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In 2021, I wrote an essay about the remarkable musicians who, amazingly, performed at my Kansas City high school in the sixties: the Crystals, the Drifters, Booker T. & the MG's, Ike & Tina Turner. There were so many of them that I thought school dances with famous artists were commonplace at the time, but they weren't. Tina Turner and Booker T. Washington both noted that they hardly ever performed at high schools, even early in their careers. The only similar case I could find was St. Xavier High School, an all-boys Catholic prep school in Cincinnati. Xavier's 1968 prom featured the Yardbirds, a band that went through several great guitarists: Eric Clapton, then Jeff Beck, then Jimmy Page. Xavier's graduation came at a critical moment in popular music history: just weeks later, the Yardbirds broke up and Page went on to form Led Zeppelin.
I hadn’t found a way to mention Xavier’s prom in my essay about my school, but I was reminded of it recently when my wife and I watched the new documentary “Becoming Led Zeppelin.” The film, directed by Bernard MacMahon and written by him and Allison McGourty, doesn’t mention the school, but it does a great job of capturing the musical and cultural context of the 1968 prom. The day after I saw the film, I found the phone number for Rip Pelley, Xavier’s student body president at the time. I called him and asked him to share his memories.
“We had two separate proms, one for the juniors and one for the seniors, and they always had the same boring band playing at each one,” he said. “My idea was pretty simple: Let’s combine the two proms and have a rock band.” The juniors were more enthusiastic than the seniors, who didn’t want the 11th graders to spoil their festivities, but a small majority voted in favor. That weekend, Pelley played guitar in a cover band that sometimes opened for the Lemon Pipers, a one-hit wonder from Oxford, Ohio, fifty miles north of Cincinnati. (Their only hit was “Green Tambourine,” which went to number one for one week in February 1968.) Pelley’s band, Uncle Sam’s Population, had an agent who gave him the number of a bigger agent in New York. “I called the guy, and we went through a list of bands that were available and within our budget,” Pelley told me. They chose Grass Roots, a folk-rock band whose two signature songs, “Let’s Live for Today” and “Midnight Confessions,” were unlikely to upset the Jesuits who ran the school.
“So everything was going great, and most people were pretty happy and excited,” he continued. “But then I got a call from my agent in New York. I don’t remember what it was — somebody in the band got sick, or something went wrong with the itinerary, or the tour got canceled — but, one way or another, the Grass Roots couldn’t make it.” Pelley panicked. The prom was weeks away, and he knew he would be held responsible if it fell through. “But then the agent said, ‘Wait, wait. I’ve got a replacement for you, and I think you’ll like it.’ ”
The Yardbirds were available because they were scheduled to perform in Cleveland the night before their senior prom, on Upbeat, a nationally syndicated teen TV show, and they had no plans the next day. “I was, like, holy cow,” Pelley said. “I was jumping for joy. But I also knew I had a problem.” The Grass Roots were folky; the Yardbirds were not. “They were edgier,” Pelley said. “'Edgy' is an understatement.”
Many Xavier students, and probably all of its administrators, didn’t know about the Yardbirds. They had two Billboard Top 10 songs, “For Your Love” and “Heart Full of Soul,” but both were released in 1965. One of the school’s prefects walked the halls with Pelley, asking the students what they thought of the change. Opinion was divided, Pelley told me. “Somehow, though, I convinced everyone that we had no choice, and we got final approval.” The only stipulation the school imposed was that the program also had to include what Pelley described as a “bubble band”—an orchestra similar to the one that performed each week on “The Lawrence Welk Show.” The father of Pelley’s girlfriend, Patty Purdy, a sophomore at Regina High School, turned out to be the leader of the band that could serve as such, the Dick Purdy Orchestra. They agreed to alternate forty-five minute sets with the Yardbirds, two sets for each group.
Shortly before the prom, a local representative for the Yardbirds' label, Epic Records, called Pelly and said she needed to leave town. “And she asked me, 'Can you pick them up at the airport?'” he said.
Sourse: newyorker.com
