Galloping through 20-some years of drooling fandom, John Sellers' memoir rises out of the primitive urge that drives us to scratch band names on our eighth-grade science notebooks. Compelling at 13, this behavior becomes atavistic when it approaches the grandfatherly age of 40.

The son of an English teacher and a man who sings along to every Bob Dylan song while "occasionally puffing on a Carleton 100 or sucking at the Jar of Death . . . a lukewarm admixture of Sanka, curdled milk, diet cola and Carlo Rossi Chablis," Sellers is enchanted by one band after another. From the ordinary pop music loves of Journey, Queen and - gasp - Duran Duran, grows the man who plunges into obsessions with Joy Division, New Order, the Smiths and Pavement, and who sees a mighty powerful trinity of Ordinary Man, Extraordinary Amounts of Beer and Really Short Songs with Nonsequitur Lyrics in the Ohio band Guided By Voices (GBV). What causes these transformations? MTV, the unbeatable influences of cool chicks and alcohol.

This is musical navel-gazing at its geeky best, complete with the entire essay on his favorite rock group written at age 12 (who keeps this stuff?); a record review by the author as a junior at the University of Michigan (and its sidebar commentary); and a section of appendices packed with compelling information like "Top Nine Worst Names of Alternative Bands I Used to Sort of Like" and the evanescent Formula, an equation devised to perfectly rank your musical preferences: "x =.65 (quality of music) + .25 (band's image) + .10 (X factor) [Note: x = value of band]."

Then there are the footnotes. When parentheses simply aren't enough. Sellers completely strafes the book with them. Sometimes they are snide commentary on the text. Sometimes they provide innocuous, yet seemingly important personal facts about John Sellers and his life: "In Michigan, the word is "pop." So I'd run downstairs to the pop machine." Sometimes they function as quasi-academic discourses on subjects like the veejay lineup of 120 Minutes or the hotness of Harriet Wheeler of the Sundays. Quite often they are infinitely more interesting than the rest of the narrative, as in the 11-page footnote describing the 12-plus hours Sellers spent commemorating the suicide of Joy Division's Ian Curtis. In one footnote, Sellers states, "You should know that the footnote gimmick used in this book is an homage to my all-time favorite book, The Mezzanine. You should also know that Baker wielded footnotes far more adeptly; I'm just a remora trying to hitch a ride."

This fever-pitch setup never pays off in the tale of the ultimate obsession with GBV. Although the section begins with a splendid description of driving while rocking ("a move of my head I'll refer to as the Emphatic Chicken") and offers the quintessential timeline of the rise and fall of an alternative rock band (no footnotes here, please; go directly to page 136), it flounders with eagerness. On his way to an actual meeting with Bob Pollard, the genius behind GBV, Sellers muses, "What I'm getting at is that it's completely inspiring that a force like Pollard could spring up in a place like where I'm from. That comforting thought, brought on by the strip-mall sprawl of the outskirts of Dayton, made me feel closer to Pollard than ever before."

Say, isn't it nice when our heroes are just like us, only better?

Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life, By John Sellers, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007, 215 pages.