Love Is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

  Sometimes I run into old friends I haven’t seen in years, who ask how Renée is—that still happens. Now it happens maybe once a year or so. They usually tell me a Renée story I haven’t yet heard. I am always happy to hear her name. I was once at a house party in Brooklyn, waiting in line for the bathroom with a friend I didn’t meet until a couple of years ago, when he randomly asked, “Hey, what was Renée’s favorite Hank Williams song?” That made my night. (It was “Setting the Woods on Fire.”) I meet new songs, too, and the new songs will sometimes bring her up. Renée told me about Gary Stewart’s “Out of Hand” once, said it could have been written about us. I recently heard it for the first time. She was right.

  I make new friends and hear their stories. Last fall, I was sitting at the kitchen table of two friends who have been together since 1972. They tell me a story about how they got together. She couldn’t decide between two suitors, so she left New York City to spend the summer in an ashram. (Did I mention it was 1972?) One of the suitors sent her postcards while she was gone, the famous postcards that came inside the sleeve of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Needless to say, he was the suitor who won her hand. They tell me this story, laughing and interrupting each other, as their teenage daughter walks through the kitchen on her way out to a Halloween party. I’ve heard of these postcards—over the years, I’ve heard plenty of record-collector guys boast that they own the original vinyl Exile on Main Street with the original postcards, intact and pristine in the virgin sleeve. I’ve never heard of anybody getting rid of their prized Exile postcards, much less actually writing on them and sending them through the mail to a girl. I watch these two, laughing over this story at the same kitchen table they’ve shared for thirty years. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

  I even met another young widower once, the only one I’ve met in eight years. We were in a sleazy West Village indie-rock bar, at the after-party for a Strokes show. He was the fiancé of a photographer I knew. We chatted about New York, and he asked why I’d moved here. I blurted out something about Virginia, where I used to live, when I was a husband, and then my wife died and I had to start over. He said, Uh, me, too.

  We spent the whole night in a corner of the bar, breaking it all down. How did she die? When did you start sleeping again? When did you start eating again? Did people talk about it, or were they too scared? Do people avoid mentioning her around you? If they say “ex-wife,” do you correct them? When does it stop hurting? Did her parents stay in touch? For how long afterward did you try living in the same house? Did you ever have that dream where you run into her on the street, and don’t recognize her, and then you wake up and don’t go back to bed for a week?

  Neither of us had ever met another one of the species. We couldn’t stop interrogating each other. All around us, people were dancing and guzzling Rolling Rocks and snorting bumps off their knuckles. His fiancée kept dancing over to check on us. We knew we were being rude, but we also knew we’d never get another chance to have this conversation.

  After Renée died, I assumed the rest of my life would be just a consolation prize. I would keep living, and keep having new experiences, but none of them would compare to the old days. I would have to settle for a lonely life I didn’t want, which would always remind me of the life I couldn’t have anymore. But it didn’t turn out that way, and there’s something strange and upsetting about that. I would have stayed in 1996 if I could have, but it wasn’t my choice, so now I have to move either forward or back—it’s up to me. Not changing isn’t an option. And even though I’ve changed in so many ways—I’m a different person with a different life—the past is still with me every minute.

  Last summer I took all of Renée’s hats to Central Park. I walked around the Great Lawn, leaving a hat every few benches. I thought of leaving a note on each hat saying, “This belonged to somebody very cool who loved hats, although she hardly ever wore them after the day she bought them, don’t get me started, and she loved this park, although she only came here once, in 1992, and we heard some guy with a banjo playing ‘Take Me Home Country Roads’ and she laughed because this guy had no idea he was getting a chance to sing it for a real West Virginian girl.” But none of the hats were big enough for a story that long. So I just put a yellow sticky note on each one, saying, “Free.” There was the dark green bowler with the black velvet trim, the soft green cotton sun-hat she wore when we were walking around Dingle Bay in Ireland, the crimson cloche made of hemp fiber. There was the pink pillbox that she bought in a Salvation Army in North Carolina, with the mildew on it that made her sneeze. There were two different straw hats, one of which she wore to a barbeque lunch our wedding weekend, except I could no longer remember which one. I walked from bench to bench, trying not to be noticed as I left each hat, vaguely expecting to get stopped by cops and taken downtown for suspicious headgear disposal. The harder I tried not to look criminal, the harder my heart pounded and the faster I walked. After dropping off the last hat, I did a few loops around the statue of King Jagiello, who led Poland and Lithuania to victory over the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410. I worried that some of the hats were not beautiful enough for anybody to want to wear them. They would get left behind; they would be forgotten. But I headed back to the Great Lawn twenty minutes later, and of course there were no hats left on the benches. The hats were free.

  There’s a lot I miss about the nineties. It was an open, free time of possibilities, changes we thought were permanent. It seemed inconceivable that things would ever go back to the way they were in the eighties, when monsters were running the country and women were only allowed to play bass in indie-rock bands. The nineties moment has been stomped over so completely, it’s hard to imagine it ever happened, much less that it lasted five, six, seven years. Remember Brittany Murphy, the funny, frizzy-haired, Mentos-loving dork in Clueless? By 2002, she was the hood ornament in 8 Mile, just another skinny starlet, an index of everything we’ve lost in that time.

  When Avril Lavigne sings “Sk8tr Boi,” a song about how lucky she is to wait backstage for her rock boy, how is anybody supposed to remember that the Avril Lavignes of yesteryear were sold pop fantasies in which they had a place onstage, too? (“Sk8tr Boi” is a great song, too—which is part of the reason why there’s nothing simple about these questions.) Something was happening in nineties music that isn’t happening anywhere in pop culture these days, with women making noise in public ways that seem distant now. Nirvana brought mass appeal back to guitar rock, and the mass appeal made the bands braver—some of them even had something to say about the real world, which is way more than anybody has a right to expect from musicians. A kind of popular song existed that didn’t before and doesn’t any more, as arty guitar bands seized the moment to communicate with huge numbers of fans and go to extremes and indulge their appalling drug-addled muses and say dangerous or dumb things and expand the emotional/musical languages with which people communicated.

  I remember the summer of 1996, at a drunken wedding with one of my professors, a Hendrix-freak baby boomer, when he was complaining about the “bullet-in-the-head rock and roll” the kids were listening to today, and he asked Renée, “What does rock and roll have today that it didn’t have in the sixties?” Renée said, “Tits,” which in retrospect strikes me as not a bad one-word off-the-dome answer at all. The nineties fad for indie rock overlapped precisely with the nineties fad for feminism. The idea of a pop culture that was pro-girl, or even just not anti-girl—that was a 1990s mainstream dream, rather than a 1980s or 2000s one, and it was real for a while. Music was not just part of it but leading the way—hard to believe, hard even to remember. But some of us do.

  America is a different place than it was in the nineties, when peace and prosperity and freedom were here to stay. The radio has become homogenized, with practically every station around the country bought up and programmed by the same corporation, and in a shocking c
oincidence, the weird girls have been shoved back underground. The economy is in the toilet. The war is here to stay. Since the coup of 2000, those nineties dreams have been stomped down so hard it seems crazy to remember that they were real, or at least part of real lives. I keep my friends around, try to stay close to them, try to treat them right. I try to stay in touch with my friends who are far away, and I do a bad job of that, but I carry them with me.

  I recently met a girl, a friend of a friend, and it took me only a minute to recognize her—she was Melissa, from the John Fluevog shoe store in Boston, where Renée would go to look for cool shoes. She’d helped Renée find three of her all-time top five pairs of shoes. I’d never even learned her name, but I remembered her kindness, and I remembered the way she talked about her cool indie-rock drummer boyfriend, who is now her husband and touring with the Dixie Chicks. At first, I felt strange telling her why I remembered her, or that my wife had been buried in shoes she’d helped pick out, but she got it. I told her about the day Renée bought the platform mod creepers and walked down Newbury Street, saying, “Nobody in Charlottesville has shoes this cool. None of the skinny girls have shoes this cool. That skinny Lori from Georgia doesn’t have shoes this cool.”

  If I didn’t want to have these experiences, didn’t want to run into living things that reminded me of the past, I would have to hide under a rock—except that would remind me of the past, too, so I try not to hide. What shocks me is that the present is alive. It wouldn’t have shocked Renée.

  I depend on my friends to remind me that what started in the nineties isn’t all dead, and the struggles of those years are not all lost, and the future is unwritten. Astrogrrrl and I go see our favorite local bar band, the Hold Steady, every time they play. They always end with our favorite song, “Killer Parties,” and sometimes I think, man, all the people I get to hear this song with, we’re going to miss each other when we die. When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.

  A lot of my music friends don’t touch cassettes anymore; they stick to MP3s. I love my iPod, too—completely love it. I love my iPod carnally. I would rather have sex with my iPod than with Jennifer Lopez. (I wouldn’t have to hear the iPod whine about getting its hair rumpled.) But for me, if we’re talking about romance, cassettes wipe the floor with MP3s. This has nothing to do with superstition, or nostalgia. MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That’s part of what I love about them. But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies. The cassette is full of tape hiss and room tone; it’s full of wasted space, unnecessary noise. Compared to the go-go-go rhythm of an MP3, mix tapes are hopelessly inefficient. You go back to a cassette the way a detective sits and pours drinks for the elderly motel clerk who tells stories about the old days—you know you might be somewhat bored, but there might be a clue in there somewhere. And if there isn’t, what the hell? It’s not a bad time. You know you will waste time. You plan on it.

  All mixes have their mutations, whether it’s the mmmmm of the cassette or the krrriiissshhh of the MP3. There is no natural religion, as William Blake would say. No matter how hard you listen, you can’t get down to the pure sound, not as it gets heard by impure flesh-and-blood ears. So instead of listening to the pure sound, you listen to a mix. When you try to play a song in your memory, and you remember how it goes, you’re just making an imperfect mix of it in your mind. Human sound is mutant sound. You listen, and you mutate along with the sound.

  Not long ago I was walking through my neighborhood and found a box of tapes on the sidewalk, set out for the trash. Of course I took them home. They were Polish disco mix tapes for the most part, as well as Ricky Martin and Shania Twain and Jennifer Paige cassingles. There was also an Ace of Base cassingle I’d never heard before—from 1998. What the hell were they doing still making Ace of Base cassingles in 1998? But my favorite of these tapes is called Mega Disco. It includes “Let It Whip,” “Groove Line,” “Shame, Shame, Shame,” and “You Sexy Thing.” I’ve heard this last song on so many mixes over the years. It’s a different song every time, but the same thing always happens. You hear something you like, and you press rewind to go back to it. But you can’t rewind the tape to the exact same place again. So you start fresh.

  What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to the Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. The stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit “Love Is Like Oxygen”—you get too much, you get too high, not enough and you’re gonna die. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them.

  But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.

  acknowledgments

  No man does it all by himself, as the Village People once sang, and they should know. So! Thank you to everybody who helped with this book. My editor Carrie Thornton is a goddess and a true Virginia girl; I am grateful for her brilliance. My agent Daniel Greenberg rocks like Side Three of Exile in Main Street, contributing an infinite supply of insight and energy from the start. He also picked out a stray sentence from one of my early drafts, and said, “There’s your title.” Joe Levy has been exchanging mix tapes and arguments with me since the days of Tiffany and Big Daddy Kane, and nobody could be a more heroic presence in my life—he lived through this book with me twice, and neither time would have been possible without him. Thank you, Joe.

  All love and worship to Ally Polak. None of this could have been written without her constant love and support and feline soul. Stay on my arm, you little charmer.

  Thanks to my family: all Sheffields, Mackeys, Hanlons, Twomeys, Courtneys, Moriartys, O’Briens, Durfers, Govers, Crists, Hugharts, Smiths, Vieras, and Needhams. I owe everything to my mom and dad, Bob and Mary Sheffield. Thank you for your wisdom, for inspiration, and for still necking in the kitchen to the Del-Vikings. Thank you to my glorious sisters Ann, Tracey, and Caroline; Bryant, Charlie, Sarah, Allison, David, John, Sydney, and Jack; Donna, Joe, Sean, Jake, Tony, and Shirley; Jonathan, Kari-Ann, Ashley, Amber; Drema, Ruby, and Joe Gross. All my love and thanks to Buddy and Nadine Crist, for endless support and kindness.

  Thank you everybody at Crown, especially Steve Ross, Brandi Bowles, Kristin Kiser, Meghan Wilson, Lauren Dong, Laura Duffy, Dan Rembert, Donna Passannante, and Jill Flaxman.

  Big up to all at Rolling Stone past and present, especially the great Will Dana, James Kaminsky, Nathan Brackett, Elizabeth Goodman, Lauren Gitlin, Bob Love, David Swanson, Austin Scaggs, Jason Fine, David Fricke, Mark Binelli, Jancee Dunn. Tom Nawrocki has permanently changed my outlook on America (not the country) and Bread (not the food). I idolize Jenny Eliscu, but doesn’t everybody? Hell, I idolize myself just for knowing her.

  Very special thanks and respect to Jann Wenner, man of wealth and taste, for always letting it bleed.

  Gavin Edwards, you know you are the man—your help on this book doesn’t even make the Top Forty reasons why you rock (liking Belinda Carlisle’s “I Get Weak,” however, comes in at Number Thirty-Eight); Darcey Steinke, who was Renée’s hero, and is now mine, from whom I never stop learning; Chuck Klosterman (god of thunder); Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell (if music writers were farmers, Christgau would be the guy who invented the plow); Marc Spitz; Niki Kanodia; Jeffrey Stock; Marc Weidenbaum; Stephanie “MMMBop” Wells; Greil Marcus (as Renée said, “he’s the only Yankee I’ve ever met who knows how to pronounce ‘Appalachian’”); all Virginia friends around the world: Elizabeth Outka, Lia Rushton, La Contessa Susan Lentati, Erin Rodriguez, Merit Wolfe, Stephanie Bird, Jeanine Cassar O’Rourke, their families; Charles W
. Taylor III and everybody at WTJU, the greatest radio station on the planet, as you can hear yourself at wtju.net; Tyler Magill (for redefining the Britpop haircut), Carey Price (the chicktator), Sarah Wyatt (she bangs the drums), Motel No-Tell UK, The Curious Digit, Plan 9 Records; Sarah Wilson; Jill Beifuss; Karl Precoda.

  The musical ideas in this book got shaped in the insane fanzine world of the eighties and nineties, when zines had staples in the spine and no bandwidth at all. Thank you to my fanzine gurus, especially Phil “Frankie Five Angels” Dellio (Radio On), Frank Kogan (Why Music Sucks), Chuck Eddy (everywhere).

  A passionate round of applause for: Nils Bernstein, Jennie Boddy, Caryn Ganz, Radha Metro, Melissa Eltringham, Heather Rosett, Katherine Profeta, Jen Sudul, Strummer Edwards, Asif Ahmed, Tracey Pepper, Pam Renner, Chris McDonnell, Ted Friedman, Flynn Monks, Graine Courtney, Laura Larson, Craig Marks, Rene Steinke, Sarah Lewitinn, John Leland, Neva Chonin, James Hannaham, Laura Sinagra, Jon Dolan, Walter T. Smith, Joshua Clover, Eric Weisbard, Ann Powers, Sasha Frere-Jones, Jon Bing, Paul Outka, Ivan Kreilkamp, Jen Fleissner, Erik Pedersen, Sister Pat, David Berman, Kembrew McLeod, Ed Pollard, The Nadine Crew, The Softies, The Secret Stars, The Hold Steady, and everyone else who has helped. Elizabeth Mitchell said the right thing at the right time. So did Mike Viola, and if you like this book, you will also probably like the Candy Butchers’ album Hang On Mike. Thank you Joey Ramone for being nice to Renée for a few minutes in 1993. Thank you to all famous people, everywhere, especially the rock stars, plus the BVM and all the angels and saints. Thank you St. Jude. God bless Mother Nature, she’s a single woman, too.

  Always: David and Bridie Twomey; Ray and Peggy Sheffield.

  Thanks to Dump for my favorite song, “International Airport,” and to everybody who’s ever listened to it on a mix tape from me. I don’t think it’s anybody else’s favorite song yet, but you never know.