Badfinger - Performance Center, Cambridge, MA, 3-31-1974

This is fun. I've never been able to post both the opening and headlining act from the same concert, but that's what I'm doing here. I just posted the opening act, Big Star. And now here's the headliner, Badfinger. Kudos to the promoter who put the two most influential and even legendary power pop bands on the same bill.

The story behind this recording is almost exactly the same as that of the Big Star recording. They were both recorded by the same taper. But although he only recorded the Big Star early show, he recorded both the early and late shows for Badfinger. 

Both Badfinger sets have nearly the exact same songs in the same order, except for the encores. I took a close look at both and decided the late show was recorded slightly better. Perhaps the taper stood in a better spot near the stage or something like that. Whatever the case, I've only included the late show here. However, the last two songs, "No Matter What" and the song cover song "Only You Know and I Know" are from the early show, because they were only played then. Also, the talk in the first track is from the early show.

Just as the Big Star recording remastered by the person nicknamed Captain Acid, so did the Badfinger recording. But, also like the Big Star recording, the lead vocals were rather low, so I further edited all the songs using the audio editing program UVR5. I think it sounds significantly better. Also, I made additional changes to improve the clarity of the banter between songs.

Speaking of the banter, some of it is extremely strange. Early on, there are a couple of cases where whoever is speaking says a bunch of nonsense words. So it's not that you can't understand due to the recording; it's that there's nothing intelligible to understand. There was a comment made by the emcee during the early show, and not included here, about the band being drunk. So maybe that explains the strange banter. But if they were drunk, I didn't hear it negatively impacting the actual playing of the songs. 

This recording is very welcome due to a severe lack of live Badfinger recordings with worthy sound quality. There are some BBC recordings, which I've posted at this blog. And there's a 1970 concert at Ungano's Club in New York City, which I've also posted here. But that's about it, and they're all from 1970 to 1973. Whereas this is from 1974, with a different set list.

There is one official live album from 1974, but boy is it a mess. It's called "Day After Day - Live," and it comes from a concert given in Cleveland on March 4, 1974. But in the late 1980s, one of the surviving band members, Joey Molland, messed it up. He changed the song order to put his songs at the front. He rerecorded his vocals and guitar parts. He even inserted himself with some banter between songs that wasn't there before. But, worst of all, he replaced the drums with overly loud 1980s-styled drumming. He basically made that album unlistenable, in my opinion.

The good news is, because this concert is from the same month, the set list is nearly the same. Plus, this is twice as long, with more songs. The only song from that messed up live album not here is "The Name of the Game." And the sound quality is good enough so you can easily throw that album away and replace it with this.

Badfinger wasn't particularly known for rocking hard, but they rocked hard at this concert. Especially near the end, some of the songs are seven, eight, or nine minutes long, with lots of jamming. It's different from their carefully produced album versions, but I like it.

This concert is an hour and 21 minutes long. That makes this the only good sounding live recording from the band that I know of that's longer than an hour.

01 talk (Badfinger)
02 Day After Day (Badfinger)
03 talk (Badfinger)
04 Constitution (Badfinger)
05 talk (Badfinger)
06 Baby Blue (Badfinger)
07 talk (Badfinger)
08 I Don't Mind (Badfinger)
09 talk (Badfinger)
10 Perfection (Badfinger)
11 Timeless (Badfinger)
12 Love Is Easy (Badfinger)
13 talk (Badfinger)
14 Blind Owl (Badfinger)
15 Suitcase (Badfinger)
16 I Can't Take It (Badfinger)
17 Give It Up (Badfinger)
18 No Matter What (Badfinger)
19 Only You Know and I Know (Badfinger)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15215640/Badfngr_1974_PerformnceCentrCmbridgeMA__3-31-1974_atse.zip.html

I couldn't find any good photos of Badfinger in concert in 1974. But I found a nice one from 1973. This photo comes from a performance on "The Midnight Special" TV show in February 1973. In the original, there were a bunch of mirrors behind the band. I thought that made the picture look overly crowded and confusing. So I used Photoshop to replace the mirrors with the same dark background elsewhere in the picture.