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I recently picked up a newer version of the demos that isn’t listed yet on the VH Boots site that includes, “Good Enough” and “Wild Thing” and also the 12″ vinyl extended single versions of “WCTBL” and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.

ron:
I generally don’t list the LAF (Lost And Found) releases, because they are usually just CDR re-issues of stuff already in the trading pool. I hadn’t seen this one before.

No sweat. Wasn’t sure if you had seen this or had it in the “to do” pile to add to the site.

Interesting note: Eddie is wearing the same shirt during the soundcheck that he is wearing on the cover photo for this CD.

ron: Is this disc worth picking up?I see that the description says the sound quality is away better than previous releases – but you can’t trust the self-promotion.What did you think Scott?

Honestly, I haven’t even taken this one out of the sleeve yet. I’ll pop it in and compare it to the only other playable copy I have and let you know this weekend.

voodoo: They took the original files, cut the highs and maybe raised the low frequencies a bit, but I actually like the original file better. The new disc is muddy. Trying to make a shitty high end mix clean will make it muddy. LOL

---

Thanks!

While it feels like there is more “body” in the newer release, I don’t like what the effect has done with the vocals at all.

Here is a freq. analysis done for a 5 second segment between 4:00 and 4:05 (just guitar and drums). Quite striking.