"Badge"
Single by Cream from the album Goodbye
B-side	What a Bringdown
Released	April 1969
Recorded	October 1968
Genre	Rock
Length	2:47
Label	Polydor
Writer	Eric Clapton George Harrison
Producer	Felix Pappalardi / RSO
Cream singles chronology
"Crossroads" (1969) "Badge" (1969) "Sweet Wine" (1970)

The 1969 song "Badge", by Cream, was penned by Eric Clapton and George Harrison during a collaborative effort between Clapton, Harrison and Ringo Starr. Although it was paired with one of Cream's less notable songs, "What a Bringdown", Badge was nonetheless a major hit when it was released as a single in April of 1969, following release of the album Goodbye in January.

It was originally an untitled track. During the production transfer for the album Goodbye, the original music sheet was used to produce the liner notes and track listing. The only discernible word on the page was "Bridge" — a notation intended to identify the transitional moment in the song. Clapton's handwriting, however, was so bad, that Ringo Starr looked at it and thought it said "Badge" — so the band named it Badge.

Harrison told the story differently, however: "I helped Eric write 'Badge' you know. Each of them had to come up with a song for that Goodbye Cream album and Eric didn't have his written. We were working across from each other and I was writing the lyrics down and we came to the middle part so I wrote 'Bridge.' Eric read it upside down and cracked up laughing-- 'What's BADGE?' he said. After that Ringo walked in drunk and gave us that line about the swans living in the park."

A common legend or misconception is that the name came about because its chord progression is B-A-D-G-E (it is not)^[1], or simply because an anagram of a guitar's string tuning (E-A-D-G-B-E) can spell "Badge".

It was this musical bridge, a series of arpeggios played through a Leslie speaker, that provided the inspiration for Harrison's later Beatles song "Here Comes the Sun" for the album Abbey Road, and would inspire a similar arpeggio at the end of two other Abbey Road tracks, "You Never Give Me Your Money" and "Carry That Weight".^{[citation needed]}

Original Goodbye performers

• Eric Clapton - lead guitar & vocals
• Felix Pappalardi - bass guitar
• Ginger Baker - drums
• Jack Bruce - piano & mellotron
• L'Angelo Misterioso (actually George Harrison) - rhythm guitar

Trivia

• The song was used prominently in the 1983 UK television drama Good and Bad at Games. One of the characters plays air guitar to the song using a tennis racket. He writhes over the racket during the guitar break and another character who is listening says "I love this bit".
• The song was featured in the movie Fandango, as one of the characters played by Kevin Costner surveys the remains of their college graduation party.

External links

• Lyrics

References

1. ^ Cream: Selections From Cream - Those Were the Days. Hal Leonard, p. 2. ISBN 0793590841. 

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