November 10, 1970
Depew High School
Depew, New York, U.S.A.

I was lucky enough to see the band Live at Depew NY High School in Nov 1970. "No Matter What" was still a big hit & they played the song 3 times that night!!! We were all quite impressed with the band. I remember seeing photos of the show in the 1971 Year Book. Does anyone out there have a copy to loan me? [yearbook photos 1; yearbook photos 2]

Update, December 12, 2001:
My friend Denise Bednarzyk got Pete Ham's autograph and asked him what kind of cologne he wore; he replied: English Leather. After the show, I heard the band all jumped into the school pool!!!

Update, December 13, 2001:
"No Matter What" was played once during their set and twice as an encore. I remember that we all rushed toward the stage for the last one!! I was about 10 feet from the stage at that point. I also remember their stage equipment being: 2 Vox AC-30 amps for the guitars on chrome stands just like The Beatles used, and the bass played thru a Sound City stack. Their P.A. was a WEM system. Pete played his Gibson SG guitar, which was given to him by George Harrison (used in the "Paperback Writer" video), an acoustic guitar, and grand piano. Tom had a Fender bass and Joey played his gold top Les Paul Deluxe. That's about all I can remember at this point. This was the 2nd rock concert which I had attended. I was 16 years old. I also had a concert poster, which hung on my bedroom wall for quite some time. Unfortunately, it wound up in the trash! I may have a photo of it somewhere!

Paul Kriedeman

I was at the Depew High School concert on November 10, 1970 and very distinctly remember Pete Ham playing a black Les Paul, because I had an identical guitar at home. I went home and taught myself the solo to Blodwyn.

Mike Buckley [October 22, 2014]
They played my high school!!!!! They had a number one record and they played my high school. It was crazy. They stayed at my Science teacher's house.

Depew, NY. It's a small town about 10 miles east of Buffalo. I think the hit was No Matter What. Anyway, they played No Matter What about three times. Man, what a memory. It was so odd.

Old Mr. Enright. I think he drove an old '55 Chevy truck around town. He promoted the show at the school. It was a school dance. I'm not kidding. It was that small time. That's how bad their management was.

He WAS a very cool guy. Here's another interesting story about that show. This was around Vietnam (War) time and one of Badfinger's roadies had an American flag patch stitched to the ass of his jeans. This was a long time ago when people would get crazy about shit like that... so this security guy hired for the show, an off-duty cop, threatened to arrest him over this rather disrespectful patch placement. Enright said, dude, you're a rent-a-cop, you're fired, get the fuck outta here, and had him thrown out. He was cool.

Badfinger's management were clueless and instead of getting them accommodations, he had them staying at our teacher's house. Now, they are on this tour and it sucks for them, bad food, bad accommodations and they are dirty and really frazzled, so they see our school has this really beautiful Olympic-sized pool. After the show, they decided to take a dip in the pool, so a bunch of us kids see this going on and join them for the dip, so kids and the band had a pool party. We even got some pizzas from the Pizza Hut across the street. I guess the English didn't have good pizza back then, cuz they really loved that pizza. It was a pretty cool, fun moment, probably the best time they had on that tour. They were super nice guys. Everyone should know that really sweet, nice guys, too nice for the music business. I ran into Enright years later and always remembered that day fondly and how much he liked those guys and what a damn shame what happened later was.

rockhard [2019]

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