Justin Bieber - First Step 2 Forever, My Story. Justin Bieber

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      The best times were when my dad was one of the people hanging out playing guitar in our living room. He wasn’t a big fan of pop music. He was more into classic rock and heavy metal. He taught me some stuff like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and a few other Dylan songs, turned me onto Aerosmith, Metallica, and Guns N’ Roses, which got me listening to (and showing respect for) the legends like Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen. My dad taught me how to play “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, and I still remember it. (You should hear Dan Kanter and me kill that thing.)

      To play metal or even the 1980s hair band stuff like Journey and Twisted Sister, you’ve gotta know the so-called power chords, and Dad taught me a few tricks there, too. He showed me how to play barré chords, which is when you lay your index finger flat across all the strings at once, which moves the chords up a little on the neck of the guitar. You’re essentially playing the same chords, but changing the key, so you can play the song in whatever range fits your voice. If you know the basic form of five or six barré chords, you can play pretty much any song in the universe. Grab the lyrics off the Web, listen to the changes and progressions five or six times, and there you go. You’re Green Day. In your room, that is.

      ROCKIN’ ROBIN

      I was Metallica and Matchbox 20 in my room at night, but at school by day I was just me. Nobody at school knew anything about this part of my life. I was a hockey kid like all my friends, and I liked it that way. I was already a little odd because Jeanne Sauvé Catholic School was a French immersion school. It’s exactly what it sounds like. You’re immersed in French. They don’t speak English at all. The idea is that you learn to speak French while you’re learning to add and subtract and all the other things you’d be learning at a regular school.

      I had a lot of friends at my French school, but, when I was seven or eight, I started playing house league hockey with a bunch of guys who went to regular English-speaking public school. I didn’t need them to think I was a music geek in addition to being a French geek. (Of course, now I’m really glad that I speak French, because, let’s face it, girls dig it when a guy speaks French. They call it the language of love, and that ain’t no coincidence. Plus, I love my French fans! Très jolie!)

      My best friends – from that day to this – were my hockey mates, especially Chaz Somers and Ryan Butler, and, man, did we have fun back then!

      We weren’t bad kids at all, but we were kinda out of control at times. We’d go down in the basement at Grandpa and Grandma’s house to watch TV and end up playing kickball with the couch pillows or battling a soccer ball back and forth or practically strangling each other with professional wrestling moves. We never destroyed anything major, but there were a few small casualties. A couple of lamps were sacrificed. And, among Grandpa’s hunting trophies, there’s a stuffed fox that mysteriously ended up missing a leg.