It was 49 years ago today (February 19th, 1972) that Harry Nilsson's “Without You” began its four-week run at the top of the charts. The song was Nilsson's second major hit, following 1969's “Everybody's Talkin',” and went on to win the 1972 Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. It was featured on his critically acclaimed 1971 album Nilsson Schmilsson.
Nilsson heard “Without You” at a party and was convinced it was a Beatles track he had never heard. The song had actually been recorded by the Beatles' proteges Badfinger, and written by the band's Pete Ham and Tommy Evans, who created the song by taking the verses from an unfinished Ham song, and stringing it together with a stray chorus that Evans couldn't fit into any of his songs.
Surviving Badfinger member Joey Molland played lead guitar on the group's version and says that the band was first and foremost a song-based outfit: “That's an interpretive thing. What it was in Badfinger was everybody wrote songs. We'd go into the studio, and the Beatles were nice enough to give us that leeway, and we would go through songs — 'What have you got?' Pete would have a bunch, sometime he wouldn't have hardly any. Pete kind of dried up after the Straight Up album. It got real dry there for a while. Pete wasn't writing any hits, I think it kind of depressed him a bit.”