Badfinger - Straight Up (1971) [1995, DCC, 24Karat Gold Disc]

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Badfinger - Straight Up (1971) [1995, DCC, 24Karat Gold Disc]

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Straight Up is the third album by power pop band Badfinger, released on December 13, 1971. It is widely regarded as Badfinger's best album, spawning two Top 20 singles in the U.S. and being commercially successful in its own right. The album was released on the The Beatles' Apple Records label and was unavailable for many years after it closed. It became a highly sought-after album by collectors until it was finally re-issued on CD in 1993.

History

Recordings for Straight Up began in early 1971 under the direction of producer Geoff Emerick at Abbey Road Studios, who produced the bulk of Badfinger's preceding album No Dice. Although these early recordings were completed and both the album and a single, "Name of the Game", were ready to be released, Apple Records co-president George Harrison decided the album could be improved under his personal direction, which led the single to be canceled and all the material recorded up to that point to be shelved. Harrison recorded a couple of new tracks with the band in the summer of 1971, as well as re-recording a couple of the original tracks. He can be heard playing a slide-guitar duet with Pete Ham on the song "Day After Day", with Leon Russell featured on piano. Additionally, Harrison and Phil Spector planned a different string arrangement for "Name of the Game", but this apparently never came to pass.

Due to a hurriedly assembled benefit concert that summer, The Concert for Bangladesh, at which Badfinger performed, Harrison lost interest in the Straight Up project and did not return to it after the concert. Apple retained Todd Rundgren to finish the album. Rundgren utilised recordings begun by both Emerick and Harrison, re-recorded some of them, and also recorded several new tracks with the band (notably "Baby Blue") in less than a month. (It had already taken the band over a year to record what songs they had.) Although production credit for individual songs on the album is given to both Rundgren and Harrison, Rundgren did the final mix of the entire album (and was upset that he was given neither a co-production nor a mixing credit for any of the Harrison songs).

Consistent with the title of the album, the front cover featured a "straight up" picture of Badfinger, with no credits or titles marring the image. The title was instead shown on the back cover.

The album was remastered by Ron Furmanek at Abbey Road Studios in March 1992. The remastered album was released by Capitol Records in 1993 with five bonus tracks. The first four were all early alternate versions of songs that would end up on Straight Up recorded in early 1971 for the originally intended follow up to 1970's No Dice. This untitled album was abruptly canceled by Apple and when Badfinger regrouped to record their next album they discarded these early tapes in favor of starting from scratch. Three other tracks from these same sessions were released as bonus tracks on the remastered version of No Dice in 1992. The final bonus track is the U.S. single mix of "Baby Blue", the difference being a reverberated snare drum.

While it was originally claimed that the remastering of the entire Badfinger catalog was done from the original two track stereo master mix tapes, this was proved false as the original master tapes were thought lost until recently. in 2010, EMI announced a new round of remasters for Badfinger's Apple releases that would possibly rectify this.

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Badfinger - Straight Up (1971) [1995, DCC, 24Karat Gold Disc]

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