humanly» singing, the
sparse, but meaningful guitar solo aping the vocal melody, and the strange
gimmick of having Japanese artist Mika Kato reciting the chorus words
translated to Japanese over the instrumental section (somehow it does add a
little extra mystery spice, particularly if you have no knowledge of Japanese)
— well, personally, I like to describe these moments as «breathtaking beauty».
There's not much of it in the overall Badfinger catalog, but there's plenty of
bands who aren't capable of even a single moment like this, so let us give due
where due is due, I say.
Amazingly, the rest of the guys generally rise
to the challenge. Gibbins contributes the lightweight, but amicable
folk-rocker ʽYou're So Fineʼ — perfectly adequate, especially when you remember
that, only a year ago, he was veering into the realm of the cowboy song
instead. Evans' ʽKing Of The Loadʼ is a bit of meditative Brit-pop with
Dylanish lyrics, which they decided to set to the sound of two different
keyboards and no guitars (bar Pete's shrieky solo) — again, nothing great, but
it gets where it wants to get. And Molland's highest point is ʽGot To Get Out
Of Hereʼ: an attempt not to «rock out», but to create an oscillating mood piece
that would take you from despair to hope and back to despair and back to hope depending
on whatever simple organ chord is played at the moment. J. S. Bach would
certainly be appalled at the crudeness of it, but for less demanding tastes, it
works quite well.
The two long medleys on Side B are not quite as
striking — I am not even sure they should
have been medleys, even if Ham's ʽMeanwhile Back At The Ranchʼ and Molland's
ʽShould I Smokeʼ do belong together quite naturally, with a melody overlap in
the chorus. They seem to have a little too much of everything thrown in,
without the ability to grow a face of their own. Still, there is nothing
embarrassing about them or even particularly boring — I just wish they didn't
put that goddamn echo on Pete's vocals on ʽRanchʼ — and quite a few people list
them among their favorite tracks on the album, maybe because of some sort of Abbey Road-esque thrill which I do not
think was intended here at all (in line with the overall «no more Beatles
dependence!» policy).
Contrary to what one could expect, and contrary
to the lonely whiff of the title and the album cover, Wish You Were Here is not a particularly depressed record. On Side
A, in fact, there is only one track dealing with despair — ʽGot To Get Out Of
Hereʼ — and although some of the songs on Side B are a little more mopey,
nothing here even remotely approaches the universalist grief of ʽTimelessʼ.
Rather, it is just a very humane
record, and a mature one at that. The love songs are never sappy, the
complaining songs never wallow too heavily in misery, and there are no attempts
to suck up to someone or something just for the sake of «trying out something
that's not us». All of which makes
this one of the most wonderful not-to-be-thought-of-as-wonderful albums of the
decade, and my guess is that, had Badfinger's career not crashed right upon its
release, this is as high as they could go anyway. Naturally, a delighted thumbs up.
Agreed - Just a Chance is a classic, and Got to Get Out of Here works very well, and serves as an eerie (and interersting) foreshadow of what was to come.
ReplyDeleteThere is an amusing (tragic?) side-story to the recording of this album.
ReplyDeleteMika Kato wasn't picked out of thin air to recite her lines on "No One Knows". She was the lead singer of Japanese prog-rockers Sadistic Mika Band, who Chris Thomas was also producing at the same time he was producing Badfinger.
Mika was married to Sadistic Mika Band's guitarist and leader, Kazuhiko Kato. Sadistic Mika Band was busy recording in London, on the verge of what was a crucial tour for them. They had just become the first Japanese rock band to make the charts in the UK, and they were determined to follow it up with a polished, well-recorded album.
Unfortunately for Sadistic Mika Band and especially Kauzuhiko Kato, producer Chris Thomas ran off with his wife Mika during the sessions, whisking her off to Colorado to record what is largely a superfluous contribution to the Badfinger album. The affair was serious enough that she ditched Kazuhiko and married Thomas.
That broke up the Sadistic Mika Band in a hurry, even as their Chris Thomas produced sophomore album outsold their debut. Many years later, Kazuhiko tried reviving the band with different lead singers as "Sadistic Yuming Band", "Sadistic Mica Band", "Sadistic Mikaela Band", but it was never the same... He committed suicide in 2011, one more thing he had in common with Badfinger.