One early evening in the fall of 1981, I put on the leather jacket I had worked all summer bagging groceries to buy, met up with the two other punks in my suburban New Jersey high school, and got on a bus headed into New York City. I was excited and nervous. It was my first trip to CBGB, the infamous incubator of punk rock itself. Serious business.

The bill that night was a handful of young bands playing a much faster, tougher variant of the sound mapped out by the music's mid-'70s pioneers, a new style with a new name: hardcore punk. The headliner? A recently transplanted quartet from Washington, DC, who my buddies and I were only slightly familiar with—the Bad Brains.

If you never made it to the now-gone landmark, CBGB was a narrow, dark, dank sweatbox that stank of stale beer, urine, and marijuana resin. Its walls were encrusted with layer upon layer of stickers, gig flyers, and spray-painted and magic-markered graffiti. Its floors were sticky, its door people and bartenders nonsmiling, unfeeling seen-it-alls who had absolutely zero time for peach-fuzzed corndogs like me and my companions. And it had the best sound system of any rock club in the city: towering, custom-built speaker stacks that pumped out tsunamis of bone-crushing decibels. I fell in love with the place.

After sets by three or four enjoyable but very much of-the-time bands, the crucial moment arrived. The Bad Brains' guitarist, followed by the likewise dreadlocked drummer and bassist, walked on stage, plugged in, and tested his amp with one mighty, room-rattling E chord. I will never forget that chord. It told me that everything I thought about rock 'n' roll was about to change. Very soon.

The singer, a wiry, gap-toothed dude with the wildest dreads of the bunch sauntered on like a panther. The band eased into a jazzy flourish more like something from a hotel lounge than a punk club. Smiling and greeting his "friends," he flopped like a rag doll into the audience, which passed him around and returned him gently to the bandstand.

Then it all stopped.

The drummer went into a tight roll on his snare, picking up speed like a coin falling on a concrete floor. He cut it off—cold. And, then, with no cue or count-in, the Universe exploded.

A wave of frenetic, mountain-plowing locomotion engulfed me. Bodies were immediately flying everywhere, careening off the walls and one another as the monolithic roar dominated everything. And, in the middle of it all, the tornado in the eye of the hurricane, was the whirling, possessed vocalist, snarling, shrieking, and moaning, with the fiery eyes of a preacher. I have seen many great live rock 'n' roll bands in the nearly 25 years since that night. But none of them have been able to touch 1980s Bad Brains. Not even close.

Besides being an all-black band in an overwhelmingly white scene, there have always been several other aspects setting the group apart: the superhuman velocity of their sound; the jaw-dropping precision of their musicianship; the way they pepper their raging sets with consoling reggae. But there's also something else, something far bigger, at work. The Bad Brains are punk mystics. It's one of those things that can be felt much easier than explained, but the deeply spiritual art of this quartet burns with an inner mounting flame more common to the music of Ravi Shankar, John Coltrane, or Native American elders than with rock 'n' roll.

Much of this magic fire can be linked directly to an unlikely source: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The book is an early self-help classic that the band—guitarist Dr. Know (aka Gary Miller), bassist Daryl Jenifer, drummer Earl Hudson, and vocalist H.R. (aka Paul Hudson, Earl's brother; his initials have stood for both Huntin' Rod and Human Rights)—took as its bible, substituting goals of artistic and personal success for the work's stated aim of guiding readers to monetary wealth. Central to Hill's teachings is the concept of Positive Mental Attitude—or PMA—a philosophy that has kept the band's eyes on the prize through thick and thin throughout its nearly three decades.

"PMA has helped us maintain the conviction of what we intended to do when we started out," says Jenifer. "Which was to be the greatest punk rock band of all."