Joey Molland, guitarist for the group Badfinger, who had continued leading a touring edition of the group decades after other key members had passed on, died Saturday night at age 77.
Badfinger was best known for the late ’60s/early ’70s hits “No Matter What You Do,” “Day After Day,” “Come and Get It” and “Baby Blue.” Molland did not sing lead on the original recordings of those classic songs, but ably took on that duty in concerts for decades to come, touring the band’s catalog and his own solo material on up through the summer of 2024, becoming a cult figure among fans of that era’s music for his good will and enthusiasm in keeping the Badfinger flag flying.
Sunday morning, Molland’s social media manager posted: “It is with profound sadness to inform his fans here on IG, and around the world, that Joey (Joseph Charles) Molland passed away last night at 11:39 pm CST, after a 3+ months long battle with multiple health issues.
No cause of death was given as part of that statement. But in a GoFundMe post in January, his girlfriend Mary revealed that, after feeling “vaguely ill” through the fall after wrapping up his last tour, he was in the ICU and had “acquired a very bad bacterial infection due to his diabetes. The infection caused septicemia and traveled through his body, causing harm in multiple critical organs and bones. His recovery has been slow and arduous, including several surgeries and procedures. As you all know, Joey is a strong-willed, independent man. He is fighting with everything he has, but every day is a battle.”
Molland had been active as a touring musician and frontman through last September. The band that toured under the name Joey Molland’s Badfinger had been out on the road throughout summer 2024 playing amphitheaters (including Orange County’s Pacific Amphitheater), mid-size theaters and fairs on the Happy Together Tour, which also featured the Turtles, the Association and other acts best known for hits in the ’60s and ’70s.
The Welsh-bred Badfinger was initially signed to the Beatles‘ Apple Records label and first hit the top 10 in 1969 with the Paul McCartney-penned “Come and Get It,” which reached No. 7 in the U.S. and No. 4 in the U.K. A followup, 1970’s “No Matter What,” did nearly as well on both continents, and the band’s trio of international hits was completed in 1971 with “Day After Day,” which gave Badfinger its biggest Billboard Hot 100 success with a No. 4 peak. Another single, “Baby Blue,” fell short of the top 10 but remains one of the group’s most iconic songs, finding new popularity after its use in the closing moments of the series “Breaking Bad.”
A previous incarnation of the group, then known as the Iveys, had been active since 1961, but Molland did not join until the transition to the Badfinger identity in the late ’60s. Pete Ham, who sang most of the band’s original material and also co-composed the Nilsson smash “Without You,” died by suicide in 1975, and bassist Tom Evans died by suicide as well in 1983. The death of drummer Mike Gibbins in 2005 from natural causes had left Molland as the sole surviving member of the classic lineup for the last 20 years.
“There are times when it all feels like a dream,” Molland said in an interview with Guitar World in 2020. “Badfinger gave me the opportunity to do everything a musician could want. 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.”
But, besides some chart near-misses, the band soon found itself broke in the wake of legendary problems with management, and then sidelined by Ham’s death before trying to pick up the pieces with revised lineups. “People say things like ‘the saddest story in rock,’ and I guess they always will,” Molland told Guitar World. “I can’t get away from it, but I don’t really dwell on it. I try to focus on the good things that we did and all the great songs we recorded. I meet people all the time who know our music. Sure, I wish things didn’t turn out as they did. We had two people in the band take their own lives – 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.”
Members of the Beatles took a strong interest in Badfinger that went beyond just signing the group to Apple. Besides McCartney’s songwriting contribution for their first hit, George Harrison produced some of the group’s second album (which also featured production by Todd Rundgren, who later said he did most of the production credited to Harrison after the ex-Beatle left the project). Molland and Evans were called in as session players on two post-Beatles solo projects, John Lennon’s “Imagine” (including what Molland said was uncredited work on “Jealous Guy”) and Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass.” Molland was also among the musicians for Harrison’s “Concert for Bangladesh” concert.
Molland quit Badfinger before Ham’s death, taking issue with the fateful management decisions that were being made after the band switched from Apple to Warner Bros. Records. He formed a new band, Natural Gas, with Jerry Shipley, who had been in Humble Pie. The group went on tour opening for Peter Frampton and released one album in 1976 but broke up the following year.
Molland reconvened with Evans for a new version of Badfinger, although they ended up adopting the band name at that time rather reluctantly. “We weren’t going to call if Badfinger,” he said in an interview with the Strange Brew. “We went into Sound City and did some demos there and we gave them to an attorney who took them to Elektra/Asylum. They loved it, thought it was great. We went and saw them and played them a bit more and they decided they wanted to give us a record deal. They signed us and said ‘You should call this band Badfinger.’ Tommy and I were a bit nervous about doing that. It wasn’t Badfinger, it was Tommy and me from Badfinger and two other guys. We ended up going along with it and they put the ‘Airwaves’ album out” under the Badfinger aegis. The group released one more album, “Say No More,” in 1981 before going separate ways.
Molland began recording as a solo artist with the “After the Pearl” album in 1983 and continued sporadically releasing albums through 2020’s “Be True to Yourself.”
Molland had been active on package tours in which he was able to sing the songs of Badfinger. One such tour, in 2019, had him reuniting with Badfinger’s former producer, Todd Rundgren, along with Micky Dolenz and Christopher Cross, on a tribute to the Beatles’ White Album where band members also played their own songs.
