Love Is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

  Tracey surprised her husband, Bryant, with a mix CD as a Christmas gift. This was the first mix CD any of us had seen, and we crowded around to gape at it. There was definitely a sense that the mix tape as we knew it was going through a major change. She titled it Mackey Music, filled it with his favorite Shawn Mullins and Garth Brooks songs, and put a picture of him on the cover. We were all wicked impressed at this technological breakthrough and got to know the mix extremely well when it went into heavy poolside rotation. But a clear advantage of mix tapes made itself immediately clear: Each side of the tape goes on for forty-five minutes, and then comes to a stop, allowing a chance for somebody to discreetly change the music, whereas a mix CD has only one side. Which means it goes on for eighty minutes, and you can’t turn it off halfway through without offering some sort of lame excuse, such as “Garth is singing about cocaine in this song and it’s bad for the baby,” or “Dave Matthews is mixing violin solos with saxophone solos and it’s bad for the baby.”

  The house was cold when I got back home from Florida. I realized the house was always cold, and would stay cold no matter how long I stayed back. Am I Swiss? Am I ticking? Sometimes.

  To get out of my cold house, I went to a New Year’s party at Darius’s house, the same night I made this tape. Usually, I made any excuse not to leave the house, so going to a party was a big deal for me. I caught a ride with the Glimmer Girl, a bassist friend of mine. Glimmer didn’t come to town until after Renée died, and I wished they could have met—they would have wagged their tails over each other—but they never got the chance. Glimmer was brilliant at getting me out of the house. She always made me feel safe, something I was not used to feeling around other people. I guess she and her boyfriend used to fight a lot, so she’d always call my radio show to request sad songs like PJ Harvey’s “Dry.” She would talk me into going to see bands at Tokyo Rose, and once I forced myself out of the house, it was usually fun to go hang with her gaggle of glam glimmerettes. If I couldn’t take it, I would just sneak away, and Glimmer Girl would never ask why.

  This night was fun. We danced to old disco records. I was extremely happy to hear “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life.” She’d never heard the song before, and she was astounded at how bouncy it made me. We sat on the front stairs and smoked. At one point, I leaned in to light her cigarette, but she was just putting on lipgloss.

  She and her boyfriend gave me a ride home. I didn’t feel like going to bed by myself and lying there freezing, so I put on a pot of coffee and started making this tape. I decided to make the tape, then sit in the backyard and listen to it on my Walkman while drinking more cigarettes and smoking another bourbon. It was only two A.M., and I banged it out by four, so I’d have time to listen to it twice by the time the sun rose at seven. The chair in the backyard was covered with ice, but I sat on it anyway.

  This is a classic example of a tape that tries to ruin a bunch of great songs by reminding you of a time you would rather forget. Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you. (I made another tape that winter that began with Roxy Music’s “Mother of Pearl,” one of my favorite songs since I was sixteen, but I haven’t been able to listen to it since. That tape was so agonizing to hear, it took all the other songs down with it. Louis Prima’s “Banana Split for My Baby”? Come on! Great tune! But ruined.)

  Individually, all the songs on this tape make me smile, but lined up in this order, they make me shudder. Listening to this tape is like going back somewhere I never belonged in the first place, and it’s spooky to tiptoe back in. All these sad songs: “SOS,” “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” “No More No More,” “She’s So Cold.” Stevie Nicks in “Gold Dust Woman,” chanting “widow” over and over. Mick Jagger in “Emotional Rescue,” sneering at a poor girl trapped in a rich man’s house. Even the fun songs sound miserable here. In any other context, Heart’s “Magic Man” fires my blood corpuscles with images of erotic abundance. Ann Wilson? Love her! Nancy Wilson? Like her lots! The album cover where they’re wearing capes and feeding a goat on the pastures of their own mystical Salisbury Plain dream world? I’m so there. But on this tape, “Magic Man” sounds scary. The “Magic Man” is magic just because he’s unreal. Surely he’s in love with somebody dead, so he’s too magic to fit into the real world. He’s isolated from everybody around him, and his isolation is contagious, making him a vampire who turns everybody he touches into a cold shell of abandoned humanity. Yes, even the lustrously busty ladies of Heart!

  (It’s only now I realize that the lyrics of this song are all about drugs. How embarrassing that I never noticed it before.)

  Don’t go home with that magic man! I wanted to shake my Walkman, warn the Heart girls to run away. Don’t trust him! He might be magic, but he’s not very nice! He says he just wants to get high awhile, but he’ll get you so high you can’t come back down. He’ll make you stay inside so long, it hurts your eyes to go out, so you’ll spend whole years wasting away in his mansion. You’ll lose your sense of time. You’ll lose your appetite. When your mama cries on the phone, you won’t understand a word she’s saying. You’ll just tell her, “Try to understand.” And Mrs. Wilson isn’t falling for that shit. Ann! Nance! Get the hell out of there! One smile from that magic man, and you’re done. You’ll be so fucking magic, you won’t be real any more. He’ll even set your lipgloss on fire.

  I hoped Glimmer Girl and her boy were sleeping somewhere, young and safe and together. I hoped they were breathing hard into each other’s hair. I hoped her feet were bumping into his shins. I hoped they were asleep and not thinking about any of the things I was thinking about, and I hoped they never would. I listened to this tape twice all the way through, and then hurried into the cold house before the sun started to rise. If I waited for the house to warm up before I tried to start something, I would never start anything.

  blue ridge gold

  APRIL 2000

  One night I had a bit of a revelation. I was up late, as usual, unable to sleep, drinking ginger ale and flipping channels, looking for something to soothe my nerves, the way a Discovery Channel panda forages for bamboo. This time I found something—a newsmagazine piece about a breaking news story in Milwaukee. I watched with awe and reverence. The story concerned a nacho dwarf. He was the most famous and successful nacho dwarf in Milwaukee—maybe the world. His job was walking around in a Mexican restaurant wearing an oversized sombrero with a brim full of tasty nachos. The crown of the sombrero held a cup of salsa. The nacho dwarf greeted the customers, shook hands, worked the room. He would invite everybody to sample the treats he had on his head. He was there to serve. He was there to honor the nacho-dwarf code.

  Understandably, quite a few of his fellow dwarves felt this was a degrading and insulting gig. Steve Vento (for that was his name), a former car salesman (for that was his trade), disagreed. He proclaimed himself proud to be a nacho dwarf. But other dwarves complained angrily that he was perpetuating inhumane stereotypes and encouraging mistreatment of non-nacho dwarves. In fact, they were protesting the restaurant, demanding a boycott until the nacho dwarf was canned.

  I watched this with intense fascination. They showed a clip from the Anthony Michael Hall movie Johnny Be Good, which apparently had a party scene that had inspired the whole nacho-dwarf thing. They showed the dwarf lawyer who was representing the protesters. And they showed the nacho dwarf himself, defending his profession. He implied that maybe the other dwarves were just a little jealous that they did not have the talent to make it as a nacho dwarf. They resented his success, so they were trying to drive a fellow dwarf out of work and into the gutter. Why, they were taking food right out of his mouth!

  “We are not trying to take food out of Mr. Vento’s mouth,” said the lawyer. “We are merely trying to take it off his head.”

  And then, dear friends, at those words, a little light flickered in my mind. Some sort of divine revelation started to make itself clear before
my eyes, and a voice began to articulate unto me the horrible truth: I needed to get out of the apartment more. No, I really needed to get out of the apartment more.

  Maybe it was time to think about leaving Charlottesville. I loved it here, but there were serious changes I needed to make, and this was not the place to make them. It was too hard to keep living surrounded by so much of the past. I needed to go. I wanted to walk before they made me run. There was too much happening there that I couldn’t share with Renée, and if I was going to keep living, I needed to move on to a new location. Charlottesville was always going to be her place. I wanted it to stay that way.

  I had new friends in Charlottesville who didn’t know Renée, although they’d all heard stories about her before I got the chance to bring her up for the first time. It was bittersweet making friends who never got to hang with her, especially when they were so cool they reminded me of her. It was kind of like that Sade song “Maureen,” where she’s sad her dead friend can’t meet her new friends. I knew I needed to learn some manners about when it was okay to tell people stories about Renée, and when it was just too traumatic for them to hear about her. I didn’t want to scare them away. I was trying to learn some of Renée’s social finesse, to remember the way she used to put people at ease and make them feel free. That was just never my department, but I tried to get better at it.

  I had a support system in Charlottesville that I felt crazy walking away from, and I was glad I had stayed as long as I had, but it was time to go. Most of my friends were now in New York, so I figured I’d go there, although friends in other towns lobbied—Stephanie called from San Francisco and read the sublet listings into my machine until the tape ran out. I set up a goodbye shelf, where I put things I needed to get rid of. If something sat on the goodbye shelf for a few days and I still got a pang when I looked at it sitting there, it wasn’t ready to go yet.

  I said goodbye to our dog Duane (who I gave away) and our favorite band Pavement (who broke up but whose members made excellent solo albums). Duane spent her last year with me barking and howling, wishing she were anywhere else; Pavement spent their last tour fighting onstage. At their final shows, the band members reportedly wore handcuffs onstage as symbols of their frustration. Each goodbye came with different levels of relief, guilt, and confusion, so I put them off as long as I could. But dogs need to run free, and so do guitarists. It wasn’t right to hold them back. I had a lot of goodbyes left to say, to places and people and trees and radio stations.

  For all of us who loved Renée, there were many goodbyes. At my friend Amanda’s wedding that spring, two of Renée’s best friends had a little meltdown in the ladies’ room when they saw that they were both wearing bike shorts under their fancy dresses to keep their thighs from rubbing together, a trick they’d both learned from Renée. They stayed in the ladies’ room and cried, while their husbands wondered what was going on. There were lots of moments like that for all of us—encounters with clothes, baseball, books, music. Every few years, I buy an old Stylistics record and think, Man, these guys were great, it’s been way too long. I get it home, make it halfway through side one, and then file it away in the Whenever pile because Renée loved them and it is too hard. Maybe next year, maybe not. I also assumed I’d never be able to take listening to the Replacements again, but then I made a new friend in the summer of 1999 who wore a rubber band around her wrist with Paul Westerberg’s name written on it. Her favorite song was “Unsatisfied” and she gave the song back to me, without knowing she was doing it, and soon I loved it as much as ever. You just never know.

  When friends came down to visit from New York, they were amused by my deplorable car-radio tastes. I had become addicted to AM 1600, Cavalier Memories. The station was stuck in 1963, keeping me sane on the road with a steady sound track of Nancy Sinatra and Ray Charles and The Shangri-La’s. They seemed to play “Moon River” every forty minutes. All weekend, we drove around in the mountains listening to Cavalier Memories, where we heard most of the songs on this tape. After they went home, I sent them a copy of the tape as a Blue Ridge souvenir. I decided this was my new favorite mix. I walked around with it all spring. I made sequels: Blue Ridge Platinum, Blue Ridge Velvet, Blue Ridge Silver, Blue Ridge Turquoise.

  Cavalier Memories was the only station Renée and I could always get in the old LeBaron, which didn’t have an FM dial, but now that I had a new car with a working radio, I just wanted to go back to my huckleberry friends on AM 1600. My appetite for this music was raging. Every time I was in the car, I heard all these great songs I’d never appreciated before. I’m sure I startled the other people at intersections whenever I would idle at a red light, screaming “I Am . . . I Said” using the rearview as a mike.

  It was bittersweet getting to know these songs I never got to share with Renée. I mean, it was one thing to make new friends, and have to explain to them who Renée was, and how cool she was, and how much she loved Ricky Nelson and Shania Twain and Biggie Smalls, and so on. I figured that would always happen, since there are so many billions of new people. But it was a lonesome surprise to make new friends with songs. One day I turned on the ignition in the parking lot and heard Glen Campbell’s “Gentle on My Mind,” a song I’d known all my life and never paid any attention to, and fell totally in love with it. I bet Renée loved this song. We never heard it together, so I have no way of knowing. Now I loved this song, and there was no way to tell her about it. I found myself desperately trying to start a conversation with this song, introducing myself. “You don’t know me, ‘Gentle on My Mind,’ but I’m sure you’ve met my wife. Let me tell you a thing or two about her . . . .”

  I’d drive around town, running errands or just escaping the house, and sing harmony duets with a partner who wasn’t there. I would picture Renée in the empty passenger seat, singing along with me. What the hell good is it to sing a Glen Campbell song to yourself? Nancy Sinatra, Perez Prado, Ella Mae Morse, Dean Martin—my mirror was getting jammed up with all my friends. I was desperate for them all to meet Renée. It was strange to fall back in love with really old songs, or to hear them for the first time and not get to hear Renée sing along with them.

  I loved these songs, learned the tunes and the words, took them into my heart to stay. I had no idea what to do with them. But they were doing something with me. I had a lot of goodbyes to say. This was going to take time. I had time.

  via vespucci

  DECEMBER 2002

  I made this tape while moving into my new apartment in Brooklyn. The living room has a china cabinet, but I loaded it up with tapes instead of dishes, unpacking one box of cassettes after another. I still haven’t finished unpacking—by the time I do, it’ll be time to move again.

  One of the things I love about my neighborhood is the junk shop on Manhattan Avenue that has a basement full of used vinyl. The store doesn’t have a name, or a sign out front, but once you venture down the stairs, you’re in a shrine. I have never seen so many records crammed into one room, ceiling to floor. They’re not in any order, so it’s a place to spend a winter day scavenging for buried treasure. After my first visit there, I took my armful of records home and made this tape. There are crackles and scratches everywhere. Some of the songs are old favorites, some are new to me. I had never even heard of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Mirage”—how did I possibly live so much of my life without that song? Martha and the Vandellas’ Watchout!—how did I manage without that one?

  I live in a new city, where I have found friends who never met Renée and only know her through me. My ears runneth over with new favorite songs, new favorite bands, new favorite people to share them with. I met a girl, an astrophysicist who moved here from Charlottesville, and fell in love. We met while I was visiting friends down there; I first heard her voice on the car radio, where she was doing a Pixies tribute show on WTJU as DJ Astrogrrrl. She made me a mix for my birthday, a real cassette, although I couldn’t read the label because she wrote it in Japanese. So many great songs: Th
e Normal’s “Warm Leatherette,” Siouxsie’s “Happy House,” The Pixies’ “Cactus,” The Cure’s “A Night Like This.” Well, clearly this was nothing but good.

  Ally Astrogrrrl and I listen to the iPod I gave her for her birthday, which is pink to match the winter coat she wears over her fishnets. Last Christmas she used it to DJ the NASA holiday party, blasting the Stooges and David Bowie until one of the other scientists came over to turn the volume down. On Friday nights, we go eat sushi and play pinball, while she feeds quarters into the jukebox to play Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy, bands I used to hate until I met her. Her specialty is galactic structure—and I can’t even find my way around McGuinness Boulevard. She explains the movements of the galaxies to me; she digs through her shoebox of high school tapes and plays me Skinny Puppy, Revolting Cocks, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, and other bands I never gave a damn about. They took Love and Rockets’ “Ball of Confusion” off the jukebox at The Library on Avenue A because she wouldn’t stop playing it. Her karaoke anthem is Nirvana’s “Lithium.”

  On weekend afternoons, Astrogrrrl and I can hear my upstairs neighbor sing along with her favorite Queen song, which is “Don’t Stop Me Now.” She likes that song a lot. She never plays it just once. I didn’t notice before, but it has the exact same lyrics as Eric B. and Rakim’s “Follow the Leader.” I don’t know my upstairs neighbor’s name, or where she’s from, but I know she loves to hit those Freddy Mercury high notes and blast off. She had a boyfriend for a while who used to listen to folk music, but now he doesn’t seem to be around anymore. She still has “Don’t Stop Me Now,” though. The cars outside of my window blast Polish hip-hop, 24/7. I’m literally surrounded by music.