It’s 1999 — I’m working two jobs and finding myself with no money thanks to my record-buying obsession, so I pick up three new jobs. I’m now working five jobs, 60 hours or so a week, going to school, and purchasing as many records as I can get my hands on.

Fast-forward to 2001. Collecting every song from the Top 40 wasn’t really the most difficult thing I’ve done. The majority of them can be found on some CD, somewhere, and if not on the original album then on a reissue, greatest-hits album, or compilation of some sort. The only reason it took me two years is a simple lack of moolah.

The very last song I needed to finish my collection was an interesting one: “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles. Of course I could’ve found that song on a thousand different CDs, but I wanted to find the ’80s release of it — it hit #23 in 1986 thanks to its inclusion in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I must’ve searched for the soundtrack to that movie for six months without any luck before the lightbulb went off in my head that maybe I should find out why. Seems that Ferris’s director, John Hughes, didn’t think the songs in the movie would flow together outside of the movie, so he never released a soundtrack. At that point I purchased the original song from one of those thousand different CDs, and my collection was complete. Or so I thought.

I figured I could end it there, but after going no more than three weeks without purchasing one record, I decided I needed to keep going and expanded my quest to include the entire Billboard Hot 100 chart from the ’80s. So, essentially, I’ve been building up to this series for about seven years now.

Since this is where the fun really begins, we’ll start talking about this challenge next week. In the meantime, we move on to the letter “B.”

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Few bands in the history of rock n’ roll have been simultaneously as lucky and doomed as Badfinger. Lucky because they were not only one of the wildly eclectic assortment of artists the Beatles signed to their Apple Records label in 1968, but also because they had the talent and the songs to actually make something of their good fortune. And doomed because of poor management and a fatal dose of hopelessness. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

When the band joined the Apple roster, they were operating under the name the Iveys. And, much like their similarly botanically named contemporaries the Hollies, the Iveys – who consisted of vocalist/guitarist Pete Ham, vocalist/guitarist Tom Evans, bassist/vocalist Ron Griffith and drummer Mike Gibbins – were playing a highly melodic, often jaunty and sometimes dramatic mix of British invasion rock n’ roll. They were slightly out of fashion in the late ’60s, and yet, being that they sounded an awful lot like the Beatles, it mattered very little. The Beatles could do no wrong, and as the Beatles themselves were acutely aware of this, they wisely took the band under their wing. In time, Badfinger became the most successful act on the Apple roster, apart from the Beatles themselves. Along with Big Star and the Raspberries, the band helped shape what we all would come to know as “power pop.”

The Iveys - Maybe Tomorrow (1969)
purchase this album (Amazon)

Tony Visconti was tasked with producing the debut LP by the Iveys. The album was preceded by a single that was thought to have great potential, the melancholy, Left-Banke-ish, Tom Evans-sung ballad “Maybe Tomorrow.” When it failed to dent the top 40 in the states (the single stalled at #67), the album’s release was canceled by Apple’s US distributor, Capitol. However, the album still made it to store shelves in Japan and parts of Europe. What those countries heard was a mixed bag of feisty rockers, cutesy pop ditties and a very Beatley sound.

From the lighthearted tale of a “Fisherman,” sung again by the Paul McCartney of the band, Tom Evans, to the bizarre juxtaposition of a sad eviction tale sung along to vaguely Mexican-sounding, not terribly unhappy music with a supple Pete Ham lead vocal, “They’re Knocking Down Our Home” (download), the contents of Maybe Tomorrow are all over the place. Sometimes this is a good thing; other times it falls flat, like when the band added some ridiculous call-and-response to “I’m In Love,” or the silly wah-wah and affected chorus vocals in “Think About The Good Times” (download). The most impressive song here is the closer, a Pete Ham-sung, a long-ish tune called “I’ve Been Waiting” (download) that foreshadowed Weezer’s dramatic, similarly placed “Only In Dreams” 25 years later. The band’s first effort may not have been a broadly defining moment, but the power pop template was being formed. Except that nobody really knew it yet. (more…)

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