Eddie Van Halen was in a music store on Foothill Boulevard in Arcadia when the owner told a 12-year-old boy to put the guitar down and leave. The boy had been playing for 3 minutes. Eddie had been listening from the next aisle for two of them. What happened in the following 10 minutes meant that boy never put a guitar down again.
March 1980 Arcadia, California Foothill Music on Foothill Boulevard, a Saturday morning 10:15 A 12-year-old boy comes in alone. He goes to the electric guitars. He takes one down from the wall. He begins to play. The owner watches from behind the counter for 3 minutes. Then he comes around. In the next aisle, a man in a gray jacket sets down the string packet he has been reading. He listens.
Here is the story. The boy’s name is Daniel Flores. He is 12 years old, small for his age, wearing jeans that are slightly too short and a faded Dodgers T-shirt that belonged to someone older before it belonged to him. He lives with his mother and two younger sisters in an apartment on Live Oak Avenue, four blocks from the store.
His mother works the early shift at a cannery in Irwindale and is home by 2:00. His father has not been in the picture since Daniel was 7. Daniel gets himself and his sisters up every school morning, makes sure they eat, walks them to the elementary school two blocks away, and then goes to his own school. On Saturdays, when his sisters are at his aunt’s, he comes here.
He has been coming to Foothill Music on Saturday mornings for 7 months, not to buy anything. He has no money for instruments. He comes because the store has a policy of allowing customers to try before buying, and because the store’s owner, a man named Carl Briggs, has tolerated him on slow mornings the way a man tolerates something that costs him nothing and might someday be worth something.
Most Saturdays, Daniel arrives at 10:00, takes down one of the mid-range electrics from the wall, plays for 20 or 30 minutes, puts it back exactly as he found it, and leaves. He has never broken a string. He has never damaged anything. He has never asked for anything except to be allowed to play. What Daniel Flores does with a guitar is not what most 12-year-olds do with a guitar. He taught himself.
He has no teacher, no lessons, no formal instruction of any kind. He learned from a cousin who plays in a band in El Monte, watching the cousin’s left hand at family parties until the chord shapes made sense, then watching the right hand, then watching both together until they became one motion he could reproduce alone.
He learned from records, his mother’s turntable in the living room, the needle on 33, then slowed to 16 to hear the individual notes, lifted and replaced and lifted again until the phrase was clear enough to finger on the neck of an air guitar while lying in bed. He learned from the 20 or 30 minutes every Saturday morning in this store, the only time each week he has access to an instrument that is actually plugged in and actually resonating the way an electric guitar is supposed to resonate.
What he does in those 20 or 30 minutes is not casual playing. He arrives with specific things to work on. He identifies a passage from the previous week that was not right and returns to it first. He corrects it. Then he moves to something new. He is methodical in the way of someone who understands that time is limited and cannot be wasted on the same mistake twice.
He puts the guitar back in exactly the position he found it, coils the cable the same way, and leaves. He has done this every Saturday for 7 months. He’s not yet played this Saturday’s passage all the way through without stopping. He’s been working toward it for 3 weeks. This morning, he is close. On this particular Saturday in March 1980, Daniel takes down a Fender Stratocaster copy, not the real thing, a mid-range import that Foothill Music sells for $240 and begins to play.
He’s been playing for 3 minutes when Carl Briggs comes around the counter. This Saturday is not slow. A father and son are at the acoustic wall. A woman is asking about keyboards. A man has been talking to Carl’s assistant about a guitar amplifier for 15 minutes. Carl Briggs is running a retail operation on a Saturday morning in March, and the sound of a 12-year-old playing an instrument he is not going to buy is, this morning, a different calculation than it is on a quiet Tuesday.
“Put it back,” Carl says. “We’ve talked about this. You’re not buying today. You need to leave the instruments for customers who are.” Daniel looks at Carl. He looks at the guitar. He puts it back on the wall hook. He does it carefully, the way he always does. The guitar in its exact position, the cable coiled neatly, everything as he found it. He walks toward the door.
What no one in the store knows yet is that the man in the next aisle has been listening for two of those 3 minutes, and that he is not going to let the door close. Eddie Van Halen had come to Foothill Music that Saturday morning for one thing, a set of strings. He had a session at a friend’s studio that afternoon, and had run out of his preferred gauge the previous evening.
Foothill Music was three blocks off his route. He had parked, gone in, found the string rack in the second aisle, and been comparing two options when the sound reached him from around the corner. He had been comparing strings for 4 minutes before Daniel started playing. He stopped after 20 seconds of listening.
He had been in enough stores and heard enough players to know within 20 seconds the difference between someone playing a guitar and someone who has something to say through a guitar. The distinction was not about technique. Technique was a later question. It was about whether the phrases went somewhere, whether there was a decision being made behind the notes, whether the person holding the instrument had an internal logic they were trying to express, rather than a series of positions they were trying to reproduce.
Most people who picked up a guitar in a music store on a Saturday morning were reproducing positions. The boy around the corner was not. The tone was imprecise. A mid-range import through a small practice amplifier cannot do what the sound in the boy’s head probably required, but the structure underneath was audible.
The phrases went somewhere. They resolved. >> [snorts] >> There was a melodic idea being developed, returned to, altered. Composition in other words, however informal, however unconscious, the composer might have been of the fact that what he was doing had a name. He was still holding the string packet when he heard Carl’s voice.
Put it back. He set the string packet on the shelf. He came around the corner in time to see Daniel return the guitar to the wall hook with the careful precision of someone who has learned that the right to be here depends on leaving everything exactly as found, and turned toward the door.
What no one in the store knows yet, not Carl, not the father and son at the acoustic wall, not the woman at the keyboards, is that what Eddie heard in the second aisle in the past 2 minutes has already changed what is about to happen. The door is not going to close. “Hey,” Eddie said. Daniel stopped. He turned around. He looked at the man in the gray jacket who had just come from the string aisle.
“How long have you been playing?” Eddie said. Daniel looked at him. “2 years,” he said, “more or less.” 2 years. No teacher, no instrument of his own, 20 minutes a week in a store on Foothill Boulevard. Eddie did the arithmetic of what he had just heard against those 2 years and what it meant. “You have your own guitar?” Eddie said.
