Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (2 page)

Renée loved to
do
things. That was mysterious to me, since I was more comfortable talking about things and never doing them. She liked passion. She liked adventure. I cowered from passion and talked myself out of adventure. Before I met her, I was just another hermit wolfboy, scared of life, hiding in my room with my records and my fanzines. One of Renée’s friends asked her, “Does your boyfriend wear glasses?” She said, “No, he wears a Walkman.” I was a wallflower who planned to stay that way, who never imagined anybody else to be. Suddenly, I got all tangled up in this girl’s noisy, juicy, sparkly life. Without her, I didn’t want to do anything, except keep being good at Renée. You know the story about Colonel Tom Parker, after Elvis died? The Colonel said, “Hell, I’ll keep right on managing him.” That’s how I felt. Every tree in the woods, every car that passed me on the road, every song on the radio, all seemed to be Gloria Grahame at the end of
The Big Heat
, asking the same question: “What was your wife like?” It was the only conversation I was interested in.

Our friend Suzle told me her sister didn’t understand—she always thought Suzle had one friend named “Robin Renée.” How did Robin Renée turn into Rob and Renée, two different people?

The whole world got cheated out of Renée. I got cheated less than anybody, since I got more of her than anybody. But still, I wanted more of her. I wanted to be her guy forever and ever. I always pictured us growing old together, like William Holden and Ernest Borgnine in
The Wild Bunch
, side by side in our sleeping bags, drinking coffee and planning the next payroll heist. We only got five years. On our fifth anniversary, we drove out to Afton Mountain and checked into a motel. We got righteously wasted and blasted David Bowie’s “Five Years” over and over. It’s a song about how the world is going to end in five years, which forces everybody to seize the freedom to do whatever they want, to act out their craziest desires and devour the moment and not even think about the future.

“Five years!” we screamed in unison. “That’s
aaaooowwwlll
we got!”

It
was
all we got. That was a good night. There were a lot of good nights. We got more of those than we had any right to expect, five years’ worth, but I wanted more, anyway.

Another L7 song, “Packin’ a Rod.” It’s a cover of an old L.A. hardcore punk anthem—Renée could have told you who did the original version, but I can’t. And already we’re at the end of side one. Eject. Flip it.

It’s too late to sleep anyway. The coffee’s gone cold, so I just heat up another pot. Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I’m a mix tape, a cassette that’s been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.

Press play.

First song, side two: R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon.” Did Renée ever make a mix tape without R.E.M.? A whole generation of southern girls, raised on the promise of Michael Stipe.

I now get scared of forgetting anything about Renée, even the tiniest detail, even the bands on this tape I can’t stand—if she touched them, I want to hear her fingerprints. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night, my heart pounding, trying to remember: What was Renée’s shoe size? What color were her eyes? What was her birthday, her grandparents’ first names, that Willie Nelson song we heard on the radio in Atlanta? The memory comes back, hours or days later. It always comes back. But in the moment, I panic. I’m positive it’s gone for good. I’m shaking from that sensation now, trying to remember some of this music. Nothing connects to the moment like music. I count on the music to bring me back—or, more precisely, to bring her forward.

There are some songs on this tape that nobody else on the planet remembers. I guarantee it. Like the Grenadine song “In a World Without Heroes.” Grenadine wasn’t even a real band—just a goofball side project. As far as we were concerned, though, this was easily the finest pseudo-Bowie limp-wristed fuzz-guitar indie-boy girl-worship ballad of 1992. We never convinced anyone else to agree. Not even our so-called friends would lie to us about this one.

Nobody ever liked it except me and Renée, and now she’s gone, which means nobody remembers it. Not even the guy who wrote it. I know that for a fact, because Mark Robinson played a solo show at Tokyo Rose a few years later. When he asked for requests, we screamed for “In a World Without Heroes.” He just stared and shook his head. A few songs later, with a little more liquid courage in us, we screamed for it again. He stopped asking for requests. So it’s official:
nobody
likes this song.

A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.

Mary Chapin Carpenter. A big country-radio hit at the time. Wasn’t she the one who wore leg-warmers?

The country singers understand. It’s always that one song that gets you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you. Country singers are always twanging about that number on the jukebox they can’t stand to hear you play, the one with the memories. If you’re George Jones, it’s 4-0-3-3. If you’re Olivia Newton-John, it’s B-17. If you’re Johnny Paycheck, you can’t stop yourself from going back to the bar where they play that song over and over, where they have a whole jukebox full of those songs. Johnny Paycheck called it “The Meanest Jukebox in Town.”

Gangsters understand, too. In the old gangster movies, you’re always running away to a new town, somewhere they won’t know your mug shot. You can bury the dirty deeds of your past. Except the song follows you. In
Detour
, it’s “I Can’t Believe You’re in Love with Me.” The killer hears it on the truck-stop jukebox, and he realizes there’s no escape from the girl. In
Gilda
, it’s “Put the Blame on Mame.” In
Dark Passage
, it’s “Too Marvelous for Words.” Barbara Stanwyck in
Clash by Night,
she’s so cool and tough and unflappable, until she goes to a bar and gets jumped by a song on the jukebox, “I Hear a Rhapsody.” She starts to ramble about a husband who died, and a small town where she used to sell sheet music. She’s not so tough now. You can’t get away from the meanest jukebox in town.

Pavement again. “Texas Never Whispers.” One of our favorites. The tape creaks a little. I know it must be getting near the end.

I’ve been playing
Rumblefish
all night. By now, I know all the tunes. I’m writing down their titles, so I won’t forget. I’m still staring out the window, but the sun won’t rise for another couple of hours. The city lights are blinking through the trees of McCarren Park. The house across the street has a stuffed wooden owl whose head spins around every fifteen minutes, which is extremely annoying. The city is full of adventure, just a couple of subway stops away. But I’m not going anywhere.

We met on September 17, 1989. We got married on July 13,1991. We were married for five years and ten months. Renée died on May 11, 1997, very suddenly and unexpectedly, at home with me, of a pulmonary embolism. She was thirty-one. She’s buried in Pulaski County, Virginia, on the side of a hill, next to the Wal-Mart.

As soon as Side Two cuts off, right in the middle of a terrible Belly song, I sit there and wait for the final
ca-chunka
. Then I flip the tape and press play again. The first song is Pavement’s “Shoot the Singer,” which I just heard an hour ago. I have some unfinished business with these tunes. I’m going to be up for a while. Renée’s not done with me yet.

hey jude

APRIL 1979

O
ne night when I was twelve,
my dad and I went out to Howard Johnson’s for hot chocolate. The jukebox in the booth offered two songs for a quarter, so we each picked one. I punched up my latest fave, Toto’s “Hold the Line.” My dad picked something I’d never heard before called “Duke of Earl,” and he got real excited as that “duke, duke, duke” started bleating out of the speakers. I rolled my eyes as he sang along, but I thought to myself, Well this
is
kind of better than “Hold the Line.”

As my Dad and I sat around the house one Saturday afternoon, playing Beatles records, we started batting around the idea that it was theoretically possible to loop a version of “Hey Jude” long enough to fill up an entire cassette. All we had to do was press pause and lift the needle every once in a while, and fiddle with the volume knobs. A few hours later, we had a ninety-minute tape of “na na nas,” along with many “yeah yeah yeahs” and a few “Judy Judy Judy wows.” We listened to the playback, and I could not believe what we had accomplished. This was a new Beatles song that hadn’t existed before. It was Something New, as the Beatles would say. The difference between Yesterday . . . and Today. My dad and I had built model airplanes together, gone to Red Sox games. But listening to this tape, I knew it was our greatest hit. Paul McCartney couldn’t have been more proud after writing the actual song.

I listen to
Hey Jude
now, and I think two things: I never want to hear this song again, and in 1979, my dad was around the age I am now, and given a Saturday afternoon he could have spent any way he pleased, he chose to spend it with his twelve-year-old son, making this ridiculous little tape. He probably forgot about it the next day. But I didn’t.

There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one.

The Party Tape

Par-tay! You know what that means—hours to create the perfect party tape, plus ten minutes to clean the house and pour all the two-thirds-empty liquor bottles into a bowl of Crystal Light and call it Orange Lotus Surprise Blossom. Then, after the party’s over, you hold on to the tape. You never know when you might get a call, saying, “Dude, party tonight! Bring a tape!” You always make sure to keep a dance tape or two handy in your room, JUST IN CASE, because YOU NEVER KNOW, the same way Cosmo girls keep a spare bottle of bubbly in the fridge. A few friends are over having drinks, a song comes on, a couple girls start to dance, and you don’t want it to fizzle out, do you? One summer in Charlottesville, I had these upstairs neighbors, Wally and Drew, whose mix tapes were neurobiologically engineered to get their girlfriends to make out with each other. I saw it happen. The tape goes in, Jeff Buckley moans one of his ten-minute thingies, then his falsetto fades into the guitar intro of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” and bam—their girlfriends are lap-dancing each other like brazen little colts. Those guys knew how to make a party tape.

I Want You

Always a great reason to make a tape.

We’re Doing It? Awesome!

An even better reason to make a tape. This is when you start trading tapes of songs like Shalamar’s “Dancing in the Sheets” or the Staple Singers’ “Let’s Do It Again” or My Bloody Valentine’s “Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside).” Sad, really. I have reason to believe I was once dumped for giving a girl a tape with one of my favorite mushy ’80s R&B ballads, Gregory Abbott’s “Shake You Down.” Never tried that again. These tapes are one of the primary perks of being in a relationship, along with the free haircuts. Some couples stop making each other tapes—I have no idea what happens to them.

You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell
We’re Going to Be Friends

You just met somebody. You’re talking about the songs you like. Oh, yeah, that band! Ever hear this band? You would
love
this song. I’ll make you a tape! Frequently confused with the “I Want You” tape by the giving or receiving party, resulting in hijinks and hilarity all around.

You Broke My Heart and Made Me Cry and Here Are Twenty or Thirty Songs About It

The best ever was the “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” mix, which my friend Heather’s boyfriend Charles made while they were going through what is spinelessly referred to as a “transitional period.” It began with the Violent Femmes’ “Please Please Please Do Not Go,” and then it got desperate—lovelorn boys begging for more punishment: Elvis Costello’s “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used To Do)?”, The English Beat’s “Hands Off She’s Mine,” Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer.” It worked, though—it got them back together. Heather kept playing it for all her friends, right in front of Charles; she was proud she could put him through that kind of misery, and I guess he was proud, too. Twenty years later, they’re living in Utah, married, with four kids who owe their
lives
to this tape. Scary.

The Road Trip

My friend Jane came to visit me in Boston the year after college, when she was living in Southern California. She wanted me to drive her around town all night, so she made a tape for the occasion. Every song got permanently fried into my brain. We hit the Southeast Expressway to Van Morrison’s “Friday’s Child.” We cruised Castle Island to Peter Green’s “Man of the World.” We sang along to the Rolling Stones’ “Ventilator Blues,” Muddy Waters’s “Stuff You Gotta Watch,” the Jam’s “Life Through a Window,” and so many others. We drove all night, spinning that tape through Dorchester and Southie and Watertown and JP. When the sun was coming up, we tossed the tape out the window. I haven’t seen Jane in years, but now I hang out at a bar in Brooklyn called Daddy’s, where they have “Friday’s Child” on the jukebox. Every time I’m there playing the Elvis pinball machine, I hit “Friday’s Child,” number 9317, and send it out to a faraway friend, wherever she is.

No Hard Feelings, Babe

Renée always swore her best friend in high school would break up with girls by taping “Free Bird” for them. A guy I knew in college dumped his ladies by taping Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” for them. In college I once thought I was breaking up with a girl by giving her a tape that began with Roxy Music’s “The Thrill of It All.” It took a few days for me to realize that she had no idea we were broken up, which I guess means it didn’t work. Why do people do this? Asshologists, please advise.

I Hate This Fucking Job

You know how sometimes you’re reading the paper with a boysenberry muffin and an iced soy cran-mocha colada and you notice the kids behind the counter screaming along with Fear’s “Fresh Flesh” or Drunks with Guns’ “Blood Bath”? Just their special way of reminding you that
they hate this fucking job
.

The Radio Tape

Back when people listened to the radio, you kept a tape handy in your boombox at all times so you could capture the hot new hits of the week. The intro would always get cut off, and the DJ would chatter over the end. You also ended up with static, commercials, and jingles, but all that noise just added to the field-recording verisimilitude. The radio tape puts you right back in the original time and place when you first heard the songs. You are
there
, my friend. A girl I knew once had a radio tape with “Rock Me Amadeus” five or six times on each side; she just pressed record every time she heard it.

The Walking Tape

Some people like to make workout tapes and take them to the gym, but I can’t fathom why. Any music I hear in a gym is ruined forever. I do like to take a lot of walks, though, which require long, mumble-trance guitar songs. Any time I hear the Byrds or Buffalo Springfield, I remember one spring day in Charlottesville when I accidentally climbed Dudley Mountain on the outskirts of town—I didn’t know it was a mountain until I was on top of it, and the only way off was to walk back down. I had only one tape in my Walkman, so I listened to it continuously, end to end, for about ten hours. The opening strum of the Byrds’ “What’s Happening” still makes my legs ache.

There are lots more
where these came from. The drug tape. The commute tape. The dishes tape. The shower tape. The collection of good songs from bad albums you don’t ever want to play again. The greatest hits of your significant other’s record pile, the night before you break up. There are millions of songs in the world, and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan.

I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history. You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new. You go through an artist’s entire career, zero in on that one moment that makes you want to jump and dance and smoke bats and bite the heads off drugs. And then you play that one moment over and over.

A mix tape steals these moments from all over the musical cosmos, and splices them into a whole new groove.

Walter Benjamin, in his prescient 1923 essay “One Way Street,” said a book was an outdated means of communication between two boxes of index cards. One professor goes through books, looking for tasty bits he can copy onto index cards. Then he types his index cards up into a book, so other professors can go through it and copy tasty bits onto their own index cards. Benjamin’s joke was: Why not just sell the index cards? I guess that’s why we trade mix tapes. We music fans love our classic albums, our seamless masterpieces, our
Blonde on Blonde
s and our
Talking Book
s. But we love to pluck songs off those albums and mix them up with other songs, plunging them back into the rest of the manic slipstream of rock and roll. I’d rather hear the Beatles’ “Getting Better” on a mix tape than on
Sgt. Pepper
any day. I’d rather hear a Frank Sinatra song between Run-DMC and Bananarama than between two other Frank Sinatra songs. When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.

Most mix tapes are CDs now, yet people still call them mix tapes. The technology changes, but the spirit is the same. I can load up my iPod with weeks’ worth of music and set it on shuffle to play a different mix every time. I can borrow somebody else’s iPod and pack it with songs I think they’d like. I can talk to a friend on the phone, mention a couple of songs, download them on LimeWire while we’re talking, and listen together. The hip-hop world now thrives on mix tapes, with artists circulating their rhymes on the street via bootleg CDs. They’re never technically tapes, but they’re always called mix tapes anyway, just because tapes are always cool.

It’s a fundamental human need to pass music around, and however the technology evolves, the music keeps moving. Renée’s dad, Buddy, has a file on his hard drive that his cousin Jerry e-mailed to him. It’s reel-to-reel tapes from his parents’ house back in West Virginia, from the 1950s, with Papaw playing guitar and the kids harmonizing. Back then they would sit around and sing all night. Buddy and his brothers sang The Sons of the Pioneers’ “Cool Water.” Mamaw would always sing her favorite, Hank Snow’s “Wedding Bells.” Papaw would serenade Mamaw with some of the old Merle Travis songs, like “Fat Gal” and “I Like My Chicken Fryin’ Size.” Renée told me about these nights when she was a little girl, the long summer nights when she would lie on the floor in her grandparents’ house and listen to her aunt and uncles sing these ancient songs. She never got to hear any of these home recordings, though, because by the 1970s nobody had reel-to-reel players anymore, so they were sitting around unheard. After she died, Cousin Jerry found the old tapes, digitized them, and e-mailed them around. Buddy can now sit at his computer and go back to a shack in West Virginia, listening to his father sing “So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed” to his mother.

I listen to music practically every waking hour. I’m a writer for
Rolling Stone
, which means my typical workday is going to hear bands play and listening to records. I have lived the absurd life of a rock journalist. I have seen Aerosmith call room service to order incense, and I’ve seen them deal with a ringing hotel-room phone by ripping it out of the wall. I have listened to Britney Spears freak out in the back of a limo on her cell phone. I was in an elevator with Madonna once. I have eaten french fries on the tour bus with Linkin Park, shared hangover cures with Ryan Adams, debated Dylan lyrics with Richard Gere, sung karaoke with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I have smoked pot at the SoHo Grand Hotel with Massive Attack (I won’t be doing that again—damn, those guys had some strong pot). On MTV, Carson Daly introduced me as “the man who knows music the way the Naked Chef knows beef stroganoff,” and although I remain unsure of what he meant by that, I feel strongly that it was a compliment. I’ve watched myself on VH1, talking about filthy Frankie Goes to Hollywood lyrics, in front of my mom—that sucked. Billy Corgan and Scott Weiland have denounced me. Garbage’s Shirley Manson criticized my haircut. She was right, too—that haircut was crap. Did I mention I was in an elevator with Madonna once?

I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I’m always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with—nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.