From The Desk Of Don Fleming: Badfinger

Even if you don’t know Don Fleming by name, chances are you own a ton of records he’s helped make. As a producer, he’s collaborated with the likes of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, Screaming Trees, the Posies and Hole, to name just a handful. He works for the Alan Lomax Archive and has done archival work for the estates of Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey and others. He’s fronted such groups as the Velvet Monkeys, B.A.L.L. and Gumball and was a member of the band that provided the music to 1994 Beatles biopic Backbeat. Fleming also runs the Instant Mayhem label, which recently reissued the Velvet Monkeys’ 1982 debut Everything Is Right and is about to release the solo Don Fleming 4, which features Kim Gordon, Julie Cafritz and R. Stevie Moore. If all that weren’t enough, Fleming is guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Fleming: Badfinger released an album in 1971 called Straight Up. It sounded so amazing that I started wondered how the recording process worked that and how this dude Todd Rundgren, who was listed as the “producer,” had something to do with it. That led me to Todd’s double album, Something/Anything. (Check out a video.) Todd had recorded it himself and played most the instruments on it. That’s when I started seriously examining the ideas behind recording music. Badfinger was a great band that got screwed by a particularly vile manager. A sad story that has unfortunately become the legacy of the band in books and documentaries. But every album that they made was consistently great. The recent Apple Records Box Set is cool because it has all four of the band’s Apple albums and loads other great Badfinger rare tracks. There were two more fantastic albums on Warner Bros., Badfinger and Wish You Were Here, but the second one got pulled off the shelves seven weeks after release because of a conflict between the manager and label. That effectively killed the band, and the main two guys hung themselves, mostly over money problems, within the next few years. The songs “Come And Get It,” “Day After Day” and “No Matter What” still get regular airplay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoke1wUwEXY