BARRY KNOEDL -
page 3
With the excitement surrounding the
release of Barry's single on Death Records, Barry and Bill began working
on what would become Bill's first solo release on Beat Bad Records, You're Not Coming Home and
Don't Listen To Them. At the same time, Barry and Bill returned
to their Lennon/McCartney project, beginning with Nobody I Know, I
Don't Want To See You Again, and I'm In Love. They laid down
rhythm tracks for all three songs in the same session, with Barry playing bass,
Bill playing acoustic and electric guitar, and John Sheridan playing drums.
As with most of their sessions at this time, everything went smoothly, and they
would continue to work on these and other Lennon/McCartney songs through 1981.
They completed 10 Lennon/McCartney songs in all, including Tip Of My Tongue, and One
And One Is Two. Those two songs, as any die-hard Beatles fan would
know, are the two most obscure of the entire collection of Lennon/McCartney
songs. Barry had never heard One And One Is
Two, but Bill had a Dutch import of it by The Strangers with Mike
Shannon. After listening to the song together, they thought that this was
a song that they could really fix up. If they gave it a driving beat, like
I Saw Her Standing There, it could have possibilities. Tip Of My Tongue was a song neither of them had
heard, but Barry had an Easy Piano Lennon/McCartney songbook with it included.
This became the most challenging song of all, but after the experience of
writing and arranging their own songs for several years, it turned out not to be
a challenge at all. Before they had even completed these two songs in
1978, they were excited that, if they could get the recordings released, they
would be the first artists to touch these songs since 1964. They also
realized that they would be the first artists ever to release the songs in
the U.S. They approached Nippo, to see if he would consider releasing them
on Death Records. He wasn't interested. Barry and Bill felt so
strongly about these two songs, that they decided to start their own record
label, and put the songs out themselves.
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Barry is in the upper left |
Barry is third from the left |
The studio track sheet listed the artists
as Bill & Barry, but both Barry and Bill were concerned with being labeled
as "cover" artists. They wanted the freedom to continue to
record their own songs, without the expectation that they would sound like The
Beatles or any other 60's group. That is why they came up with the name The Badbeats, which
was a play on Beat Bad Records, a company name Barry and Bill already owned from
a collectible oldies store they ran in 1976. Once they decided to start
their own record label, they decided to continue using the name they already had
- Beat Bad Records.
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