"It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock n' roll," Bon Scott once sang. He was damn right. Here are a few stories about bumps I hit in pursuit of rock stardom.

In fourth grade I had gone crazy about Waylon Jennings and finally convinced my parents to enroll me in guitar lessons. I went to a eight-week summer program where I took lessons with a group of kids. At the end of the eight weeks I was awarded "Most Progressed" for the class.

In sixth grade we were assigned to come up with a book report on our hobbies, so mine was on guitar playing. By this point my parents had caved to my requests for private weekly lessons. I had a decent Yamaha acoustic (still my only acoustic) and could play a simplified version of Chet Atkins' "Wildwood Flower" that my guitar teacher had shown me. Some other kid named Nick also did a report on guitar playing, but everyone said my recital of "Wildwood Flower" had blown ol' Nick off the stage! I felt humbly confident that I was the best guitar player in all of the sixth grade.

Little did I know a lifelong pattern was about to begin.

A year later, the seventh grade "sock hop" was coming up, and Nick's band was going to play it and was rehearsing in a room next to the gym after school. There was Nick with...a Kramer Baretta! The Kramer Barreta was the guitar Eddie Van Halen endorsed, and Nick had one. And not only that...he was playing Van Halen's "Eruption" solo on it! "Eruption" was the THE piece for a rock guitar player to know (still is)! What the hell happened in the past year?!

What had happened was Nick had teamed up with this guy James who was 15 years old but still in seventh grade, a stoner who vaguely resembled Joe Elliot from Def Leppard. The stoner spent the time he avoided doing homework playing guitar. The story was he had shown Nick how to play all kinds of AC/DC and Van Halen songs on guitar because he wanted to play bass. Here they were with a full band with two guitarists, a bassist, a real drum kit, a singer, a p.a. and a Kramer Baretta playing covers that sounded just like the records to our 12-year-old ears.

Everyone said Nick stunned the gym with his reading of "Eruption," and then the 15-year-old stoner switched over to guitar just for Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze"...and played the solo with his teeth! Thank God I was serving afterschool detention so I didn't have to be psychologically traumatized by this.

Oh, who am I kidding? I was traumatized just the same! I caught "Highway to..." (I think it was "Highway to Hell," but they weren't allowed to say "hell") once detention was over, and I just couldn't believe what they were doing. I was clearly sooo far behind the curve now.

Not surprisingly my interest in my guitar lessons dropped off exponentially after this. My rendition of "Greensleeves" from Mel Bay book #3 was not about to cause the girls in the gym to go crazy.

I needed a real electric guitar, and not the Roy Orbison-looking thing from Woolworth's my granddad had given me. I needed a real electric. My mom said she didn't approve of playing rock n' roll at dances, but finally they relented and got me...a Peavey T-15 (photo above). (Actually I'm thinking maybe I got this before my humiliation at the point of Nick's Kramer Baretta?) The Peavey T-15 was about the most un-rock n' roll machine ever produced, even compared to the Roy Orbison Woolworth's guitar. Wood grain, a body that resembled a pretzel, and a short, scrawny neck for little kid hands. Oh, well...it was an electric. I also got a Peavey amp with a 10" speaker that made that elusive crunchy sound I had heard on records.

Maybe now I could make a band? Maybe?