Van Halen live at Pasadena High School in 1975: audio recording

(Image credit: YouTube)

A 45-year-old tape of audio from a Van Halen show at Pasadena High School has surfaced on YouTube. Recorded on April 25, 1975, the tape features the fledgling rockers performing a number of covers, including ZZ Top’s Chevrolet, Deep Purple’s Maybe I’m a Leo, Johnny Winter’s Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo, the James Gang's Walk Away, and Edgar Winter’s We All Had a Real Good Time.

The band also play one of their own compositions, Live With Fools, which re-surfaced five years later as Fools on Van Halen's third album, Women And Children First.

While the band had secured a position as the house band at the famed Gazzari's Club in West Hollywood by 1974, Pasadena – where the Van Halen brothers grew up – was very much the band's true stamping ground.

In 1978 Eddie Van Halen told Steven Rosen, "What we basically did is we just kept playing the LA area everywhere. We used to put on our own shows at the Pasadena Civic, our home town, and draw like three thousand people on a four-dollar ticket.

"This was way before Warner Brothers. So we just developed such a following that a sister of a friend at the record company heard about us and the word got around about the band.

"Finally, Ted Templeman and [Warner Bros president] Mo Ostin came down to the Starwood in Hollywood, which was really always just kind of a bad place for us because we weren’t a Hollywood band. Pasadena is really where we’re from, and that’s like San Bernardino – that’s like Bumfuck, Iowa."

Eddie Van Halen is on the cover of the new issue of Metal Hammer, while the new issue of Classic Rock includes a bonus magazine devoted entirely to the late guitarist.

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 40 years in music industry, online for 27. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.