"When the music hits, I feel no pain at all."

Anger, hate, and sporatic violence surrounded me in the fall of 1998. I was a very angry person and for the most part, I didn't know why. But my family life was shit and I was watching it crumble before my eyes.

Ever since my dad moved out four years before, my mom had been drinking more and more. It drove my brother out of the house and it was on the verge of driving me insane.

As a teenager, I knew all about escape. I was a master in the art of escape. I lived surrounded by the four walls of my bedroom, the only place I ever felt truly safe. When the going got tough, I ran to my bedroom. But I didn't understand why my mom did the same.

As a parent, she was supposed to be the strong one. She wasn't supposed to lose herself in a bottle of wine and forget all about us. She was supposed to don an apron and cook us macaroni and cheese. She was supposed to go grocery shopping. She was supposed to be stronger than I was. When she failed at that, it made me angry. Why couldn't she be more like my friends' mothers? Why couldn't she be a good mom? She worked, then she'd come home, go upstairs and drink her bottle of wine while she read a book or chatted on the internet.

I was a fairly good kid, as kids go. I didn't do drugs, I didn't smoke, I didn't stay out late having sex with various neighborhood boys, and I got fairly good grades in school. No cause for concern, at least not obvious ones.

My little sister, on the other hand, was turning out to be just the opposite. Staying out late, smoking, drinking and doing drugs, and her grades at school were plummeting. I was worried. My mother wasn't. And that worried me even more.

It was one thing for my mother to neglect me. I was responsible for myself and I dealt with that accordingly. But as I grew older, my concern for my sister grew more and more until it obviously surpassed my mother's. And it pissed me off that I cared more about the trouble she was getting into than her primary caregiver did. Time and time again, I stood witness to my mother's neglect and all of that led up to October 14th.

It was an average October night. My sister was gone doing God knows what with her friends. My mom arrived home from work with a fresh bottle of wine.

I was sitting on the floor of the living room. I held up my sister's unopened report card, sure of her failing grades. I wondered what her reaction would be. She grabbed it, opened it and stared at it, looking her grades over.

"I don't get it," she said, putting it down and shaking her head. Then she grabbed her bottle of wine and disappeared up to her room.

She doesn't GET IT? SHE DOESN'T *FUCKING* *GET* *IT*?!!? How can she not understand what this was doing to us? I had told her that her drinking was bothering me and she said it was my problem. My problem. And now a fucking report card full of E's was my sister's problem. She was 13, not 30. How is that supposed to be her problem if my mother did nothing to combat it?

That was the last straw. I lost it. I completely and utterly lost it. I threw things and punched walls and kicked things and went searching for something, anything to get me drunk so I wouldn't have to feel the anger and confusion I was feeling at that moment. When I couldn't find anything in my house, I gave up. I went into the living room and turning on the CD player and almost blew out the speakers with the opening lines of Nihilism by Rancid. I didn't care though. I was through caring. Why care if no one else did?

I paced through my living room, trying desperately to keep it together. Millions of thoughts were running through my head, none of them really coherent. I stomped my feet and tried not to fall apart. Finally, in desperation, I collapsed on my couch.

"Never fell in love, 'til I fell in love with you..." Tim Armstrong began singing Radio, the second song off Let's Go. I already liked the song because of its, "When I got the music, I got a place to go," chorus. So I began listening to the words.

"One October night, I was drinking with my dad. He tried to give me love that I never had. But he gave more love to his bottle of wine. So I had to go out and find love of another kind."

It hit so close to home that I started crying. "He gave more love to his bottle of wine." That was exactly how I was feeling about my mom at that minute. I put the song on repeat and listened to it over and over and for once, I felt like someone else out there understood. Someone else out there had felt the same way I had and dealt with it. He made it through. He didn't collapse, at least not enough to leave him down for good. Someone else out there knew how much music could save you, especially when you were in a situation that left you feeling completely defeated. And that was enough. That was enough to get me through.

Ever since that night, Radio has held a special place in my heart. When they came to Clutch Cargo's in November of 2000, two years after that night, they began the first lines of Radio and I cried again. After two years, it still means the same thing that it did that night. After two years, I still believe that:

"When I got the music, I got a place to go."