I grew up in a home with 3,000 albums on vinyl. I listened to all kinds of music, but of course was hugely influenced by all the big classic rock acts: The Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys, and later Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Van Halen, Queen, and all the usual suspects. As a hard-rock loving guitarist I was eventually greatly influenced by Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Jake E. Lee, George Lynch, and the sort. As the years went by I took a great deal of inspiration from shredder cats such as Greg Howe, Paul Gilbert, Richie Kotzen, and of course Satch and Vai. I have a huge spot in my heart for jazz legends such as Django and Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass, and blues masters such as B.B. King, Hubert Sumlin, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and all the folks they inspired or played with.

I picked up a guitar pretty early on, and by the time I was 16 I was playing 6 hours a day, 7 days a week. When adulthood forced its wicked ways upon me, I found my way into the world of journalism. I wrote for more than 100 publications, including major daily newspapers such as the Daily News of Los Angeles and the Orange County Register, and most of the major guitar magazines. If you remember the days when you could stand in front of a magazine rack in a store and see Guitar Player, Guitar World, and Guitar for the Practicing Musician, alongside Frets, Guitar World Acoustic, Guitar Shop, Bass Player, and Home Recording -- well, you would have found my articles and celebrity interviews in all of them at one time or another.

I ran Fender Frontline Magazine for awhile, and later ran the websites Guitar.com, Musician.com, and Gbase.com for many years. If you remember the early 2000s and all the instructional celebrity guitar videos on Guitar.com, I'm proud to say that I shot and edited most of those interviews and lessons myself. And I was definitely a pioneer in the field: Those videos, with everyone from Satch and Vai to Iron Maiden and B.B. King, were online years before YouTube existed. It was a whole lotta fun doing what I did at that time, believe me!

Along the way the fine folks at Hal Leonard, the world's largest music publisher, asked me to start writing and editing guitar instructional books for them. I did a whole lot of them. They even used me as a model in a bunch of popular books. Many of the books I wrote for Hal Leonard -- such as "101 Guitar Tips" and "The Blues Guitar Handbook" and the "Picture Chord Encyclopedia" are still available on bookshelves in stores world-wide, from Guitar Center stores to Barnes and Noble locations, independent music stores, retailers such as Target and Walmart, and plenty of other locations too.

Somewhere down the line I ended up with a beautiful wife and two good-looking kids. Not sure how that happened, exactly, but my offspring are exceptional musicians and we have had a lot of fun playing together -- or arguing about playing together! They've joined me on-stage in the Allman Brothers tribute band I fronted for 15+ years in the Chicago area, The Almost Brothers Band. We have had hella-good times in front of some big crowds, and more recently, we've been tracking for each other in the recording studio. And one of these days we'll stop bickering about the mix, and actually release a song or two!

In the past few years I've been wandering the country a lot, often rolling aimlessly across miles of lonely desert, questioning the meaning of life, and wondering why the sky is blue. Other times I can be found laying down tracks in cool recording studios, or watching over stage rigs for folks such as Vinny Appice and Vivian Campbell, pretty much just for the fun of it -- and the occasional backstage bowl of M&Ms.

I play a whole helluva lotta guitar these days, and I'm startin' to think there might be something to this music thing, and that maybe I oughta find myself a rock 'n' roll outfit and hit the road.

Let me know if you can relate.