Badfinger – Day After Day

The Beatle Who Borrowed A Strat And Wouldn’t Stop Until It Was Perfect

By the time “Day After Day” reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1972, Badfinger had done something almost no band managed — scored three consecutive top-ten singles with three different Beatle-connected producers. Paul McCartney had handed them “Come and Get It.” Now George Harrison had quietly delivered their biggest American hit yet. The song, written entirely by Pete Ham, was a lovelorn masterpiece that sounded so much like the Beatles that Rolling Stone once wrote the band was “as if John, Paul, George, and Ringo had been reincarnated” as the four of them.

Getting there was a nightmare. Badfinger had already recorded a full album with engineer-turned-producer Geoff Emerick, only for Apple Records to reject the tapes entirely. Harrison stepped in — partly out of gratitude, since Badfinger had contributed to his landmark All Things Must Pass — and set to work at Abbey Road in the spring of 1971. He wanted something in the spirit of Abbey Road itself: warm, layered, and built to last. “Day After Day” was one of the first tracks cut in those sessions, and Harrison knew immediately it was special.

What most people don’t know is that the slide guitar arrangement was entirely Harrison’s idea. Joey Molland recalled the moment Harrison asked if he could play on the track: “I said, ‘No man, sure, go ahead. This man’s a Beatle, this man’s a hero.'” Harrison borrowed Molland’s Stratocaster and spent hours getting the slide parts exactly right — precise, unhurried, a little obsessive. Then Leon Russell wandered into the studio by chance, heard the playback, and offered to add piano. George leaned over to the engineer and whispered, “This guy’s a genius.” Russell listened to the track once through with his eyes closed — Harrison thought he’d fallen asleep — then played the part perfectly in a single take.

Harrison never finished the album. Ravi Shankar’s urgent request pulled him toward organising the Concert for Bangladesh — which Badfinger also played, with Ham duetting with Harrison on an acoustic “Here Comes the Sun” in front of 40,000 people. Todd Rundgren was hired to complete Straight Up, mixing Harrison’s sessions alongside new recordings. Badfinger weren’t happy about it. Rundgren was effective but blunt, and the band felt their rawer instincts were being sanded down. He finished the entire record in two weeks.

Straight Up, released in December 1971 on Apple Records, peaked at number 31 in the US — modest, given the quality inside. But “Day After Day” overperformed the album significantly, topping the Cash Box chart on the back of over a million sales. A second single, “Baby Blue,” reached number fourteen. Meanwhile, Harry Nilsson’s version of Ham and Tom Evans’s “Without You” — from the same songwriting partnership — was climbing to number one simultaneously. Pete Ham was writing number ones for other people while his own band’s album stalled.

The song has been revisited with deep affection ever since. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull teamed up with guitarist Terry Reid and the Manchester String Quartet in 2020 for a chamber version, calling it “an elegant and nostalgic experience.” It remains the most covered and celebrated track in the Badfinger catalogue — a small miracle given how chaotically it was made.

Pete Ham took his own life in April 1975, aged 27, never knowing the full scale of what he’d left behind. Tom Evans followed in 1983. The tragedy that followed Badfinger makes “Day After Day” almost unbearably poignant in retrospect — a song about longing, written by a man of extraordinary talent, polished by a Beatle who believed in him completely, and now carrying the weight of everything that came after.