When I think back on it now, it seems like we were desperate for each other. Nothing else worked. I was an awkward kid with bad hair and immense glasses, searching for some kind of identity, and he was rounding out the last days of his own extended, awkward childhood that had, I guess, gone sour long ago.

But '84 was the year all that changed. My father found a 12-step program. And I found Talking Heads and pop music that, in that era, promised nothing less than complete reinvention for nerdy, kind-of-sad kids like myself. By the time I was 13, my Dad was clean. I was strung out on rock 'n' roll.

Around the same time, after years of sporadic, heartbreaking visits, my father and I were spending every other weekend together in his tiny South Philadelphia apartment -- the kind of place you end up in only after you've been told that you have to completely rebuild your life.

Those weekends were great. They revolved around the stereo, "Saturday Night Live" and baseball cards, all of which my Dad and I endorsed with equal enthusiasm. With his program friends, he took me to see the Laurie Anderson movie "Home of the Brave," which I didn't understand at all, but gave me the feeling that I was in on the ground level of something cool. Both of us were also really into the soundtrack "The Cat People," an awful companion to a forgotten erotic thriller with one great David Bowie song ("Putting out the fire with gasoline/ Putting out the fiy-ah with gass-o-leee-eee-een!").

Always looming in the background were my Dad's favorite bands, like the Rolling Stones, as well as a reinvigorated passion for the life and work of Bob Dylan. For my Dad and a lot of his friends who were in recovery, Dylan embodied the kind of person who could reinvent his old, bad self and somehow stay true. At the same time, Dylan's embrace of Christian and Jewish faiths walked the same kind of humbling line these guys had been walking after every other option had plainly failed them.

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But at 13 -- and on to 14 and 15 -- I thought Dylan was, in the parlance of the times, totally gay. High on new wave, I saw nothing whatsoever in the harangue-and-whine that my Dad and all his friends swore up and down was the seer, the sayer, the rock 'n' roll saint.

Seeing a rebellion coming, and thinking he could help, my not-so-old man started the push. My father sent me to Bob school.

The Christmas before, an electric guitar had appeared under the tree. I'd already spirited away my stepfather's big old Gibson, bummed $20 and gone over, once a week, to my father's best friend's house, where, week to week, Jimmy Lombard was teaching me to play his favorite songs, first "House of the Rising Sun" and later "I Don't Believe You," "Desolation Row" and "She Belongs to Me." The songs seemed archaic and strange, but I had to learn some way and Jimmy didn't know "Psycho Killer."

Later, there was a set of hand-me-down records: "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," "Bringing It All Back Home," "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and, leaping time, the sucking winds of "Desire." My Dad left me the vinyl, buffed up with Discwasher record cleaner, in new plastic LP bags -- like a hand-me-down Boy Scout uniform.

But this was not in the late '60s, or even in the early '70s; it was in the late '80s. While the rest of my teenage universe centered on Depeche Mode and the Smiths, my father was earnestly, slowly and with much deliberation trying to convince me that none of that, or almost none of that mattered. And because Bob Dylan's music didn't do it for me, at least at first, my Dad told me about the importance of Bob.

It went something like this: As hard and as awful as it was being a teenager in the '80s, it was even worse being Bob Dylan. Bob had weathered every criticism: for art, for religion, for the way he treated people, for "Street Legal." My father cherished Bob not so much for what he represented or what he endorsed -- or even for his music -- but for his heart and that he would follow it, stay true to it. That's what mattered.

And even though the late '80s were indeed Bob's darkest hours -- listen to "Knocked Out Loaded" and it seems as if he couldn't even get a good drum sound in those days -- my father saw Bob as a scratch-and-win-ticket sort of role model: If he scratched at the right places, steamed off some of the bad parts, he might even make a 13-year-old Tears for Fears fan aware of this man's almost all-encompassing (if, for the moment, fading) relevance to everyday life.

So that's what he did. Every Saturday and Sunday night after dinner, while my stepmother Anne Marie cleaned up, my father would take me into the living room, sit me down on the couch and take me through the finer points of even "Desire" and "Infidels" (which I still think is utterly terrible), all the way back to his boot of "The Gaslight Tapes." Hour after hour of discussions about the long, ugly sagas of Bob and Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Bob and Carla Rotolo -- his ex-girlfriend's sister, for whom "Ballad in Plain D" was written -- and so on, delivered as Gnostic gospels, an alternate history of the '60s as a back-stabbing melee of drugs and misunderstanding.

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