It all started in a tent in my backyard, exactly 30 years ago.
That's right, the first NAMM show was in an Arlington Heights,
Illinois tent! No, actually the first NAMM show took place in
1901 (Player pianos? Jaw harps? The mind reels!) but that little
orange tent was where I first became aware of it. I vividly
recall reading coverage about NAMM in a 1984 issue of Keyboard
magazine when I was a teenager, which is pretty strange since
most people don't remember reading too many specific magazine
articles when they were 14. But I remember this coverage! It
left quite an impression. Since this was also the year I got my
first "real" synthesizer (a Roland Juno-106), the notion that
acres and acres of similarly cool musical instruments could all
be converged in one area -- near Disneyland, no less -- was just
too staggeringly awesome to be real. But it's very real, and I
promised myself that somehow, someday, I'd go.  That day, I
became one of the millions of interested musicians that were
aware of the existence o