When I was in 8th grade, living in Midland, Texas, I religiously listened to a nightly radio program called Radio Free West Texas. Students at nearby Odessa Community College put on the show, an obvious homage to REM’s alt-nerd anthem, "Radio Free Europe," and they spent the evening hours from ten to midnight spinning requests from the call-ins of West Texas’ best collection of outcasts.

Being only thirteen, and appropriately sheltered by my parents, I was supposed to be in bed by ten, through with my homework, off the phone and getting some rest for school the next day. Being thirteen, I ignored my parents’ rules and sat up until midnight most nights, my ear pressed to my small plastic boombox, excitedly breathing in every subversive melody. I loved the illicit sense of voyeurism that I felt when I heard the dedications played on air, especially when I recognized the names of the various cool older kids who knew much more about underground music than I did.

"This Dead Milkmen song goes out to Erin from Anne. Your Camaro is truly bitchin’, she says." Then a scuffed up record would blast a heretofore unknown skate-rock song from the cheap Sony.

I heard contemporary new wave and punk rock bands like Smiths, the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Dead Kennedys, Depeche Mode and Minor Threat. Then sometimes the eighteen-year-old DJ gave us old school education with the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and the Velvet Underground. I learned all about how to be cool from these late night sessions. I learned which band names I needed to drop to impress the cute skater boys I so admired. I learned which cassettes to pounce on in the bins at Musicland or Record Bar at the Midland Park Mall. I learned about the secret lives of the glamorous older kids I idolized from our common community theatre youth troupe experiences.

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As one of the poetry-writing, black-clad theatre geeks, I latched onto the music of Radio Free West Texas with all of the passion of any self-absorbed teenager. This was my music. Its lyrics spoke to me, as if each musician had read my angst-ridden young mind, as if he or she understood my struggle to find a place where I fit in. The first time I heard Morrissey sing that he wore black on the outside because black is how he feels on the inside I cried with relief and empathy, shuddering to imagine how anyone could so accurately nail my unique brand of pain. Finally, I found some lyrics that got it right. These were words that superseded my hometown, where I regularly saw George W. Bush at church and we achieved international fame for a baby falling down a well. No more Huey Lewis or Morris Day and the Time for me. I was a full-on convert to Alternative music.

Back then, around the mid-80s, what we called "Alternative" music actually was an alternative to the mainstream. The music I heard on Radio Free West Texas never came up on the playlists of the top 40, classic rock or country music stations that populated the spinning dial of my radio alarm clock. By listening to obscure tunes that most kids in my hometown had never heard of, I slightly redeemed my adolescent inferiority complex, at least in the music department. Knowledge of unusual bands gave me status, access and respect among the unified weirdo subculture. One of the proudest moments of my fourteen-year-old life came when a cool skater guy who sat next to me in social studies class loudly acknowledged to his friends, "Robin’s cool. She likes the Dead Kennedys." The boys flopped their asymmetrical bangs in approval and I felt more regal than the Homecoming Queen.

The life of a junior high girl is never easy. Well, maybe for a certain select crew of beautiful blond girls it seems easy, but I doubt that even those kids just coast by. It is a tumultuous, hormonal time, full of changing bodies and a craving for approval. After trying, and failing miserably, to fit into the giggling cheerleading cliché, I found a beautiful solace in the freak-embracing arms of music. My music. Alternative music. Music only to be found between the hours of ten and midnight, way down at the far left of the dial on Radio Free West Texas.