Here’s a newly unearthed audio clip from April 25, 1975, on which Van Halen perform a pair of songs they would often present onstage as a two-song “rock opera.” The recording comes from a live performance at Pasadena High School and consists of the songs “Eyes of the Night” and a “lost VH original” called “Forced Entry.”
“Eyes of the Night” was one of the band’s early originals and was played frequently at their club dates. Other versions of it appear elsewhere online. “Forced Entry,” another original, appears to have never been previously unreleased, though it’s possible versions exist on bootlegs.
Greg Renoff, author of the band biography Van Halen Rising, posted the clip to YouTube on January 7. “Here’s a never-before-circulated pairing of VH originals, live in ’75,” he writes. “The sound improves quite a bit once ‘Forced Entry,’ the lost VH original, begins after ‘Eyes of the Night.’ ”
The nine-minute clip is low quality, but the instruments are individually distinct enough to make out each of the member’s performances. Eddie Van Halen opens the recording playing a slithery climbing lick and using a generous amount of phasing on his guitar. He was 20 at the time of this recording and the youngest member of the band.
Although the recording opens cold with “Eyes of the Night,” apparently singer David Lee Roth would sometimes introduce it as a song about a man who falls in love with “the girl across the street” and watches her through binoculars. (This explanation can heard on a recording made at Glendale College Auditorium on February 27, 1976.) On Renoff’s newly released recording, we hear Roth introduce “Forced Entry” as a song “about a guy who falls in love with a chick and she doesn’t want to love him, so he decides to break into her window and love her anyhow.” Roth explains that the tunes are part of a “two-song rock opera” that the group performs, apparently with unrequited love serving as the common theme.
To learn more and purchase Renoff’s book, visit the Van Halen Store.
Everyone has a plan, till you get punched in the face,
