In 1990, I bought my first guitar. It was a black Ibanez RG560. I paid for it with money earned from my paper route, delivering the Pittsburgh Press. But I forgot about sales tax. I always forgot about sales tax when buying things as a kid. My parents covered the difference. I took the guitar home and had nothing to plug it into. No amp. So I strummed on it, almost silently, and attempted to play from my Mel Bay Guitar for Beginners book.
Aside from a few of the guitar lines from Heart’s “Crazy On You” (a favorite of my guitar teacher), I didn’t know how to play any songs. And my guitar teacher just had me play scales and taught me some tablature. His name was Tom Wolfe and his fingers were stained by nicotine. He had a curly pile of black hair and a matching mustache. Tacked on the wall in the small lesson room were photos of him playing at an outdoor festival somewhere. They looked to be from the 1970s. He played a sunburst Gibson Les Paul that weighed a ton.
Soon I figured out how to play by ear though, and one of the first things I picked up was “Twist of Cain” by Danzig. I was done after that, convinced for the next five years that I would play in a metal band, ditch high school for a tour bus and a string of performances at shitty clubs that smelled like stale beer and cigarette smoke. I pored over videos of bands I was obsessed with. Danzig was one of those bands. A friend of mine, Larry Stewart, let me borrow his copy of Danzig (1990), the VHS companion to the album.
In this clip (above), which is sort of an At Home With Glenn Danzig segment, he gives a tour through his library of books on satanism and the occult. It was funny watching it at the time so many years ago, but only because Danzig had a smirk on his face — like he and his fans were all in on some joke (though 13-year-old me didn’t get the joke). Twenty years later, however, it’s funny for an entirely different reason.
