There are many tragedies in the world of music. Mozart dying young and penniless, buried in a common grave. Billie Holliday ignominiously handcuffed to her deathbed, charged with drug possession. The shockingly overpopulated Forever 27 Club. But few stories in pop music are as full of woe as the tale of the Welsh group that came to define power pop, Badfinger. The first band signed to The Beatles' Apple Records, they seemed destined for pop greatness — if not outright picking up right where the Fab Four left off — but mismanagement, deceit, and plain old bad luck scuttled all their aspirations. Within an eight year period between 1975 and 1983, the songwriting duo of Ham/Evans, the central creative forces in the band, had both committed suicide. Their deaths were blamed on a convenient combination of despondency over their lack of mainstream success and their sense of betrayal by record companies and managers who had swindled them out of their earnings, but a careful analysis o
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