Joey Molland, a guitarist and songwriter who was the last surviving member of Badfinger, one of the first acts signed to the Beatles’ Apple Records and a power-pop force in the early 1970s on the strength of hits like “Day After Day” and “No Matter What,” died on March 1 in St. Louis Park, Minn. He was 77.
His partner, Mary Joyce, said he died in a hospital from complications of diabetes.
Mr. Molland joined Badfinger — originally called the Iveys — in 1969. The band had been signed the year before as a marquee act for Apple Records, the much-publicized label formed by the Beatles in 1968 as part of the parent company Apple Corps.
“Badfinger gave me the opportunity to do everything a musician could want,” Mr. Molland said in a 2020 interview with Guitar World magazine. “I got to make records. I heard my music on the radio, and I toured all over. I couldn’t believe the luck we were having. For a time, everything was great.”
Apple Corps was a high-minded, if financially dubious, initiative to tap the Beatles’ millions to fund unknown talents in music, film and electronics. It was created so that, as John Lennon said at the news conference announcing the venture, “people who just want to make a film about anything don’t have to go on their knees in somebody’s office — probably yours.”
This experiment in “Western Communism,” as Paul McCartney called it, involved no shortage of misfires. (The company’s retail shop, known as the Apple Boutique, hemorrhaged 200,000 pounds — the equivalent of millions in today’s dollars — in a little more than a year.) But Badfinger was a gamble that worked, and its members enjoyed their new status as rock stars.
The band — whose best-known lineup included the Welsh-born Pete Ham on guitar and vocals and Mike Gibbins on drums, along with two members from Liverpool, Tom Evans on bass and vocals and Mr. Molland, who also sang harmonies — wrote most of their own material. Still, their close association with the Beatles, as well as their honeyed Merseybeat melodies, initially had some fans thinking that they were the Beatles recording under a pseudonym. Others ventured that the doe-eyed Mr. Molland was Mr. McCartney’s brother.
And no wonder. The band’s name itself echoed a Beatles tune: “Bad Finger Boogie” had been the working title of their “With a Little Help From My Friends.”
The first of Badfinger’s three Top 10 hits, “Come and Get It,” recorded before Mr. Molland joined the band and released as a single in Britain in late 1969, was written by Mr. McCartney for the film “The Magic Christian,” starring Peter Sellers and his Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr. With its easy, singsong sunniness, it seemed to hint at Mr. McCartney’s later work with his band Wings.
Another Beatle, George Harrison, not only produced Badfinger’s next hit, “Day After Day,” which reached No. 4 in the United States in 1971; he also chipped in on slide guitar.
Badfinger struggled over the years to carve out an identity distinct from their rock-deity mentors’. And playing alongside them was not easy.
“I love the Beatles and I love to play,” Mr. Molland said in a 2014 interview. “But to be in a studio with these guys, either playing for them or with them, was a very intimidating experience — a scary thing!”
Joseph Charles Molland was born on June 21, 1947, in Liverpool, the fifth of six children of Joseph and Jane (Green) Molland. He grew up not far from Penny Lane, the thoroughfare immortalized in one of the Beatles’ most celebrated songs.
By his early teens he was playing in a band called the Assassins. It was a fertile time to be a young rocker in Liverpool.
Mr. Molland and his friends had grown up “listening to the same radio” as the Beatles, he said in a 2020 interview with the Vinyl District, a music website. “We went to the same guitar stores, the same cafes and all of it, really. We played the same clubs.”
He later recorded with another band, Gary Walker & the Rain. After they broke up in 1969, he got word that the Iveys had an opening.
Mr. Molland joined in time to record the band’s first official album as Badfinger, “No Dice” (1970). (The group had made one album as the Iveys, and some tracks had earlier appeared on “Magic Christian Music,” which was essentially a soundtrack album.) “No Matter What,” featured on “No Dice,” hit No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In April 1970, Mr. McCartney announced that he was leaving the Beatles, initiating a famously nasty split. Still, Badfinger remained in their orbit. The band played on Mr. Harrison’s triple album “All Things Must Pass” (1970), for example, and Mr. Molland and Mr. Evans backed John Lennon on some tracks of his watershed 1971 album, “Imagine.”
Badfinger eventually signed with Warner Bros., although their affairs had turned nearly as nasty as the Beatles’. The band became entangled by fierce battles over money with their manager, Stan Polley, who was embroiled in a messy legal tangle with Warners. At one point, the label halted distribution of the band’s 1974 album, “Wish You Were Here,” despite a strong critical response.
With tensions rising within the band and anger mounting over Mr. Polley’s stewardship, Badfinger began to fray. Mr. Ham killed himself in 1975, leaving a note that read: “Stan Polley is a soulless bastard. I will take him with me.”
Mr. Molland spearheaded various incarnations of Badfinger over the years, including collaborations with Mr. Evans on the albums “Airwaves” (1979) and “Say No More” (1981). Still, disputes about royalties festered, and in 1983 Mr. Evans, too, died by suicide. Mr. Gibbins died of a brain aneurysm in 2005.
Mr. Molland continued to tour with a band called Joey Molland’s Badfinger into his later years.
In addition to his partner, Mr. Molland is survived by two sons, Joseph and Shaun, from his marriage to Katherine Wiggins, who died in 2009, and a brother, Douglas.
“People say things like ‘the saddest story in rock,’ and I guess they always will,” Mr. Molland said of Badfinger to Guitar World. “We had two people in the band take their own lives,” he added. “That’s a tragedy on a human level. Who knows what drives people to do such a thing? But I can’t think about ‘what might have been.’ You go crazy if you live your life like that.”
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