Reply To: VH soundcheck Rochester 86 with TV footage

Nice quality. I have all of this footage in pretty good quality. I haven’t watched the whole unedited version in a long time. I did, coincidentally, just watch the edited soundcheck footage last week. Waaaay back, a group of us on the VHML pitched in to purchase the 5150 demos from a guy on eBay, hoping it would be legit and it was. I was tasked with putting the tape to CD and then adding some additional tracks to fill the disc to make a tradable “bootleg” copy, which became known as “5150 Studio Leftovers”, which was then REALLY bootlegged and sold under other titles. This is the version that I put together and I believe Jon Dunphy did the cover and disc artwork. We weren’t really audio mastering or graphic savvy back then. LOL

https://www.vhboots.com/5150leftovers.html

There are other versions of these demos that have different bonus tracks between them. One has clips from the Wild Life soundtrack and then, for some reason, two live versions of VH playing or possibly it’s just Hagar playing Hagar solo tunes. I skipped over them on the disc, so I didn’t pay attention.

I recently picked up a newer version of the demos that isn’t listed yet on the VH Boots site that includes, “Good Enough” and “Wild Thing” and also the 12″ vinyl extended single versions of “WCTBL” and “Dreams”. That one is called Van Halen – 5150 Leftovers. It’s a Lost And Found release (LAF 2590).

I recently pulled the original CD-R that I put together to check it out and, alas, it is no longer readable. I tried two other 5150 Demos CDs I had and they, too, wouldn’t play. I did manage to find a copy of “The Dawn of 5150″ and I listened to the demos again after a long time. They’re pretty much the final basic music tracks with no solos with Sammy working on vocal ideas over them although the music tracks on a few songs are different than the final releases. Summer Nights intro is extended a bit like they play it live and it has more guitar links and fills here and there, Best of Both Worlds has an extended bridge with some additional vocals and the vocals on all of the songs aren’t exactly the same as what was finally released. It was a fun listen after such a long time. The biggest issue with these tracks is that it seems the guy that released these intentionally pushed the highs and the over all level to create some distortion, probably to be able to track where his copy of the tape he sold ended up. I can’t imagine the band recording these demos to work on in this quality, but this is just my assumption. It was a crazy time in the bootleg world back then. People did all kinds of crazy shit to try to keep track of who was doing what with their recordings.