If the Van Halen family decides to release music from the vault, they’ve got a pretty good head start with material from a project from over 15 years ago.
Engineer Brian Kehew was hired to go through the Warner Brothers vault in search of material for potential reissues of Van Halen's studio albums.Kehew came up with four CDs worth of tracks from Van Halen from 1977 to 1984 for the group’s members to review.
Kehew was interviewed for the Sunset Sound Recorders video series, and he indicated that he'd found an alternate version of "Hot for Teacher," featuring different lyrics and Eddie Van Halen dueling with himself on bass and guitar, plus an alternate take on "Little Dreamer" and demos like “Bring on the Girls” (which become "Beautiful Girls") and “Voodoo Queen" (which the band changed into "Mean Street").
When asked why the material wasn’t reissued back then? Kehew says, "At the time, Sammy Hagar was in the group, so it was bad timing to promote anything with Dave." And when Roth rejoined a few years later, the band decided to focus more on promoting a new album.
After Eddie Van Halen's passed away last month, band manager Irving Azoff said that that Alex and Wolfgang Van Halen would eventually go through the tapes at Eddie's 5150 studio to look for unreleased songs.
[courtesy of Classic Hits Today]