Yeah, right...
When I was a sophomore in college, and on my 3rd year as an aspiring guitar player, I bought a guitar magazine with a cover that looked like this:
I was a Metallica and G'n'R fan for the most part, but there was a transcription in there for a song called Eruption by Van Halen, which I don't believe I'd ever heard before (because at the time, the mighty Z106 wasn't huge on playing Dave-era VH). Just from the transcription alone, it looked amazing, so I rode over to the Little Big Store in Raymond and bought a used cassette of the first Van Halen album.
This changed my life.
I probably listened to that album 20 times in the next two days, and within two weeks, I owned every Van Halen album to date, and had started collecting any guitar magazine I could find talking about VH, and started trying to learn how this fleet-fingered man created the sounds that he somehow makes come out of a guitar.
Right about the same time, the internet was coming to life, and one day I used one of those AOL CD's and figured out how to create an account. Trying to think of a user name, I somehow landed on VHFreak (which I still have, by the way).
A few years go by, and during the glorious fall of 1999, I somehow came across Genespage, and seeing that nearly everyone posting there had -dawg or -dog as part of their username, I broke with tradition and went with "vh dawg".
It was probably only a couple of years later, during the first Sherrill meltdowns, that someone first cleverly accused me of being "Vaught Hemingway" Dog, and a closet rebel.
And I laughed, and laughed, and laughed. And somehow landed here, which ultimately was probably nearly as life-changing as the day I bought that May 1995 issue of Guitar World.