Badfinger Plays Riverhead
Residents and visitors to the South Fork may know that both John Lennon and Paul McCartney have spent time here, the latter an annual visitor to his house in Amagansett. Another member of the Beatles’ orbit, Peter Brown, who worked for their manager, the late Brian Epstein, has long summered in East Hampton.
Yet another of the extended Fab Four family will come as close as Riverhead on Saturday at 8 p.m., when Joey Molland, the guitarist and last surviving member of Badfinger, brings the power-pop legends to the Suffolk Theater. Badfinger, they of classics including “Come and Get It,” “Day After Day,” “No Matter What,” “Baby Blue,” and “Without You,” signed to the Beatles’ label, Apple Records, in 1968. While the latter song was a huge hit for Harry Nilsson and the others remain staples of classic-rock radio, the group suffered almost unimaginable bad luck, gravely wounded by unscrupulous management and a disorganized record label, which the Beatles birthed amid their own disintegration.
“We do the hits and a selection of other Badfinger songs,” Mr. Molland, who lives in Minnesota, said last week. “We might do one new song, but it’s really a Badfinger show.” The band now features Mark Healey, who joined in 1987, on bass; Mike Ricciardi, a decade-long member, on drums, and Gregg Inhofer, who played on Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” album, on piano and guitar.
While the founding members Pete Ham and Mike Gibbins hailed from Swansea, Wales, Badfinger’s Tom Evans and Mr. Molland came from the Beatles’ hometown of Liverpool, England. Mr. Molland, in fact, saw the Beatles at Liverpool’s famed Cavern Club in 1961 or ’62. Ultimately, he not only signed to their label but also collaborated onstage or in the studio with all of the Beatles after their breakup.
“They weren’t me absolutely favorite band, but they were really great,” Mr. Molland said of his first encounter with the Beatles. “I was really impressed by the two guys who sang — I didn’t know their names or anything. But they were really good and really powerful. Liverpool bands, at that time, were really punchy, nothing lightweight about them. That was what really impressed me, just how strong it was. That gave me a real thing about what it was to play onstage: to sing full out, play your guitar as hard as you could. It was a great introduction, and a great, fun time.”
Badfinger’s four albums on Apple Records are outstanding and, the hits notwithstanding, the band remains underrated. Mr. Molland’s contribution was considerable: In addition to superlative guitar work, he wrote or co-wrote many of the band’s songs. “We were very democratic about all that,” he said. “We did write a lot of songs together. It was easy, a collaborative effort.”
Comparison to the Beatles, he said, “is a great compliment. When people talk about us being great songwriters, it’s the greatest compliment we could get. I know if the guys were here, they’d all say the same thing.”
Alas, the guys are not. Ham, destitute with a child on the way and despondent over the realization that the band’s manager, Stan Polley, had long swindled them, hanged himself in 1975. “Stan Polley is a soulless bastard and I’ll take him with me,” a suicide note read. Eight years later Evans took his own life in the same manner, his wife quoting the musician as saying, “I want to be where Pete is. It’s a better place than down here.” Gibbins, who with Mr. Molland continued in Badfinger for several more years, died in 2005.
“We did have really bad luck with the managers, and of course the crooks were all over us — the music business was full of crooks in those days,” Mr. Molland said. “They took us to the cleaners. All we knew was to do our best and play. We were a pretty good band and could have gone a lot further.”
Tickets to Joey Molland’s Badfinger, Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Suffolk Theater in Riverhead, are $45 and $49.