Bob Marley once sang, “The best thing about music/when it hits you feel no pain.”

No one has ever spoken a truer word. As someone who loves music, I find it amazing that I grew up in a musical void.

The Upper Peninsula’s radio stations play music, sure, but neither the Whitney Houston and Phil Collins of the Top 40 stations nor the George Strait of the country station taught me to feel music.

My parents were no better. The only album I can recall them playing was by a guy named Mark Mitchell who sang folk songs about logging. I believe it was called “And the Trees Fell.”

When it hit it didn’t change me at all.

Then, thank any supernatural power you like, I heard the first music that could change my mood: screeching guitars, drums as heavy as lead falling off a truck and life-altering lyrics.

“She was a fast machine/she kept my motor clean/she was the best damn woman that I ever seen,” Brian Johnson howled from my friend’s tape player.

AC/DC’s “Who Made Who” was the first album that made my 12-year-old brain sizzle with what I heard. I don’t think I understood the lyrics, but I got the beat. I was changed; things popped and snapped in my brain when I heard those songs.

The music didn’t reveal great truths about the world, but it made me want to hear more. I became a junkie straining for a mental fix.

After a brief and embarrassing detour into thinking MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice were cool - but never the New Kids on the Block - I found Guns ’N’ Roses.

They were cool, and they introduced me to thrash metal and its hammering drums, fast guitars and insanely heavy beats. It was a great time to get into that music. Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth were approaching the end of their prime, but Sepultura, Pantera, Anthrax and Overkill were hitting theirs.

It was great music; I still listen to some of it today. Turning “Master of Puppets” by Metallica or “Chaos A.D.” by Sepultura on always brings back fond memories of chilling with my friends.

My tastes broadened to include Nirvana and its ilk, as well as reaching back through the mists of time to bands such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Punk rock, by way of pop/punk such as The Offspring, also unfolded before me.

The U.P.’s horrid influence was not yet done. The other integral part of loving music such as Bob Marley was going to see people play it live.

The backwater nature of my homeland reared its ugly head, as the only bands that came through my area by this time were has-beens such as Warrant.

My friends and I might hum along to “Heaven” or “Cherry Pie,” but we certainly weren’t going to sit through a concert full of their tunes. And neither Alan Jackson’s nor Sawyer Brown’s appearances at the Upper Peninsula State Fair could reel me in with tales of pickup trucks or cheating wives.

A double bill of Christian metal bands at a tiny club that a religious friend talked me into attending was all I saw. Considering one band borrowed riffs from the satanic Slayer, whose lyrics probably would have made Tipper Gore’s head explode in a self-righteous mushroom cloud, this lot did nothing for me. Lousy, unoriginal music live is still just lousy, unoriginal music.

As a result, going to concerts just wasn’t something I did. The mind-set held on after high school, and I’m still feeling its effects. My first clutch of roommates contained one who could talk about the third time he saw Nine Inch Nails and such.

Even my girlfriend, who is nowhere near the pop music fanatic I am, told me of seeing the Rolling Stones at the Pontiac Silverdome.

So my first concert came in my sophomore year at the Auditorium. The Verve Pipe, Sponge and Thin Lizard Dawn showed me real live music finally. Sponge showed how to play a show.

Singer Vinnie Dombrowski called the audience up to the stage and many of us rushed the stage, throwing the Auditorium’s annoyingly placed chairs one way or the other to the strains of “Wax Ecstatic.”

It felt great. The point of concerts was revealed. The energy of so many people flying around and the band members playing their hearts out was something new. Perhaps the last great discovery of what music is.

Rushing the stage and bouncing off my fellow concert-goers, I felt what Marley said and it felt great.

Daniel Pepper, State News music reporter, can be reached at pepperda@msu.edu.