My musical education started conventionally enough with piano lessons, then percussion in second grade. Three times a week I dragged a Ludwig snare drum from home to school in Ohio, carrying the drum in its case along with the stand for about half a mile. In the snow, naturally, and uphill both ways. The drum was probably about as big as I was.

By junior high I had moved on to alto and tenor saxophone. I was never a remarkable musician, but somewhere along the way I developed a fairly sophisticated taste in music for a fifteen-year-old. Against what was probably my parents' better judgment, I eventually ended up with a clear 1970s Ludwig Vistalite drum kit with double bass drums. I pushed my single bed against the wall to make room for the thing and began laying siege to the neighbors' tranquility.

A neighbor named Brad was also a drummer and had a pair of roto-toms, the tunable drums that seemed to be everywhere for a while. He let me borrow them. Roto-toms were a bit like percussive parachute pants: very much a fad, and not automatically flattering on everyone. Bruford knew how to wear them. He used them particularly well on the first U.K. album, and the borrowed pair complemented my clear Vistalite double-bass setup with exactly the right amount of 1970s excess. I suspect the neighbors knew that U.K. album too, or at least substantial portions of it played badly and repeatedly through the walls.

I had friends who played guitar and were actually quite good. One of them eventually went on to a legendary career playing jazz and country at the highest levels. The friends I was actually in a band with were closer to my level. We called ourselves the Wizards and managed a couple of gigs at about the local roller-rink level. We had passion, if not much reason to expect a recording contract. I was realistic enough to know music probably wasn't going to be my career, although being in a band still seemed like a reasonable way to meet cute high-school girls.

What we listened to kept changing. Larry Carlton, Lenny White, Chick Corea and Return to Forever, Jean-Luc Ponty, Weather Report with Jaco Pastorius. In the summer of 1977 we could drive around listening to an 8-track of Van Halen with "Runnin' with the Devil" playing. A year later we were more interested in figuring out how Allan Holdsworth could make a guitar sound like that.

U.K. had opened for Jethro Tull at another Dallas show, but I arrived late and missed their set. That stayed with me. So when Bill Bruford came through Dallas with his own band, I wasn't going to miss him again. Kenny, one of the guitar players in the Wizards, and I drove to North Dallas to see him at the Bijou Showcase Club on July 16, 1980.

By then Bruford had already played with Yes and King Crimson, helped form U.K., and moved on to the band carrying his own name. The 1980 lineup was Bruford on drums, Jeff Berlin on bass and vocals, Dave Stewart on keyboards and John Clark on guitar. My strongest memory besides Bruford himself is Berlin. Even now, when I think about that night, the bass playing is one of the first things that comes back.

The opening band was Schwantz Lefantz, and they made one decision I still admire or question, depending on the day: they played U.K.'s "In the Dead of Night" before Bruford's band came on. Bruford had played on the original recording. The piece leans heavily on seven-beat meter and was exactly the kind of music that had occupied our attention by then. Playing it in front of the man himself was either unbridled fandom or sheer stupidity. I'm still not sure which.

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Then Bruford came out and showed everyone how it was actually played.

That memory works partly because I had spent enough time behind a drum kit to know the difference. I wasn't remotely in Bruford's league, or Berlin's, or anyone else on that stage. But years of hauling drums, learning instruments, making noise in bedrooms and roller rinks, and trying to understand records that were beyond my own ability had given me some idea of what I was hearing.

The Bijou was a small club, which is how I still picture the show: a band capable of extraordinary technical playing working at close range, without the distance of an arena. I don't remember enough to reconstruct the set list, and I don't want to pretend that I do. What remains is more useful anyway: Jeff Berlin on bass, Bruford behind the kit, and the sense that all those hours spent listening closely had finally put me in the room with the real thing.