From '92 to '97, I went to college at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the furthest I could get from home while still remaining in the dirt-cheap state university system. It turned out to be going from the frying pan to the freezer. If you've never been to Buffalo, I recommend you rent Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66. It conveys the utter despair and hoplessness of living in a rust-belt town where it snows eight months out of the year, and a hip cultural reference consists of mowing "Go Bills!" into your lawn. Plus, it has Christina Ricci.

To stave off the madness, or when they spent all of the rent money on weed, the residents of the university slum would throw house parties. We would each plunk down $5 to gather around a keg of cheap beer and hear some local bands play. And it was there, beneath the rotting boards of a prewar Victorian inhabited by twelve college students, a dog, and more marijuana than a Cheech and Chong movie, that I first saw Every 13 Days.

There were only three of them, but the close quarters and the sheer presence made them seem much bigger. The sound was awesome, an acid-space-mystical heavy metal rumble that soared like the space shuttle and hypnotized like a snake. They were young, but they were phenomenal musicians. Mitch, the drummer, and Mike, the bass player, laid down a groove as deep as a valley. Over their sonic kaleidescope, Steve Weiss seemed to float like a Buddha in a Tibetan mandorla as he strummed the collective unconscious with his Telecaster and sang lyrics about the painter Goya, or Gnostic versions of the Trinity that featured the Father, the Son, and the Holy Mother Mary.

Steve was, to put it bluntly, out of his mind. There was something of Percival about him--not the knight of the Arthur mythos, but the Peredur of the Malbignon, the holy innocent who sees clearly secrets hidden to the rest of us. His lyrics and ideas were drawn from Frasier's Golden Bough or Jungian psychology. When he played, it was less a performance than an act of worship. Whatever drugs he was taking, however Dr. Peradotto's classical mysthology course had affected him, Steve had a direct line to God.

I, of course, had my head my head too far up my own ass to realizie what I had,or maybe I could have learned something from Steve. As it was, I gave him my copy of Abbie Hoffman's Steal this Book, which is what passed for deep in my mind back then. And I rue the day I lost my only copy of their album, because it had some of the most mind-bending music I've ever heard on it. I suppose that I always expected them to make it big, like those other great musicians from Buffalo, Ani DiFranco and the Goo Goo Dolls, that some producer would clean up the half-hour extended jams their songs turned into, that I would turn on the radio one day and tell my friends, "You hear that? I knew them when they were playing basements in Buffalo!"

As it turns out, the band broke up shortly after I graduated. Steve was a genius, but he was like a child. He couldn't get along in the material world. Too beatific, or stoned, to survive on his own, I heard that he had moved back to his parents' house on Long Island.

I haven't thought about Every 13 Days for years, until I thought saw Steve recently, leading a group of Hare Krishnas down St. Mark's Place in Manhattan's Lower East Side. I could recognize him by his halo as he seemed to give their chant a special meaning all his own. Steve became Krishna. And if I ever find him again, I'm going to chain him to a chair until I can record him.

The rest of us deserve to be led into enlightenment, too.