Love Is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

  The only reason I ran for student council was so I’d get to be on the social activities committee, which meant planning the only part of the social activities I really cared about: the music. We got three dances that year, and I got the plum job of making the dance tapes.

  It went without saying that I had to include “Free Bird” and “Stairway to Heaven.” The other selections were mine. As you can see from the playlist above, I knew school dances about as well as I knew tantric sex. Roller Boogie holds some of the least danceable grooves ever passed off in the name of getting down. Jesus H. Christ on ice and Mary in the penalty box! Why did I put Boston’s “Don’t Look Back” on a dance tape? Why did I think anybody would shake ass to ELO? Why was I not tarred and feathered by my classmates by the time the third J. Geils Band song came on?

  But hey, I was the only kid who wanted the job, and I took it seriously. I borrowed records from people at school, kids who ordinarily would have sooner trusted me with their toothbrushes, retainers, and headgear than with their records. I immersed myself in the glorious masterpieces of the seventies, such as side one of the first Boston album, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, and side two of the first Boston album. I came to regard the J. Geils Band’s second live album as vastly inferior to the first. I wondered what the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven” meant.

  I had never made out, smoked, drank, broken a law, set fire to a car, vandalized a cemetery, or worn socks that matched. But I had the passion for rock and roll; I was a regular Dr. Johnny Fever in the body of a Les Nessman. Nobody could truly understand my quest to rock—except maybe Annie, my favorite Solid Gold dancer. I was totally clueless about social interaction, and completely scared of girls. All I knew was that music was going to make girls fall in love with me.

  So I approached my beatmaster duties with the same reverence I brought to my Sundays as an altar boy serving Mass. I approached my stereo sanctuary and genuflected. I lifted each vinyl wafer to the heavens. I unveiled the cassette ostentorium: “Take this, all of you, and rock. This is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you, and for all who rock, so that rock may be worshiped and glorified.”

  Heidi From Algebra pulled me aside in the hallway and handed me her copy of the Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks. She didn’t even crack a smile. “‘Wild Horses,’” she told me. “It’s a slow dance. The girls like it.” She wouldn’t let go of the record until I gave her a “Wild Horses” guarantee, and then she disappeared down the hall. It was the only conversation we ever had.

  “Rock, I am not worthy to receive you. But only say the word, and I shall be healed.”

  “Nobody cares about the music at these things, you know,” my dad told me. “They go to meet girls.” I chuckled. Oh, Dad, you are so out of it.

  The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics, as in: “Girl, you really got me goin’, I don’t know who you’re blowin’,” or “Eleanor Rigby, blowing the groom in a church where a wedding has been,” or “Something in the way she blows me,” or “And though she was born a long, long time ago, your mother should blow.” And blow on.

  I listened to rock station WCOZ in eighth grade, and slept under a WCOZ poster that depicted a giant space robot who used a light saber to slash “94.5 FM” into the very fabric of the galaxy. I had rock-and-roll parents, who played the Famous Jim Sands Oldies show on WBZ all the time. They used to slow-dance in the kitchen to songs like “In the Still of the Nite.” They watched Happy Days with us and explained that the Fonz was not really so cool because he liked Frankie Avalon. In our house, the radio was always on. Even our babysitter Regina, a crazy old Irish lady from Dorchester, used to chain-smoke in the kitchen and sing along with Dionne Warwick at the top of her tarry lungs, when she wasn’t offering my sisters dating advice such as “Never give ’em anything for free.”

  I had three little sisters—Ann, Tracey, and Caroline—and we were all devoted to our radios. We bought our first record together, chipping in two bucks apiece and ordering The Best of the Monkees off of TV. I adored the Monkees, but I was terrified of Mickey Dolenz. For some reason, I got the notion in my head that Mickey Dolenz was what happened if you smoked pot—you made screwy faces, you talked too loud, you bugged everybody. I was convinced Mickey got this way from drugs, which also explained his dashiki—he was obviously a nice Irish boy gone wrong. I suspect that over the course of my life, my chemical experimentation has been severely curtailed by the specter of Mickey Dolenz.

  Ann and Tracey were on the basketball team, so they learned cool dances to go with disco tunes like “It’s Raining Men” and “We Are Family.” I loved those disco hits, but I knew enough to keep this a secret in front of other guys. My sisters were also into Rick Springfield. Every day after school, I’d watch General Hospital with them to see if Rick was finally going to make some sharin’-the-night-together magic with Bobbie Spencer. One night, Mom and Dad took Tracey and her friends to see Rick Springfield at the Providence Civic Center. On the way out of the parking lot, they got behind a bus that everybody agreed had to be Rick Springfield’s tour bus. My dad tailed the bus all the way up I-95 to Boston, with four girls screaming in the backseat. They lost him on the Southeast Expressway, right near the Chinatown exit, but Dad drove around to all the downtown hotels so the girls could barge into the lobbies and ask for Mr. Springfield. To this day, Tracey’s computer password is MUS-134, Rick’s license plate.

  I always envied my friends who had older siblings who could guide them through the teenage wasteland. They got a head start. My next-door neighbor Jeff had an older brother, Barry, and an older sister, Susan. I would often sit in the tree in our front yard and breathe in their aura. Every weekend, Barry wore his T-shirt with the cover of Boston’s first album, and washed his Trans Am in the driveway while cranking “Peace of Mind.” He had a basement room with black lightbulbs, guitars, and a piranha. Some afternoons, he’d let us watch the piranha eat goldfish. He also had a girlfriend named Nancy, who he wouldn’t let us watch at all.

  Susan was a real seventies girl, blond feathered hair and all, one braid dangling down the side of her face. Her CB-radio handle was Whammer Jammer, after a J. Geils Band song. Once I was in the tree while she was on the porch with a boy. I was hoping she didn’t see me, but she came over to talk. She said, “You won’t tell my mom I was smoking, will you?” I said, Of course not. She kissed me on the cheek and said, “You’re a doll.” She was more than a woman to me.

  Every day Susan came home after school and followed the same ritual: She opened her bedroom window and played one or both of her favorite albums, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (side two only) and Boz Scaggs’s Silk Degrees (side one only). Sometimes, she would just play her favorite songs. She would play Boz Scaggs’s “Georgia” for hours, lifting the needle over and over. If Susan wasn’t in the mood for “Georgia,” she would play the second half of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain,” starting with the bass solo and then going into the “Chaaa-yaaay-yaaain!” chant. I would sit in my tree, gazing up at Susan’s window and trying to imagine her intense communion with the music and what it must feel like inside her soul at such moments.

  When you’re a little kid, you’re fascinated by the mystery of what the big kids do, and for me these mysteries were associated with music. The music I loved kept scaring the bejeezus out of me, with the nebulous concepts of “sex” and “drugs.” I’d sit in the basement with Eddie and Jimmy Durfer, listening to records like Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell or Kiss’s Alive II, trying to figure out the plots. The music was full of danger. Every note evoked the terror of the don’t-take-drugs paperbacks I’d read at school, like Go Ask Alice (“Dear diary, the squirrels are eating my face again”) or That Was Then, This Is Now (“The colors screamed at me! Purple screamed loudest!”). At school, we studied Rush’s 2
112 and Lord of the Rings. In the cafeteria, I looked anxiously at my chocolate milk and recalled how Alice got dosed at the sleepover party. Was somebody playing “button, button, who’s got the button” with our lunches? Would my teacher do such a thing? Why not? She was into Lord of the Rings. I was just one chocolate-milk mustache away from slipping into a hellhole of bare feet and crash pads and diary entries like “another day, another blowjob” until my inevitable fatal pot overdose.

  But I couldn’t wait for the eighth-grade dance—this was the culmination of my years of obsession with rockness. I spent days sweating over those dance tapes.

  “Hey, I like this one,” my mom said. “We will, we will rock you! That’s a catchy song!”

  I erased “We Will Rock You.”

  The night of the dance, the whole class gathered in Strauss Hall. The girls looked very cool over on their side of the room, a swirl of velour and Love’s Baby Soft. The boys did not look so cool. Every time a rocking song came on, the girls would sit down. It was enough to make you doubt their commitment to rockness. When the boys busted out the air guitar, the girls parked the Calvin Klein labels on their jeans firmly on the bench. In fact, the harder the boys rocked, the farther away the girls drifted. That night, I learned the hard way: If the girls keep dancing, everybody’s happy. If the girls don’t dance, nobody’s happy.

  The girls got hot for “Pop Muzik” and “Heart of Glass” and “Bad Girls.” The boys stood around and waited for rock anthems so we could untuck our shirts and chant the lyrics to “Hot Blooded,” which by some strange coincidence were the same as the title. But all the majesty of rock could not impress these girls; it failed to move their stony hearts despite the cathedral-like grandeur of Tom Scholz’s guitar solo in the second movement of Boston’s “Don’t Look Back.” Asking a classmate to dance was scary enough when the song was a girl-pleaser. But when the song involved acoustic guitars and elaborate metaphors about bustles in hedgerows? Out of the question! Girls did not care whether a dance tape had the live version of “Carry On Wayward Son” or the studio version. In fact, they did not want to hear “Carry On Wayward Son” at all. What was wrong with these people?

  It was a painful night, but I got the message: Let the dancing girls dance. That’s the one ironclad rule of pop muzik, whether in New York, London, Paris, or Munich, and I’m just lucky I learned it so early. I had always been taught to fear disco, and to fear the disco inside me. But by the second verse of “Bad Girls,” it was obvious everything I knew was wrong. “Toot toot, beep beep” was meaningful on a much deeper level than I could have fathomed.

  For me, this was a humbling lesson, as well as my introduction to the principle of “bitch power,” as first elucidated by the great twentieth-century philosopher Rick James. Bitch power blew my mind. Rick explained it all in an issue of Creem magazine that I carried around in my backpack. According to Rick James:

  It’s this kind of syndrome—where if a guy sees his girlfriend likin’ somebody, that’s called ‘bitch power.’ Like Elvis Presley was hated by men, hated, ’cause he had bitch power. Teddy Pendergrass has bitch power. I just found out that I have a little bitch power. But beyond bitch power, I have something else, that men like—and that’s the truth, and the down-to-earth shit, OK? So men don’t mind bringin’ their women to see me, ’cause I have bitch power but it’s in another way.

  If Rick is to be trusted—and he always is—bitch power is the juice, the sweat, the blood that keeps pop music going. Rick James helped me understand the lesson of the eighth-grade dance: Bitch power rules the world. If the girls don’t like the music, they sit down and stop the show. You gotta have a crowd if you wanna have a show. And the girls are the show. We’re talking absolute monarchy, with no rules of succession. Bitch power. She must be obeyed. She must be feared.

  As a thirteen-year-old boy, I had plenty of reasons to fear bitch power. But when she came knocking, I had no choice. I bowed and worshiped. Toot toot. Beep beep. But I have to admit, I have no regrets about including the live version of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.” I picked the song because it was a slow dance, but I picked the live version because Steven Tyler screams the word “motherfucker” in the second verse (“all the things you do, motherfucker, come back to yooouuuuu!”), and that was just so cool. For that one line, I cranked the volume up into the red, hoping it would rile the chaperoning math teachers, not realizing that they were way too stoned to notice. I also knew that “Dream On” came on right after “Off the Wall,” and I decided to exploit this inside knowledge. I innocently chose that moment to ask the beautiful Sarah Farrah Field Hockey to dance, before she or anybody else realized it was Aerosmith slow-dance time. This is one of the most daring things I did in my entire life. But I paid the price. As I held loosely to the long-pined-for waistline of Sarah Farrah Field Hockey and frantically tried to hide my boner, my friends were making faces at me behind her back, trying to make me giggle. While Steven Tyler was dreaming on until his dreams came true, Sarah Farrah Field Hockey was smirking, “What’s so funny?” The horror. The horror.

  tape 635

  JUNE 1980

  Camp Don Bosco in East Barrington, New Hampshire, was a Catholic summer camp for boys aged eight to fifteen, run by priests and brothers of the Salesian Order. I was a camper there in the summers of 1980 and 1981. It was in the middle of a pine forest four hours north of Boston, with a lake and grassy dells, far from any other human dwelling. St. John Bosco (1815–1888) was an Italian priest, canonized in 1934, who founded the Salesian Order to bring the gospel to destitute boys.

  Almost all the campers were Italian kids from East Boston who also attended Salesian vocational schools. Others, including me, were from the suburbs or other parts of New England. A tiny minority were local country boys who kept to themselves. There were three cabins: St. Pat’s for little kids; Savio for medium kids; Magone for us big kids.

  Brother Larry, in charge of Magone, was a gentle soul, always willing to discuss religious problems at the drop of a hat. He walked around for an hour every night after lights-out to make sure nobody was committing self-pollution. He taught me to shoot a rifle; I still have a couple of NRA “Advanced Marksman” certificates in my parents’ attic.

  Brother Jim was a biker who’d done time. He was in charge of Savio cabin, which meant scaring the shit out of any Magone kids who tried to pick on Savio kids. There was a rumor he had a switchblade on him.

  Brother Jim loved to talk about how Jesus wasn’t a pussy.

  “You see the guy crucified up there?” he yelled. “You see him? Are his hands closed? NO! Is he making a fist? NO! What does that mean to you?”

  We sat there, cowering.

  “It means something to me.”

  More cowering.

  “It means he could have just gotten down off the cross anytime he liked, and come down and WASTED all those Roman gladiator motherfuckers. But he kept his hands OPEN! He let it go! For YOU! And you sit here and look at that dead guy up there and you don’t even notice!”

  Brother Jim was seriously cool.

  Brother Dave, the folksinger, wore a Jesus beard and sandals. At Mass, he strummed an acoustic guitar and sang his original compositions, like “Dare to Be Different.” There was a vague sense that the other brothers did not fully accept him as an equal.

  Brother Al was a jovial Polish guy with a Gabe Kaplan mustache. He once literally washed out a kid’s mouth with soap. I saw it happen. Crandall took the Lord’s name in vain, and Brother Al flew off the handle and dragged him to the sink at the back of the cabin with a bar of Irish Spring.

  Salesians have their own icons and folklore—when they get mad, they yell, “Mother Cabrini!” They were always telling magical tales about Don Bosco, who had visions, and St. Dominic Savio, a fifteen-year-old who died of consumption because he was sleeping naked to catch cold and do penance for his sins. Sex and death and Italian mystagogy were in the air!

  There was a stigma against admitting you were trained as an
altar boy, because it meant admitting you dressed up in a cassock and surplice. I was the only kid at Camp Don Bosco who would admit he was an altar boy back home, so I served two Masses a day all summer. But I loved the cassock and surplice, ringing the bells, lighting the candles—it was like being a glam-rock roadie for God. It might have earned me the contempt of my fellow campers, but it gave me a chance to bond with Sister Veronica and Sister Catherine, the nuns who took care of the chapel. While the other guys were riding horses or shooting hoops, I was working the cassock, swishing the surplice. Back home, my favorite part of Mass was during communion, when I’d stand at the rail and hold a little gold platter under people’s chins. The pretty girls would line up for communion (I confess to Almighty God). They’d kneel (and to you my brothers and sisters), cast their eyes demurely down (I have sinned through my own fault), and stick out their tongues (in my thoughts and in my words). Their tongues would shine, reflected in the gold platter, and since the wafer was dry, the girls would maybe lick their lips (and I ask Blessed Mary ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you my brothers and sisters) before they swallowed (to pray for me to the Lord our God). It was all I could do not to pass out.

  I was a little psycho about religion. My teen malaise found a language in the blood and glory of Catholic angst. All kids lead a secret double life, and this was mine. I slept with Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ under my pillow. I idolized St. Rose of Lima, who rubbed raw pepper on her face so her beauty would not be a temptation to the chastity of others. I devoted myself to mastering the underground occult lore of the Catholic hardcore—Butler’s Lives of the Saints and Augustine and T-Money Aquinas—the way other kids would devote themselves to D&D or the Foundation trilogy. My moral compass was shaped mainly by the Second Vatican Council, plus the episode of Welcome Back, Kotter where Arnold Horshack refuses to dissect a frog.