Pop Production–Badfinger
When Cool Band Meets Crappy Production
A crappy production or mix can ruin an album … and it’s too bad the technology doesn’t exist to just hand over a digital version of the original tapes to the listener. Until that day, we’re sometimes stuck with good material and poor presentation
I had picked up a copy of Badfinger’s Straight Up recently, and by the third track, something was bugging me about the production and mix. No Dice, the band’s previous album, sounded much better, and no one had felt the need to break up the lead vocal (s) to the left and right channels simultaneously. It isn’t that I mind using the stereo spectrum–it just seemed like a gimmick here. It also seemed to take the guts out of the band’s sound.
I had to get all the way to the sixth track–”Name of the Game”–before I realized that something was really screwy. I knew the track from The Very Best of Badfinger but this was a completely different–and to my ears, far inferior–version. It’s as though producer Tod Rundgren had used all of his power to turn Badfinger into a run-of-the-mill pop band.
“Name of the Game” is also one of the tracks that George Harrison originally produced, though the Straight Up liner notes say that Rundgren gave the material a “complete overhaul.” That means “he chose to re-work and mix tracks” from earlier sessions. After all that, the fact that Harrison produced “Name of the Game” seems pretty much beside the point.
The most recent re-issue of Straight Up includes an earlier version of “Name of the Game” (the same version, I believe, from The Very Best of Badfinger). It’s great to have both of these versions on the same album … and a second version of the Harrison produced “Suitcase,” but why are these alternate versions re-issued in such a haphazard way? Why not issue all of the Harrison tracks together in one place (”Suitcase,” “Name of the Game,” “I’d Die Babe,” and “Day After Day”)? Then we could have a proper comparison. Anyway you cut it, Badfinger’s sound was better centered with producer Geoff Emerick on No Dice.
Power Pop–Badfinger
Somewhere Between Pop and Rock
I’ve been listening to Badfinger and it strikes me strange that the phrase power pop is used to describe bands like Badfinger, Big Star, and the Raspberries. I understand the use of the term; what is strange to me is that we need it. The phrase somehow seems to provide a psychological edge to justify listening to bands that basically cover pop material.
I do understand that power pop does physically describe the fact that bands like Badfinger have more “power”–more rock– than say Bread . At the same time, calling a band power pop seems to be an attempt to make the band–any band that plays pop music–seem cooler.
You can look at Bread and Badfinger’s catalogs and make the argument that there are Bread songs that rock harder than Badfinger songs. That the hardest rocking Bread songs (”Mother Freedom,” “Don’t Tell Me No”) have much more power than a number of Badfinger ballads (”We’re for the Dark”). Still, no one calls Bread power pop or says that Badfinger ballads don’t really qualify as power pop. But both groups–material wise–cover a lot of the same ground, which means they mostly focus on love songs.
I think the idea of power pop needs to be readjusted. Pop music–without power as an adjective–is as justifiable aesthetically as rock if it’s any good.
