Van Halen famously had a 25-song demo tape that made the rounds as the band was searching for a record deal. Over the years, nearly all of those songs (in one form or another) made it onto regular albums, some being included on the band’s last album in 2012.
I wanted to create an album of any leftover tracks from the band's pre-record deal that could be cobbled together into a DIY album for 1977.
SIDE A
1. Piece of Mind
2. Young and Wild
3. Woman in Love
4. I Wanna Be Your Lover
5. Babe, Don’t Leave Me Alone
SIDE B
1. Light in the Sky
2. Angel Eyes
3. We Die Bold
4. Get the Show on the Road
5. Gonna Take a Lot of Drugs
I sort of considered this exercise as an alternate universe where the band got tired of waiting for a record deal and issued its own low-budget album to sell at shows. Sadly, all the demos that you find on bootlegs sound like third or fourth-generation recordings, but they're at least listenable.
There are some demos from earlier than 1976 floating around the interwebs, but the sound quality on them is not very good. The one exception I made was the inclusion of “Angel Eyes” from 1974 because I simply needed at least one more track. I could be wrong, but I think David Lee Roth is the only one actually performing on the track with vocals and guitar. Besides that song and "Woman in Love" and "Babe, Don't Leave Me Alone" (both from 1976), the rest of the tracks are from 1977.
There's a bit of "Get the Show on the Road" that was later used in the song "Romeo's Delight," but I decided that it was different enough to include here. "Gonna Take a Lot of Drugs" was a joke recording of Roth and Michael Anthony singing different lyrics to Nicolette Larson's "Lotta Love" which had been produced by their producer Ted Templeman. It's doubtful this ever would have been made commercially available, but I thought it was a humorous way to end the album.
For a cover, I chose the rejected cover for the first album. The photo is ridiculous in so many ways with Alex Van Halen looking like the leader, Roth looking asleep, Anthony looking scared and Eddie Van Halen looking mad. And the cover overall looks like it belongs to some new wave group. But it captures the band members as they were at the time. Zero has been used as a title by others for compilations of the band's demos (as opposed to Van Halen and Van Halen II), and I figured it was just as good as any other so I adopted it as well.
