Badfinger’s ‘Day After Day’ is credited to George Harrison, producer and that doesn’t sit easy with Todd Rundgren, who is actually the producer.
Todd tells Noise11.com, “It’s a real saga. They had actually recorded an album with Geoff Emerick, who was the engineer for The Beatles in their latter days as a studio band. The American Apple was not pleased with the result. They couldn’t hear any singles. It wasn’t what they were looking for”.
“George Harrison started all over again with them but it was more of a George Harrison record than a Badfinger record. He did it the way he was doing his own acoustic records with three acoustic guitars, like Phil Spector. He got four songs in, maybe five and got all caught up in the Concert for Banga Desh and said I can’t do this anymore. At that point, I was up and coming as a trouble shooter. I was notorious for getting in the studio and getting the record done.
“The band at that point were like ‘we’ve made a whole record then started another record with different material. They were a little bit lost. I said, ‘lets do some of the material you where going to do with George’. The first thing we did was ‘Baby Blue’. I thought that should be the template for the rest of the record. The record should sound like that and have that level of songwriting. During the course of that I had the Geoff Emerick stuff, and we used two songs from the original Geoff Emerick sessions. We used three songs maybe from the George Harrison recordings. I remember going to the listening party for the Bangla Desh album. George was in the studio. He said ‘I’ve got no time with this, I’m out. It’s your gig now’. I re-recorded ‘Day After Day’, because it sounded like a Phil Spector record, nothing like the rest of the record. My preference was make the band sound like the band. Don’t overdub a ton of stuff so they don’t sound like the band. I took a bunch of stuff off ‘Day After Day’ and re-recorded the drums. The record comes out and I’m mentioned anywhere on the ‘Day After Day’ record. “Produced by George Harrison”. It burnt my ass a little bit. The fact I got so upset about it upset them because they felt they had to defend George. So when it came time to do the next album I flew to London to be the producer. We did a session and the next day I came in and they said ‘we don’t want you to finish the record’ so they sent me home. That’s when the band started to fall apart which was a shame but it ended at ‘Baby Blue’”.
Watch the complete Todd Rundgren Noise11 interview:
TODD RUNDGREN 2024 AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES:
Thursday, February 22 – Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Friday, February 23 – The Triffid, Brisbane
Saturday, February 24 – Factory Theatre, Sydney
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