Dreams Come True in Los Angeles! - The hot night at the NAMM Show is a place for guitarists to blossom!

Every January a music trade show called the NAMM Show is held in Anaheim, the suburb of Los Angeles. Anaheim is also famous for being home to Disneyland. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NAMM Show wasn’t running as scheduled for the past two years. Finally in 2023, the doors of NAMM have opened again and now I’m writing this article in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel while this great rock band is playing loudly with a large audience at the NAMM Show next store just before 11 pm. This moment truly feels like a dream.

As I write this, the band has changed and to my surprise, the last band to play tonight is a Van Halen cover band! Van Halen has been my favorite rock band since I was a college student. I have seen them many times at local venues in Los Angeles way before they made their major label debut. The lead guitarist is Eddie Van Halen, a guitar genius who in the 70’s created a guitar tapping technique that no one had ever seen or heard before and played it freely on stage. He is well known for his diligent guitar practice even while sitting on the toilet, and his stage performances were always flawless and he never made a mistake.

I fell in love with Eddie’s playing when I was playing in a band since high school. I studied studio guitar and played guitar for three years under the tutelage of Duke Miller, the teacher of the famous guitarist Lee Ritenour, while I was a business major at University of Southern California (USC). I was a young man whose dream was to one day become a rock star. Well, that is to say that I did dream of becoming a tennis pro until junior high school but that was replaced by the guitar. As soon as I graduated from college, I immediately went to Hollywood and enrolled in Guitar Institute of Technology (GIT), which had just opened in 1977, and I played the guitar there for a year. And, as I was keeping my dream of becoming a rock star alive, I formed a band with my classmate Bill and his acquaintance, the drummer of the prominent band called Cheap Trick with the aim of making my debut in Hollywood.

It’s important to hold on to your dreams. Even now, I sometimes wonder how I could have traveled all the way to Hollywood to become a professional rock star. Then one day, just before our band I had formed was about to make our debut in Hollywood, I quit the band, and suddenly my dream of becoming a guitarist came to an abrupt end. They say that giving up is the key to life, and that is exactly what happened. Somewhere along the way, I had to snap out of it and say to myself, “This is impossible!” and decided to change the direction of my life. I decided to apply to an ivy league business school and go to graduate school. Of course, that was only if I could get in, but that was also a tough road to go down.

At the time, I was only 22 years old. Even in graduate school, the average age of admission to business school was 26-7 years old. I had no employment experience and my grades in college were far from all A’s. People might have considered this to be an impossible feat, but I desperately put in a lot of applications, determined to succeed academically if I was going to stop playing the guitar. Perhaps my unique background as a Japanese who had graduated from college in three years and played guitar in Hollywood helped me to stand out, but I was accepted to a prominent school as the youngest student that they ever had. Dreams do come true. Perhaps it was all thanks to my guitar.

Meanwhile, the super-hot live concert at the hot Los Angeles NAMM Show is coming to an end. Suddenly, half a century of my life comes back to me like a running light. Yes, 48 years ago I met Van Halen, my life changed as a guitarist, and I ended up graduating from business school. Then I eventually founded my music company, Sound House. Soon after, I became a distributor for Peavey, one of the largest musical instrument manufacturers in the States, who had been known for endorsing Eddie Van Halen, and as the general sales manager of Eddie’s EVH guitars and 5150 guitar amplifiers, I offered guitarists all over Japan products that Eddie himself had produced. This connection is also too good to be a part of this wild dream.

And now, here I am at a hotel in Anaheim enjoying a Van Halen cover band to the fullest while shamelessly typing on my laptop computer as I’m standing in the audience. The crowd around me is huge. There is no room to walk. Many people are enjoying the loud sound of the rock concert, cheering and shouting. Naturally, I am also enjoying myself as I write this article. Well, my fellow staff members at Sound House are watching the stage right next to me. I’m sure that they’re thinking, “Rick is nuts!” I don’t care! Finally, it’s the last song. I want to enjoy the last song so I finally decide to close the laptop. Good timing! The dream is still going!