Things were hurtling rapidly forward. We had shaved the mustaches and the sideburns. We were aerobicizing. We were moonwalking. Every garage housed fuel-injected cylinders, and in every living room sat a teenager twisting a Rubik’s Cube and winning at Pitfall. (Or a nice game of chess.) And as our home entertainment was chasing Moore’s Law, so was our guitar technique.

In the ’80s, the relentless pursuit of perfection turned rock guitar into a kind of pre-Wright Brothers scramble for innovation. Eddie Van Halen, the decade’s spiritual mentor, had blasted away convention with his iconoclastic tapping technique. For kids around the world, that was all the cue card we needed. The next breakthrough would come from us.