I'm pretty sure that roundabouts

1995 as a hapless 17-year-old amateur guitar player

with a cheapish black Gibson epiphone and vague rock star dreams,

I paid five American dollars for a magazine

that promised to teach me how to play this song.

Brain Stew by Green Day from their 1995 album Insomniac. At this time I had an after-school job. I made

$5.25 an hour, bagging groceries, corraling shopping carts, and ineptly flirting with various

ladies in the floral produce and seafood departments of our local grocery store. Minimum effort

for minimum wage. That's $5.25 before taxes.

I surrendered an hour of my teenage life, the spoils of my youth, 60 minutes of my prime, toiling in the paper or plastic trenches, just to exchange that money for a copy of either guitar world or

guitar player. I don't care. I got no brand loyalty to either magazine. Every month along with features

and interviews and gear reviews I didn't care about that used terminology I didn't understand.

Every month these guitar magazines would pick four to six popular

rock songs and transcribe them. Full musical notation, guitar tablature, sacred texts. You too can

learn to play, What, Alive by Pearl Jam. Wish You were here by Pink Floyd. Are You Gonna Go My Way?

By Lenny Kravitz.

Connection by Elastica.

Perhaps even Silent Lucidity.

By Queensreich.

Great songs.

All.

Valid ambitions.

...