Van Halen Played La Cañada and Montrose – The La Cañada High Show

Van Halen was a largely unknown band in the early 1970s. The band played backyard parties, parks and small festivals all over LA, but mainly in the San Gabriel Valley area where bandmembers lived.

I recently spoke to Dan Sullivan, who promoted several local concerts by Van Halen in our area in 1975-76, just before the band hit it big in about mid-1976. Dan grew up in La Cañada. In junior high, Dan got involved with a local band, Tales, basically serving as its roadie as it played local parties. It was his intro to rock music, and Dan began to focus on photography at the various concerts he attended.

Dan graduated from La Cañada High School in 1975 and in the fall started photography studies at Pasadena City College. Anyone who knows Van Halen history knows that its members were students at PCC as well.

Dan told me: “I had already seen Eddie Van Halen, David Lee Roth walking around the campus. David Lee Roth– you couldn’t miss him. He walked around like he was already a rock star. He had open Hawaiian shirts, tied off, and bells and whistles, chains and hair. He just had this attitude. He’d walk through the quad area of Pasadena City College like a peacock, spreading his feathers.”

Dan had seen Van Halen at a local venue and taken some photos of the band. Dan was amazed at the crowd’s enthusiastic reaction to a band that was basically doing cover songs. He decided to approach the band about doing some concerts.

The band reluctantly agreed. David Lee Roth said something to the effect of: “Maybe we need someone out there doing the grunt work, putting these gigs together.”

So Dan got to work. He planned a concert at the Lanterman Auditorium with his band Tales as the headliner and Van Halen and another group to open the show.

Dan remembered: “But I was worried that we wouldn’t sell enough tickets. No one in La Cañada knew of them [Van Halen], maybe a few people did who had been to these backyard parties. I hadn’t heard of them.”

To build up enthusiasm for the upcoming Lanterman Auditorium show, Van Halen agreed to do a free concert at La Cañada High.

“They allowed the band to come in around 10 o’clock and set up on the steps of the gymnasium. A lot of kids would come out and have lunch in that area. As soon as the bell rang for the lunch break, kids started gathering [and] they started off playing. And it was phenomenal. It was just amazing. Kids were just like, ‘Wow.’ It was like a real rock show. It was loud as hell.

“One of the things that Van Halen did back then, inside and at this outside show, was Alex Van Halen, the drummer, would take old tuna cans and he’d pop holes through the bottom and put a plug and he’d put a little trip wire, a very thin copper wire … They took the cord to a battery [where] he had a switch under his drum kit. He’d push the button and it would connect the current of the 12-volt battery. That little wire would trip. On top of it he had poured gunpowder or some kind of black powder, with some sulphur to make different colors. He would hit it at certain moments and these giant plumes of smoke would blow up, blue and red, and it was just unbelievable. That was mostly at the end of the show. It was just unbelievable. It was like Kiss or something.

“This was a high school free show at lunch so the kids were just going berserk. They wouldn’t go back to class. They were trying to get the kids back into classrooms. It became local lore.

“That sealed the deal. We sold out the (Lanterman) show. We probably could have done another show, probably should have done another show. Probably should have had Van Halen as the headliner because they were pissed that they were opening for this other band.”

Next week, the Lanterman Auditorium show.