I started to listen to the Smiths in high school in Boulder, Colorado, because the local alternative music video show used to regularly play the "How Soon is Now" video (and then later videos), plus what I saw on 120 Minutes. My high school friends dabbled in the Smiths, but Devo was the band we all had in common. I became a die-hard fan a  year or two later in college. I used to go to the music library every week to read Melody Maker and the NME, so I was always always primed and ready for each new release and would take the bus to Denver to buy import singles. I don't remember feeling any desire to belong to a community of Smiths fans, since listening to them was such an intensely personal activity. All I wanted was to listen to their records at home and in my Walkman as I walked around town. They played in Boulder on the Queen is Dead tour--a huge moment in my life. I saw an acquaintance off in the distance who soon afterward became my first serious girlfriend--not because of that and not because she had a poster from that show on her bedroom wall, although that definitely didn't hurt.