Wow.. The power of TV! Todd Rundgren had been talking about his time producing Badfinger‘s 1971 Straight Up album and its second single, “Baby Blue,” which has become one of 2013 hottest tracks, thanks to its inclusion in the final scene of AMC’s Breaking Bad.
On Tuesday (October 1st), after hitting Number One on the iTunes charts, the song sat at Number 13.
Spotify reported that streams of “Baby Blue” rose 9,000 percent, and Billboard posted a 3,000 percent sales gain. Although the Beatles‘ Apple Records proteges remain beloved for their power pop classics, such as “No Matter What” and “Day After Day,” the hanging deaths of leader Pete Ham — who wrote “Baby Blue” – and Tommy Evans in 1975 and 1983, respectively, has cast a pall over the band’s history.
Rundgren told The Hollywood Reporter, “The band in retrospect was one of these kind of tragedies . . one of those head-shakers. They had a lot of problems dealing with management and that sort of thing. So a lot of the time when the band’s name comes up, it’s usually in this context of an ‘if only’ kind of thing: ‘what if’ this, ‘what if’ that. And it’s kind of interesting now to have the band getting some recognition in a different context. Good for them! . . .They were kind of like almost an ersatz Beatles. And when their very first records came out, like ‘Come And Get It,’ they were produced to sound like the Beatles, in a way. Paul McCartney’s writing songs for them! So it was kind of a way of broadening the Beatles’ franchise, I think. . . Badfinger was almost filling a void that was opened up when the Beatles stopped recording together.”
