Snapshot
Snapshot: George Harrison and Pete Ham
The photograph of Harrison and Pete Ham sits at the intersection of two very different stories — one that kept going and one that didn't.
Pete Ham was the principal songwriter for Badfinger, the Welsh group signed to Apple Records in 1969. He wrote "Without You," the song that Harry Nilsson turned into a defining hit in 1972 and that has been covered so many times since that the original recording is almost inaccessible beneath the weight of its replications.
He died by suicide in 1975 at the age of twenty-seven. The Badfinger story is one of the worse ones in the Apple Records period — a story of management problems, financial irregularities, and the failure of the mechanisms that were supposed to protect musicians from exploitation.
The photograph
The photograph of George Harrison and Pete Ham together is from the Apple period, the early 1970s, when Badfinger were one of the more active groups on the label and Harrison was still maintaining some involvement with Apple's roster. Harrison had produced the first Badfinger record and knew the members.
The photograph carries weight now that it couldn't have carried at the time. Harrison is at a point in his career that will continue for another three decades. Ham is at a point that will not continue for long.
Badfinger's place in the lineage
Badfinger's relationship to the Americana and roots-rock lineage is indirect but traceable. The group was a British band working in a mode heavily influenced by American country and folk sources. Their melodic sensibility came from the Beatles, whose influence on American country-rock and the Americana sound is one of the running arguments in the music history of the period.
"Without You" — which Ham wrote with Tommy Evans — is one of the most performed songs in the pop canon. It has traveled far from where it started.
What the snapshot carries
Harrison outlived many of the people he was photographed with from the Apple period. The photograph with Ham is poignant in the way that photographs of people with very different futures always are, except that in this case both men knew something of what trouble looked like.
The snapshot entries at this site try to find what the photographs contain beyond their surface. The Harrison and Ham photograph contains a great deal — a friendship, a shared professional context, an era in which enormous possibility and serious failure often existed in the same building.
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