01	Wheel Of Fortune						07:50
	02	Fountain						07:22
	03	Wind Of Change						07:17
	04	River						06:49
	05	The Preacher						03:59
	06	On The Way Home						07:39

Originally released on Atlantic in July 1973, reissued on CD by Repertoire Records in 1993

Tony Kaye - Keyboards
Dave Foster - Bass, Vocals
Roy Dyke - Drums
Brian Parrish - Guitar, Vocals

Jon Anderson - Producer
Geoffrey Haslam - Producer, Engineer
Martin Rushent - Engineer

All songs by Badger, except track 5 by Brian Parrish

Recorded at the Rainbow Theatre, 15-16th December 1972

An attempt by ex-Yes keyboardist Tony Kaye to form a progressive supergroup, Badger released two albums but failed to achieve any sort of popularity. Recorded live a couple of weeks before Christmas 1972, One Live Badger is comprised of long tracks that provide an opportunity to feature the keyboard playing of Kaye and more importantly the excellent guitar work of Brian Parrish. The music is kind of like Traffic meets Grand Funk Railroad with an emphasis on spiritual rhythm and blues. Most of the songs have a religeous theme but stay well shy of being preachy. This is not complex progressive, but it is a very nice album with lots of energy, power, and emotion. It has recently been reissued on CD and sports the great cover work by Roger Dean. Their second release, White Lady, has Jackie Lomax taking center stage and a shift from progressive to a more soulful sound. Not overly recommended.

AMG EXPERT REVIEW: The easier Badger album to find, and the one worth having anyway. As the album's title indicates, the band also took the unusual step of making their first album a live recording of original songs. It has aged very well - with all the energy of live performance, there's none of the usual studio excesses or noodling of the era. The Yes connection via Tony Kaye is abundantly evident; the album was co-produced by Yes singer Jon Anderson, uses long instrumental breaks and prominent Hammond organ solos, and features the obligatory Roger Dean cover art. Nonetheless, the brooding lyrics and soulful harmonies make comparisons to Traffic and Blind Faith a much closer musical match. The first half of the album is excellent, kicking off with the pleasingly hoarse vocals of Foster on the full-tilt rocker "Wheel of Fortune" and the pensive "Fountain." There's an especially tight rhythm section underlying the restrained guitar work of "Wind of Change," combining to produce the album's best song. But the second half of the album, with rather moping numbers like "The Preacher," doesn't quite keep up this momentum. Reissued as a CD in 1993 by Repertoire Records. - Paul Collins

For much of his career, Tony Kaye was mostly known as the man that Rick Wakeman replaced in Yes in 1971, just in time to become a superstar keyboard player rivaling Keith Emerson. More serious fans of Yes knew him somewhat better, as the inspired if not overly showy keyboard virtuoso on what is usually regarded as the first fully realized Yes LP, The Yes Album. Then, in the 1980s, he was back in Yes, remaining long enough to participate in the eight-man "mega-Yes" lineup that gave Kaye his taste of the international success that he'd just missed at the outset of the 1970s, and belatedly raised his recognition level to extraordinary heights. Born Anthony John Selridge on January 11, 1946, Tony Kaye was a natural musician, his grandmother having been a concert pianist and his grandfather a jazz saxophone player. He showed an early affinity for the piano and began taking lessons at age four. He showed a strong interest in classical music as a child, and by age 12 he was giving concerts locally. Kaye continued taking formal music lessons up to age 18, but by that time he had developed aspirations other than a career as a classical musician. He'd discovered jazz in his mid-teens, beginning with Dixieland, and was playing in a trad-jazz band while still in school. His interests remained split between jazz and classical until he encountered the work of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, after which he abandoned his goals as a classical musician. At 15, he joined his first working band, the Danny Rogers Orchestra. This accompanied his beginning to study of the art of arranging, which was to serve him well in the years to come. Faced with the choice of becoming a music teacher or a concert pianist - a goal for which he doubted he had the talent - Kaye chose to bide his time by studying commercial art and design. Meanwhile, he played with his jazz group and immersed himself in R&B, which was booming in Britain at the time. Ultimately the music cost him his spot in school, but by that time his interests had shifted again, to rock & roll. Kaye's earliest rock & roll gigs were played as a member of Johnny Taylor's Star Combo, and then in the lineup of the Federals, a beat instrumental group in the same category as the Dakotas, who recorded for Parlophone Records and got their best crack at success backing Roy Orbison on a British tour in 1965. Kaye played organ in the group, and cut four singles with them in 1964 and 1965. His main influence was Graham Bond, the R&B keyboard player whose work showed Kaye how to exploit the organ's sustaining quality, as against the piano. By 1966, Kaye had moved on to membership in Jimmy Winston & His Reflections, a band formed around former Small Faces organist and rhythm guitarist Jimmy Winston - they stayed together through one single and a name change, to Winston's Fumbs, and Kaye had also passed through the lineup of a band called Bittersweet. It was sheer chance that led Kaye to a meeting with Chris Squire, who was putting together the lineup of a new group with Peter Banks, Jon Anderson, and Bill Bruford. Squire invited Kaye into the lineup of Yes, which became the first big break in his music career. Tony Kaye's time in Yes was a formative period for musician and group alike. Using psychedelia as a starting point, the quartet aimed for a big electric sound that would also have room for elegant harmonies and virtuoso technique. At first, like the rest of the band, Kaye was finding his way, trying to get an expansive sound from his instrument, an exercise in futility until he was able to purchase a large Hammond B-3 organ six months after joining. His own sound was fairly tentative but increasingly ambitious, and within the limitations of the piano and organ, Kaye added a great deal to the color and tone of the music on the group's first two albums. He persevered through the group's early days, when they were still getting known and putting the fine points on their sound, which meant letting Peter Banks go, and bringing Steve Howe into the lineup. Kaye got through all of those early travails, and a December 1970 car crash that left him with a broken foot (you can see the cast in the cover shot of The Yes Album. It was with The Yes Album, recorded in the fall of 1970, just before the crash, that Kaye (along with the rest of the band) achieved his breakthrough as a musician - his keyboards (now including a Moog synthesizer) made sounds as animated as Steve Howe's guitars, and the interplay between the two musicians was some of the best work the group had ever done. Additionally, The Yes Album finally showed Kaye (and the rest of the band) achieving the larger-than-life presence they'd always sought, his organ and synthesizer adding a considerable degree of majesty to the band's overall sound. In its restraint and solid music and musicianship, The Yes Album remains one of the most impressive and listenable albums of the progressive rock era, and not just to fans of progressive rock, and a good portion of that credit must go to Tony Kaye's restrained, tasteful, yet virtuosic playing. Unfortunately for him, the other members of Yes had a somewhat different sound in mind, one that Kaye had not been able to provide in his three years with the band. His tenure with the group came to an end in the summer of 1971, after their first American tour and a triumphant run on the British album charts with The Yes Album. The reason for his exit stemmed from personal and musical conflicts with the other members, especially Howe. Increasingly, Yes were striving for a dense, loud, complex sound, almost the progressive rock equivalent of what composer Igor Stravinsky generated with an orchestra on works like The Rite of Spring. Kaye's tendency to rely on piano and organ with the minimal use of synthesizers was no longer sufficient for what they saw as their evolving sound, and he was let go. Kaye picked himself up nicely enough in 1972 as a member of the original lineup of Flash. The group, formed by fellow ex-Yes member Peter Banks, sounded on their first album like a Yes in exile, as though the band from Yes' Time and a Word album were suddenly trying to outstrip the Fragile album. Still signed to the same management, and associated with the same label as Yes, it was easier for Kaye to pick up his career than if he'd been cut loose entirely on his own. It seldom actually happens, but record labels and managements in situations such as that always hope - as English Decca had when Jimmy Winston was let go from the Small Faces, thus giving Kaye a berth in his backing band the Reflections - that another successful act can be spawned from a split. In this case, the act was Badger, formed by David Foster, Yes lead singer Jon Anderson's former bandmate in the Warriors. Foster had collaborated with Anderson on several early original songs and played a tiny bit of guitar (uncredited) on the second album, and played bass and sang in Badger. Kaye's presence on keyboards helped the band get noticed more easily by the rock press, and they made their debut in 1973 with a concert album, One Live Badger, that was well-received critically. Unfortunately, the band went through some personnel and musical changes by the time their did their second album (for Epic Records), which was ignored by the public. Kaye was later a member of Detective, which was signed to Led Zeppelin's Swan Song label in the late '70s, and served in the reunited Badfinger during this same era, appearing on the Airwaves album. Primarily, however, Kaye was a busy session musician whose clients included David Bowie. Then, in 1983, at the end of a dizzying series of events in which the Yes lineup collapsed, was revamped almost entirely, collapsed again, and was reconstituted once more, Kaye suddenly found himself asked back into the group. He came back into the group for what proved to be a commercial highlight of their history, the 90125 album and the biggest hit single in their history, "Owner of a Lonely Heart." This was Kaye's chance to grab some of the recognition that he'd been cheated of by his dismissal from the group in 1971. With some breaks in their studio work, he remained associated with the band up to and including the 1991 tour that reunited the various disparate factions of the group. Wakeman naturally grabbed the spotlight with his more flamboyant multi-keyboard style, while Kaye participated in his usual restrained fashion, confining his playing to the organ, although he also contributed some vocals as well to this "mega-Yes" performing unit. In the years since his second time around with Yes, Kaye moved to the United States and remained active in music as a session musician. - Bruce Eder

=================
Badger


Badger were formed in 1973 when original Yes keyboardist Tony Kaye left Flash, the band he'd set up with another original Yes member Peter Banks, and set about forming his own "Progressive Supergroup". Bassist David Foster, who'd worked with Yes vocalist Jon Anderson in The Warriors, was the first recruit followed by drummer Roy Dyke who'd previously been a member of the Remo Four, Family and one third of Ashton Gardner & Dyke who'd scored a worldwide smash hit with "Resurrection Shuffle" in 1971. The fourth member was Brian Parrish who'd been involved with Medicine Head (where he met Dyke), Three Man Army and had also released an LP with Paul Gurvitz.



Atlantic Records quickly signed the band and released their debut album "One Live Badger" in 1973 (K 40473). Like Yes the album contained long instrumental songs which amply showed off the skills of the individual members but failed to catch the public's imagination. Kaye and Dyke, seeking new inspiration, recruited ex-Stealers Wheel guitarist Paul Pilnick to replace Foster and also brought in Dyke's old bassist Kim Gardner. The search for a frontman/songwriter ended with the addition of Liverpool born Jackie Lomax, previously with The Undertakers and solo artist with The Beatles' Apple label. Lomax transformed Badger from a Progressive Rock band into a more soulful outfit and wrote all of the songs for the band's second LP "White Lady" (Epic EPC 80009). The album was recorded in New Orleans at producer Allen Toussaint's studio but before it was released the band split following a gig at Croydon's Fairfield Hall supporting E.L.O. with whom they'd had an argument over the use of the P.A.!



Lomax returned to a solo career cutting albums for Capitol and Warner Brothers. He also undertook a lot of session work including working on Rod Stewart's "Foolish Behaviour" LP. Roy Dyke worked with the likes of Cafe Society, Pat Travers and Chris Barber whilst Tony Kaye joined Detective, had a spell with Badfinger and then rejoined Yes in 1983. Paul Pilnick later teamed up with Deaf School and Joe Egan whilst Kim Gardner continued as a session bassist working with the likes of Dwight Twilley.



Mark Brennan
Taken from the CD reissue of "One Live Badger", Repertoire REP4373-WY, 1993



Badger - "One Live" (1973) Tony Kaye did obviously have some problems with finding out what bands he wanted to play with in the early 70's. After leaving Yes when they really started to get the grip, he formed Flash with former Yes- member Peter Banks. After just one album he left and then formed another progressive group, Badger. For some strange reason, Badger chose to record their debut-album live in concert instead of in the studio. The result is not so very complex or challenging, but still a very nice and enjoyable piece of early 70's progressive rock. The most surprisingly thing is probably that Kaye used Mellotron on this album, an instrument he's always stated that he hates (check your ears, man!). Some of the tracks have some really embarrassing Christian lyrics, but the music is fortunately good enough to make you forget about that. The album opens with "Wheel of Fortune", an energetic track with catchy melody-lines and extended solos. Quite representative for the rest of the album. "Fountain" includes some very tasty moog-playing from Kaye, while his past in Yes shines through on "Winds of Change". "River" is a more basic and rocking track. I think this and "The Preacher" are the least interesting tracks on the album. The closing number "On the Way Home" is one of the best tracks on the album. The first part of it varies between a heavy riff and a wonderful melodic ballad before the track builds up to a very energetic finale with Kaye's excellent organ-playing in front. But I really have to close my ears for these truly overt-the-top Christian lyrics. The band made another album called "White Lady" before they disbanded, but that one is supposed to be rather weak and uninteresting.



Badger
One Live Badger
Repertoire Records (REP 4373-WY)
UK 1973

Brian Parrish, guitar, vocal;
Dave Foster, bass, vocal;
Tony Kaye, organ, Moog, mellotron, electric piano;
Ron Dyke, drums

Tracklist:
1. Wheel of Fortune - 7:50
2. Fountain - 7:22
3. Wind of Change - 7:15
4. River - 6:50
5. The Preacher - 3:59
6. On the Way Home - 7:39

total time 40:56


joe

After joining his ex-bandmate Peter Banks on the eponymous debut album of Flash, keyboardist Tony Kaye was soon off again, departing for new pastures with a new band. Along the way, Kaye recruited bassist Dave Foster (not to be confused with the Canadian composer... thankfully). Foster was in the pre-Yes band The Warriors with Jon Anderson (and also future King Crimson drummer Ian Wallace), with whom he co-wrote the future Yes songs "Sweet Dreams" and "Time and a Word."
With the further recruitment of guitarist/vocalist Brian Parrish, Badger's debut effort was this live release, recorded on December 15-16, 1972, with them opening for Kaye's former band at the Rainbow Theater in London (in fact, the album and video Yessongs is drawn from these shows as well). One Live Badger was co-produced by Anderson, obviously from a time long before the new age-shaman-dilettante persona that he wallows in now.

Although this album gets some snickers nowadays, personally I quite like it a lot. Fair comparisons include later-era Traffic and maybe Derek and the Dominoes, with vocals akin to Stevie Winwood and Eric Clapton. Most of the songs are defined by upbeat, blues riffs on guitar and Hammond that expand into jams in their middle. These have some toasty though not mindblowing guitar passages from Parrish and trademark Hammond from Kaye, who generally gets the job done. Also, despite his apocryphal reputation to the contrary, Kaye even employs Moog and mellotron strategically here, helping to fill out the keyboard textures of the album.

The songs are extended just enough to get off the runway, have their fun, and land. Luckily, they are not protracted to the point of ludicrousness (ie, fifteen minutes plus with drum solo, etc.) like much of other bloated, live material from that era. My favorite track is "Winds of Change," with a chorus of soulful harmonies and golden, high-flying mellotron. Also of note are "Wheel of Fortune," which has some enjoyable riffs and lively drumwork from Ron Dyke, and "River," a boogie shuffle and spirited electric piano arpeggios from Kaye.

So, coming from Yes and Flash, the experience here is more down-to-earth and less overtly prog. Perhaps reinforcing the even-keeled, workmanlike quality of the album, Roger Dean's cover painting of sly badgers defying their winter hibernation holds an understated charm. Though not by any means an essential, innovative, or complex music experience, take this one for what it is, a slab of forgotten, early 70s British rock played with gusto, no more and no less; if you are into that kind of music, you should like this album.

4-26-03


bob

Another relic of my days as a completist Yes-fanboy. Tony Kaye plays the keyboards, Jon Anderson helped produce and Roger Dean did the cover - more than enough to suck in an impressionable young Yes fan with $23 to blow on a German import CD. Apparently now that it's out of print, the CD fetches quite a bit more...hmm, maybe I should think of that $23 as an investment.
The music isn't really prog, and bears little similarity to what Kaye was doing with Yes and Flash. Badger is a more blues-based, jam rock band (and according to the liner notes, they turned into a "more soulful outfit" on their only other album). I wasn't surprised to see Joe compare them to the band Traffic, as that's the first comparison that came to mind for me too.

Kaye's keyboard work is mostly limited to creating a wall of organ chords for the guitar to wail over, but he occasionally stretches out. For example, there's the other-worldly, almost sickly-sounding moog solo of "Fountain", and lots of electric piano riffing in "River".

The lyrics aren't terrible, but they generally aren't that great either. They take an odd bend into Christian-rock towards the end of the album. The message of "The Preacher" seems to be that even if you're a worthless drunk, you're still a good person if you believe in God. "On the Way Home", a track about going to heaven, sounds like it wouldn't be out of place at a tent revival meeting.

All in all not a bad album, but probably only worth tracking down of you're a serious Yes collector.

6-10-03




Badger - One Live Badger

Release Date: 1973

Member: Constable Napweed - 6/28/03

Tony Kaye, ex of Yes and Flash, put together this little tasty treat of a band and boldly put out the debut album as a live release. Anyone who is prepared to do that must be pretty sure of themselves, and Badger didn't disappoint. Badger sounded nothing like Kaye's old cohorts Yes....instead opting to go for homegrown rock with some tasty numbers.

The feel of the album is one of melody and drama. The songs are all strong with Kaye's Hammond being to the fore with some nice lead guitar playing by Brian Parrish. All numbers are excellent and worthy of attention but the two that really catch my ear are "The River" and the closing track "On the way home". Both are great rock tracks and display some great guitar by Brian Parrish and probably Tony Kaye's finest moments on his trusty Hammond.

Restrained aggression are what Badger were about on this album....no bludgeoning or over widdling progressive parts but honest down to earth rock music. A great album...and any band who chooses to bare their soul by making a debut album a live album has my unstinting respect.


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