I learned about "real" music in Pinball Pete's, a dingy arcade in a basement in East Lansing, Michigan. Pete's was somehow able to get a feed from WRIF, the album-oriented rock station from Detroit, despite the fact that it was 90 miles away. Maybe they had some kind of Antenna of the Gods on the roof, or an early form of cable radio, I'm not sure. But WRIF came in loud and clear in that dank subterranean cave. The station was legendary to me then, so much cooler than Lansing-area radio, an aura enhanced by its scarcity. Even the call letters were heavy-- you never said W-R-I-F; it was "Riff." Then, as now, the most famous personality at WRIF was a gravel-voiced biker dude named Arthur P, whose on-air persona captured the decadent partying image of 1970s rock. He spoke to me down in that basement.

This was the early 80s. Zeppelin, the patron saints of WRIF, had just broken up a couple years earlier. To me, rock like Zeppelin, the Stones, and the Who were the real alternative to wimpy, insubstantial singles being played on pop radio and MTV. I liked a good deal of that pop stuff, but secretly, and in a different way. Outwardly, I identified with rock from the 60s and 70s. I felt like enjoying it made me different, a kid of distinguished taste who could separate substance from disposable pap. I swallowed the Rolling Stone line whole-- WRIF rock was "real" music to me, art of import. And though I never thought about it much at the time, it was also pleasingly tough and masculine, the kind of music no one would make fun of you for enjoying. That helped.

I grew up in a reserved and private Midwest household, in a family that didn't value tenderness and affection. The music I admired as I hit my teenage years had weight, force, history, and not much in the way of feelings. Music was a shield, the big stick a nervous and soft-spoken guy like myself needed. Roger Daltrey's scream at the end of "Won't Get Fooled Again" summed it up pretty well: epic, soaring, a celebration of power. There was a macho edge that radiated strength, and I-- pretty much the straightest, squarest kid you can imagine, a frightened jock who trusted authority-- was drawn to it intensely. It didn't matter that these guys had hair past their shoulders and, like Robert Plant, sang in a register Joni Mitchell yearned to reach. These guys were men, see. And WRIF was where the men hung out.

That's how it seemed down in Pete's, completely isolated from the outside world, where everything looked the same no matter what time a day it was. It was a good place to try out grown-up ideas. My friends and I were there after school most days, and Friday and Saturday nights until whenever our curfew was. The video games were the draw, but just as exciting was that this was a place without parents. I never saw anyone there older than 22, not once-- it was like Lord of the Flies or Peanuts if the off-screen warbly voices had all died off. Anarchy. It's where my friends first smoked. If an older dude was to mess with you, there was no one around to help out.

There was a kid who worked the booth where you went if a game ate your quarter, he was probably 16. I'm pretty sure he never went to school. He walked around the place with a huge ring of keys dangling from his jeans that allowed him to open any game he wanted and play it for free. We envied him. It seemed to us that he had the best life imaginable. Why would we want to be anywhere else? Cups of soda dispensed from a machine were only $0.10, candy bars were a quarter; for a while there they even had a french-fry machine that dumped frozen potatoes into a vat of boiling oil, all of which you could watch through a grease-smeared window. $0.75. We had everything we needed down there. Five bucks could buy you an afternoon.

When I was 15, I met a fellow denizen of Pete's named Dave. We shared a sense of humor and both felt like outsiders-- mostly with respect to girls, of which we were both terrified-- so we started hanging out. His father had died when he was young and his mother worked like crazy, which meant that his house was another parent-free zone. Once we started hanging out regularly, between his house and Pete's, we could live our teenage lives completely unsupervised. Unlike me, Dave had no sentimental notion whatsoever about family. Pinball Pete's was actually open on Christmas, and it was a tradition for Dave to spend part of the holiday down there, playing Pac Man and hanging out with whoever else wanted to avoid their families. This was completely shocking to me.

Dave loved music. Really, really loved it, in a way I was only just starting to feel. He collected records and he could sing beautifully and he followed what bands were doing. But our tastes were different. Dave had no interest in Zeppelin, Creedence, the Doors, Pink Floyd, or almost any other band I enjoyed. He was into stranger music, stuff that wasn't "guy" music in the same way as what I'd been hearing on WRIF. His music seemed, I don't know, fruity or something, girlish-- certainly wimpy. Bands with letters for their names, like OMD and R.E.M. These I knew I could be mocked for enjoying, which was pretty to scary me, a kid desperately afraid of not fitting in.

Dave, on the other hand, relished being an outsider. Sometimes he and I would lift weights together after school and some of the football players-- guys I played with-- would make fun of his slight build. He knew them all pretty well and it didn't phase him. But instead of fighting back, Dave would walk over to the bench press, put 20 lbs on the bar, and let out these high-pitched shrieks as he struggled with it like an eight-year old girl. The other kids didn't know what was going on; they thought he was serious. Only he and I knew he was fucking around, that he was actually making fun of them. Over time I began to think of Dave in heroic terms. Everyone claimed not to care what other people thought, but here was someone who actually meant it.

And he was turning me on to new music. A few songs from those years stand out. Dave was the first person I ever got drunk with, and I recall hanging out and drinking beer in his basement, playing ping-pong while listening to tapes and LPs on a small stereo. One weekend night he played for me a Bowie song called "Heroes". Nobody was home so he played it incredibly loud, way past the point of distortion, but it didn't matter. The power of it and the droning guitar kept me conscious even as I was about to black out from all the alcohol. It was tactile, sensual, weirdly elongated, like a riff I loved so much stretched out so far it became something else. I knew some Bowie-- "Panic in Detroit", "Suffragette City", "Changes"-- but had never heard anything like this.

A while later, after Dave and I were more or less best friends, he picked up The Queen Is Dead. "How Soon is Now?" had been the Smiths anthem from Dave's collection to that point. It was something I could give myself to. Not only did the words fit perfectly for two guys drinking alone, afraid to hang out with other high school kids at a party, but there was Johnny Marr's riff, and it was huge. But "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" was something more. It seemed to understand what made us miserable, but it also pointed to a way out. In the world of the song, friendship counts-- to someone alone and estranged from his family, it's everything-- and there was a possibility that things would eventually be different. There was also Morrissey's voice, so far removed from anything I'd identified with before. Little by little, I could feel a new world opening.

Dave also introduced me to a singer he liked named Kate Bush, who had recently released Hounds of Love and the best-of The Whole Story. Wow. Orchestral when it wasn't synthesized, piano-based, with songs I couldn't quite figure out. And at the center of it was this arty ballerina chick, with an impossibly high voice. How to square this with WRIF rock? Not possible. But I heard "Wuthering Heights" and discovered that I wanted to live inside the song, to play it over again to see if I could figure out what made it so moving. And I found myself wishing, while it was playing, that I could be Kate Bush sitting at a piano. This, instead of playing air guitar to Page's solo on "Stairway to Heaven". What could it mean?

Life was getting more complicated and I was growing into something-- what exactly, I wasn't sure. But having a friend like Dave around to go through it with, and having music to serve as some kind of map, made a difference. But then something terrible happened to our friendship at the tail end of high school. The oldest story in the book: I found a girlfriend, which turned everything around completely, and I began spending a lot less time with Dave. He resented it, I felt guilty, and eventually we stopped hanging out altogether. Then college came, and we lost track of each other. Three or four years later, I ran into him at a bar and we talked. I apologized for my behavior and he graciously accepted, while acknowledging that I'd been a shitty friend. We went back and forth on music for a bit and found we'd both grown to be huge fans of Public Enemy, which was hard to connect to anything we'd bonded over earlier. Everything seemed friendly as we said goodbye. After that night I never saw him again.

In addition to all that 80s indie, Dave was also a Marvin Gaye fan. I remember him putting on Midnight Love a few times to play "Sexual Healing," a song of unusual interest to virgins like us. In the last few months I've downloaded a couple different versions of Kate Bush covering this song, one live, one the B-side to her "King of the Mountain" single. Her version, faithful in most respects save its crucial gender tweak, brought those years hanging out with Dave back. It's so far from anything I would have considered valuable back when I first started caring about music, but it sounds so good to me now. So much of life is coming to understand things inside you never knew existed.