PHOTOS: Beyond ‘Breaking Bad’: What’s Next for the Show’s Stars They did, with four top 20 singles, of which “Baby Blue” was the last (preceded by “Come and Get It,” “No Matter What,” and “Day After Day”). Badfinger was the one act on the Beatles’ Apple label that bore any resemblance to their corporate bosses, and they had a lot to live up to. The 1971 album from which “Baby Blue” sprang, Straight Up, is now regarded as a classic, and in some ways the prototype for an entire genre of power pop, bridging the gap between the Beatles and Big Star. “So he’s fondling the equipment?” quipped Rundgren - who as of Monday still hadn’t seen the episode - as THR described the context of the final scene to him. Not since Paul Thomas Anderson placed ELO’s “Livin’ Thing” at the end of Boogie Nights as a tribute to Dirk Diggler’s penis has a pop song been used quite so ironically by a director as an unexpected grace note. While Ham was writing a love song to a girl, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilliganused it as Walt’s final love song to his beloved blue meth. The opening line, “Guess I got what I deserved,” certainly applies both to Ham’s sorry romantic lot at the time and to Walter White’s rueful, bloody end.īut there’s also a decidedly wry aspect to the placement of the song. The context in which “Baby Blue” was placed by Breaking Bad could scarcely have been imagined by Pete Ham when he wrote it as a sort of apology to an estranged girlfriend, Dixie Armstrong, who’s mentioned in the lyrics. PHOTOS: ‘Breaking Bad’ Finale at Hollywood Forever Cemetery And it’s kind of interesting now to have the band getting some recognition in a different context.
“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. “They had a lot of problems dealing with management and that sort of thing,” he noted - not to mention the greater sorrow of the eventual suicides of two band members, including the singer/songwriter behind “Baby Blue,” Pete Ham. “The band in retrospect was one of these kind of tragedies … one of those head-shakers,” said Rundgren, reached by The Hollywood Reporter at his home in Hawaii on Monday.
It’s a sort of bittersweet vindication for Badfinger, whose collective and individual fates have conjured a sense of sadness over the years. Spotify reported that streams of the Badfinger song rose by 9,000 percent, while Billboard reported a 3,000 percent sales gain, which should be good enough to put the song back on the next Hot 100 chart after 41 years, even though only a day’s worth of sales and streams will figure into the tally. The day after the show aired, “Baby Blue” rose out of nowhere to No.
0 kommentar(er)
