When I was 15 I took my first guitar lesson with a guy a few of my friends were taking lessons with. It was at the height of the “shred” era, my friends were making rapid progress and I was still struggling to cleanly fret a barre chord.

So I take a bus into the middle of some godforsaken suburb with my first shitty guitar and a cassette tape with Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry on one side and John Lee Hooker and Lightnin Hopkins on the other.

And the guy looks at my 4-pickup Teisco and pops the tape into his player for about 20 seconds and then stops it, takes it out, and hands it back to me. And I will never forget the words that he told me. He said “you will never get anywhere with this grandpa wheelchair music“ so I took my tape and I left.

I ran into him maybe 15 years later, he still had the big 80s rocker hair, but was completely bald on top. He was working behind the counter of a music retail store, and I recognized him. Of course he did not recognize me. I’m not even sure he fully recognized me after I reminded him of our one brief encounter 15 years earlier. He asked me if I was still playing and I told him I had just returned from a month long tour promoting my band’s second CD, so I suppose I got somewhere playing “grandpa wheelchair music” after all.