Todd Rundgren Took Over Straight Up After George Harrison Quit 1971
Todd Rundgren says he was called in to finish Badfinger’s Straight Up after george harrison walked away from the sessions in 1971. Rundgren described the handoff as producer number three, after a project that had already stalled once and then shifted again under Harrison.
“They got maybe five songs in and George got completely involved in the Concert for Bangladesh and told the band, ‘I’m finished. I can't do this.’ That’s when I got the call — producer number three.”
January 1971 and May 1971
The first Straight Up sessions began in January 1971 with Geoff Emerick, who had coproduced Badfinger’s previous album, No Dice. Apple’s American arm was not satisfied with those new sessions, so Badfinger started over with Harrison in May 1971, roughly six months after he released All Things Must Pass.
That sequence left the album with three producers before it was done. Rundgren said the turnaround had to be fast, and the finished record was built from material that had already been started under two different setups.
Apple Records and the salvage job
Badfinger were already riding high on “No Matter What,” a top-10 hit in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and several other countries. Their debut single under the Badfinger name was Paul McCartney-penned “Come and Get It,” and Straight Up later became widely regarded as the group’s finest album.
Rundgren said, “There was a whole album by Geoff Emerick. I think we lifted a couple tunes from that.” He added, “‘Flying’ was one of them,” and, “Then the George Harrison tunes — we used some of those.”
Three producers, one album
Rundgren had built a reputation for getting things done very quickly, and Apple wanted the album finished after the earlier versions had not satisfied its American arm. He had worked on the Band’s 1970 album Stage Fright and had released two solo albums under the name Runt, which made him the kind of producer a label calls when a project is drifting.
For Badfinger, the result was not a clean handoff but a patchwork built from two abandoned runs and a final push from Rundgren. That is the real story here: Straight Up survived because Apple kept forcing the record toward a finish, and Rundgren was the last person willing to turn unfinished sessions into a releasable album.
