The Beatles hit that was given away to Badfinger
For a few years in the earliest part of their career, Badfinger was heavily mentored by The Beatles. Although they had started out as their own distinct entity under the name The Iveys, pretty much everything about the band changed once they were signed to Apple Records.
Beatles band members began writing songs for Badfinger, and one of their most popular songs, ‘No Matter What’, was even produced by Beatles road manager and personal assistant Mal Evans. George Harrison was a producer for the band on the track ‘Day After Day’, for which he also played slide guitar. But Harrison wasn’t the only Beatle to contribute to Badfinger’s discography: Paul McCartney gave the band their first top ten hit in both the UK and US, ‘Come and Get It’.
“I’d written the song ‘Come and Get It’, and I’d made a fairly decent demo,” McCartney remembered in Anthology. “Because I lived locally, I could get in half an hour before a Beatles session at Abbey Road – knowing it would be empty and all the stuff would be set up – and I’d use Ringo’s equipment to put a drum track down, put some piano down, quickly put some bass down, do the vocal, and double-track it.”
McCartney recorded an entire demo of the song by himself on July 24th, 1969. The Beatles were in the middle of recording Abbey Road, but McCartney’s early entry allowed him to finish the demo without any other band members’ input. It doesn’t appear as though McCartney ever seriously considered recording the song with his band, considering how McCartney produced the Badfinger version of the track just a week later.
“I said to Badfinger, ‘OK, it’s got to be exactly like this demo,’ because it had a great feeling on it,” McCartney added. “They actually wanted to put their own variations on, but I said, ‘No, this really is the right way.’ They listened to me – I was producing, after all – and they were good. The song was a hit in 1970.”
McCartney auditioned each member to sing the lead vocal, eventually choosing fellow Liverpudlian Tom Evans. Badfinger’s previous two singles, ‘Maybe Tomorrow’ and ‘Dear Angie’, failed to make any kind of major commercial impact, but ‘Come and Get It’ reversed their fortunes. The song climbed to number four in the UK and number seven in the US, no doubt helped by McCartney’s writing and production credit.
Although he wrote the song, McCartney almost completely handed over the ownership of ‘Come and Get It’ to Badfinger. That is until he decided to perform the song for the first time live at a concert in Bologna, Italy, in November of 2011.
Check out McCartney’s demo of ‘Come and Get It’ down below.
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