My name is Dan, and I like Van Halen.

This weekend, the reunion tour of my dreams is coming to my area, and I happily overpaid for halfway decent seats to see Van Halen live with my official concert going pal, "Major Mike" Weigand. But I liked Van Halen before they got back together. I liked Van Halen with David Lee Roth. I liked Van Halen with Sammy Hagar. I even liked Van Halen with Gary Cherone (well...okay, not really, but I sure did try, and "How Many Say I" is still the funniest thing the band has ever done). The first tequila I ever tried was Cabo Wabo, Sammy's personal brand. And as Ryan is fond of telling people, I sometimes walk around with red Chuck Taylors painted with black and white stripes all over them. (One previous employer asked if I got them from a hobo.) I have a second pair painted and ready to go when the first one wears out. I hacked my cell phone so the wallpaper is VH stripes and the ringtone is my custom edit of "Hot for Teacher." I am not a closet fan in the slightest.

The first thing I did when I got my Xbox 360 was rip some Van Halen albums. That's because I'd done the same thing in my original Xbox (yeah, I was that guy who used the feature). The thought of playing Burnout Revenge or Gears of War with "Panama" slamming in the background was my idea of fun. And that turned out to be just the beginning.

Rock Band was an obvious outlet for my obsession. Shortly after I got the game and started realizing all the stuff you could do with the art tools, I knew I had to make a striped guitar. I wound up making one pattern and using it on two guitars -- the American Deluxe Stratocaster HSS (since it has a black humbucker at the bridge, like Eddie's) and and Standard Stratocaster (which has the finish worn away in places, like Eddie's). It took me about an hour to get everything just the way I wanted. In a super-nerdy touch, I added a silver disc under the bridge, to match the quarter Eddie unceremoniously drilled into the body one night as a quick hardware fix. Nothing makes me happier than showing this thing off in online play.

It's not perfect, and the game has some limitations that I had to accept (only 25 art layers, and no option for a maple fretboard), but I still do a double-take when I'm playing the game, because I'm like, OMG, I made that!

I am not a big fan of sim racers, but I did spend some quality time with Forza Motorsport 2. Paul was really into it and I wanted to play with him, so I invested some time. I guess the paint job on the Lancia Stratos was inevitable.
It took me a long time to make the car because I tried to connect the stripes on the different panels, so the lines on the hood carry over to the driver's side door, for instance. There's a little "5150" down at the real wheel well on both sides. If you've played the game, you know the Lancia's not the kind of car that wins a lot of races unless you really pimp it out, so it's just my cruiser -- when I want to be seen. Seen as a giant Van Halen dork.

But for me, the ultimate expression in stupid fandom is my custom faceplate. As we were finishing up the article last year about how to paint your own faceplate, I had Greg Philpott of Orbiter Guitars create this for me. The tutorial we ran only covered creating a basic color, which was tricky enough, but Greg paints real guitars for a living, so I figured if anybody was up to the task, it would be him. (For the record, Greg doesn't even have an Xbox 360 yet; he loves Colin McRae Rally on his PlayStation 2. I'm hoping Santa will surprise him this year.)

It took a while, it took some money, and it took a lot of high-quality automotive paint (not to mention six layers of clearcoat gloss -- it shines!) but it's never coming off my 360. Just to make me ridiculously happy, he used Dakota Red paint, which is a Dupont finish used on cars and -- you guessed it -- Fender Stratocasters. He told me he made a point to do over "X" designs in the stripes since it was an Xbox. I like it on the white 360, but I've since upgraded to an Elite, and it looks just as snazzy on black.

Naturally...I needed to get its companion. Faceplates should match the controllers, right? And in the course of doing the 20-Minute Tweaks article, I figured out how to disassemble a controller, so next time I visited Greg, I brought along a white controller faceplate and said "See if you can do it on this, too." Sure enough...

So now, to bring it full circle, the trilogy needs completing. There's one big obvious thing that needs to be VH striped, and that's the Guitar Hero II X-Plorer controller. Greg was hired to create the contest prizes for our GHII Rising Sun giveaway and instead of bringing him five guitars, I brought him six. I had several other guitar projects I needed him to do too, so as payment, I gave him one of my real guitars in exchange for the paint job on one of my fake guitars (plus a lot of other work -- Greg's not that expensive).

UPDATE: On the morning of the concert, I got the guitar. He painted both sides of the shell. It works perfectly.

If that doesn't get me 100% on "You Really Got Me" on Expert, nothing will.