Rob Sheffield - Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

contents

for Mom and Dad

I wasted all your precious time
I wasted it all on you.

PAVEMENT

rumblefish

IDES O MARCH 1993

T he playback: late night, Brooklyn, a pot of coffee, and a chair by the window. Im listening to a mix tape from 1993. Nobody can hear it but me. The neighbors are asleep. The skater kids who sit on my front steps, drink beer, and blast Polish hip-hoptheyre gone for the night. The diner next door is closed, but the air is still full of borscht and kielbasa. This is where I live now. A different town, a different apartment, a different year.

This mix tape is just another piece of useless junk that Rene left behind. A category that I guess tonight includes me.

I should have gone to sleep hours ago. Instead, I was rummaging through old boxes, looking for some random paperwork, and I found this tape with her curly scribble on the label. She never played this one for me. She didnt write down the songs, so I have no idea whats in store. But I can already tell its going to be a late night. It always is. I pop Rumblefish into my Panasonic RXC36 boombox on the kitchen counter, pour some more coffee, and let the music have its way with me. Its a date. Just me and Rene and some tunes she picked out.

All these tunes remind me of her now. Its like that old song, 88 Lines About 44 Women. Except its 8,844 lines about one woman. Weve done this before. We get together sometimes, in the dark, share a few songs. Its the closest well get to hearing each others voices tonight.

The first song: Pavements Shoot the Singer. Just a sad California boy, plucking his guitar and singing about a girl he likes. They were Renes favorite band. She used to say, Theres a lot of room in my dress for these boys.

Rene called this tape Rumblefish. I dont know why. She recorded it over a promo cassette by some band called Drunken Boat, who obviously didnt make a big impression, because she stuck her own label over their name, put Scotch tape over the punch holes, and made her own mix. She dated it Ides o March 1993. She also wrote this inspirational credo on the label:

You know what Im doingjust follow along!

JENNIE GARTH

Ah, the old Jennie Garth workout video, Body in Progress. Some nights you go to the mall with your squeeze, youre both a little wasted, and you come home with a Jennie Garth workout video. Thats probably buried in one of these boxes, too. Neither of us ever threw anything away. We made a lot of mix tapes while we were together. Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep. Tapes for doing the dishes, for walking the dog. I kept them all. I have them piled up on my bookshelves, spilling out of my kitchen cabinets, scattered all over the bedroom floor. I dont even have pots or pans in my kitchen, just that old boom-box on the counter, next to the sink. So many tapes.

I met Rene in Charlottesville, Virginia, when we were both twenty-three. When the bartender at the Eastern Standard put on a tape, Big Stars Radio City, she was the only other person in the room who perked up. So we drank bourbon and talked about music. We traded stories about the bands we liked, shows wed seen. Rene loved the Replacements and Alex Chilton and the Meat Puppets. So did I.

I loved the Smiths. Rene hated the Smiths.

The second song on the tape is Cemetry Gates by The Smiths.

The first night we met, I told her the same thing Ive told every single girl Ive ever had a crush on: Ill make you a tape! Except this time, with this girl, it worked. When we were planning our wedding a year later, she said that instead of stepping on a glass at the end of the ceremony, she wanted to step on a cassette case, since thats what shed been doing ever since she met me.

Falling in love with Rene was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-along. She would wake up in the middle of the night and say things like What if Bad Bad Leroy Brown was a girl? or Why dont they have commercials for salt like they do for milk? Then she would fall back to sleep, while I would lie awake and give thanks for this alien creature beside whom I rested.

Rene was a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl. Her favorite song was the Rolling Stones Lets Spend the Night Together. Her favorite album was Pavements Slanted and Enchanted. She rooted for the Atlanta Braves and sewed her own silver vinyl pants. She knew which kind of screwdriver was which. She baked pies, but not very often. She could rap Roxanne Shantes Go on Girl all the way through. She called Eudora Welty Miss Eudora. She had an MFA in fiction and never got any stories published, but she kept writing them anyway. She bought too many shoes and dyed her hair red. Her voice was full of the frazzle and crackle of music.

Rene was a country girl, three months older than me. She was born on November 21, 1965, the same day as Bjrk, in the Metropolitan Mobile Home Park in Northcross, Georgia. She grew up in southwest Virginia, with her parents, Buddy and Nadine, and her little sister. When she was three, Buddy was transferred to the defense plant in Pulaski County, and so her folks spent a summer building a house there. Rene used to sit in the backyard, feeding grass to the horses next door through the fence. She had glasses, curly brown hair, and a beagle named Snoopy. She went to Fairlawn Baptist Church and Pulaski High School and Hollins College. She got full-immersion baptized in Claytor Lake. The first record she ever owned was KC & the Sunshine Bands Get Down Tonight. KC was her first love. I was her last.

I was a shy, skinny, Irish Catholic geek from Boston. Id never met anybody like Rene before. I moved to Charlottesville for grad school, my plans all set: go down South, get my degree, then haul ass to the next town. The South was a scary new world. The first time I saw a possum in my driveway, I shook a bony fist at the sky and cursed this godforsaken rustic hellhole. Im twenty-three! Life is passing me by! My ancestors spent centuries in the hills of County Kerry, waist-deep in sheep shit, getting shot at by English soldiers, and my grandparents crossed the ocean in coffin ships to come to America, just so I could get possum rabies?

Rene had never set foot north of Washington, D.C. For her, Charlottesville was the big bad city. She couldnt believe her eyes, just because there were sidewalks everywhere. Her ancestors were Appalachians from the hills of West Virginia; both of her grandfathers were coal miners. We had nothing in common, except we both loved music. It was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. We did a lot of work to meet in the middle. Music brought us together. So now music was stuck with us.

I was lucky I got to be her guy for a while.

I remember this song. L7, punk-rock girls from L.A., the Shove single on Sub Pop. Rene did a Spin cover story on them, right after she made this tape. Shed never seen California before. The girls in the band took her shopping and picked out some jeans for her.