Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield Read Free Book Online

tough guys were constantly watching for the guys who were just a little tougher. They were busier being scared than I was. It was like
Planet of the Apes
, and I knew I was a chimpanzee who would never pass for a gorilla.
    But there’s one memory I have about Steve Doherty that I still wonder about from time to time. We were all standing around the lake after dinner one night, with AC/DC on the box, when Doherty said, “I hate disco people—you know, disco
pants
. But there are some disco
songs
, you know, like ‘Funkytown,’ that rock.” Believe me, nobody else could’ve talked that shit and made it back to the cabin alive. Maybe Doherty was just screwing with us, seeing what he could get away with. (“Ape has killed ape!”) Or maybe he really dug “Funkytown.” I’ll never know, because we all just nodded and said, “Uh-huh.”

love makes me do foolish things
    OCTOBER 1987

    T
his was my very first breakup tape,
slapped together in the aftermath of my very first breakup. I was twenty-one. My social skills had not advanced all that much since my
Roller Boogie
days, I’m sad to say. I was just one of those graves that pretty girls make. I wore black every day, and grooved to the morose strains of Lou Reed and Richard Thompson and Tom Verlaine. I was a senior at Yale, plugged in to my Walkman, still hiding from the world most of the time. In fact, until I met my first girlfriend, Maria, I was a safe bet to graduate from college without ever having kissed a woman, a fate spared me only when Maria launched a tenacious attack on my innocence not unlike the one led by Charles Bronson in the 1970s TV movie
Raid on Entebbe
.
    It was a spring romance that lasted, blissfully, all summer long. Maria was obsessed with R.E.M. and Sonic Youth; she also taught me to wear Converse high-tops, smoked and drank, and did all kinds of wild shit that was new to me. We spent the summer sitting in her room, under her Michael Stipe posters, listening to R.E.M. bootlegs. I DJ’d the all-night radio show on WYBC, so Maria would always call me on the air at 4 A.M. to request the Modern Lovers’ “Hospital.”
    When we broke up, I was devastated. I made myself this breakup tape as a sound track for my afternoon walks through the city. It includes lots of sad guitar dudes and soul singers, especially Martha and the Vandellas, sobbing their way through “Love (Makes Me Do Foolish Things).” The opening drums of that lost Motown gem still make me gasp, ushering me into Martha’s lonely room, where she doesn’t even have any Vandellas to keep her company, just weepy piano and strings and drums. Martha sits there on the edge of her bed, praying to hear that knock on her door, except she knows she will never hear that knock . . . no
more
! I would rewind and play that song over and over, certain that if I could only hear all the way through Martha’s voice to the core of her soul I, too, could suffer gorgeously enough to be one of her Vandellas.
    Before I met Maria, I was your basic craven hermit. I spent most of my time in my room, in love with my walls, hiding out from the world with my fanzines and my records. I thought I was happier that way. I had developed these monastic habits to protect myself from something, probably, but whatever it was, the monastic habits had turned into the bigger problem. In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman. I was an English major, obsessed with Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater and Algernon Swinburne, thrilling to the exploits of my decadent aesthete poet idols, even though my only experience with decadence was reading about it.
    My chick friends were always trying to find girls for me. They were my mentors in girl vanity, and after growing up with three sisters, I was a more than capable student. My chick friends got tired of their boyfriends pretty fast, but they didn’t get tired of me; I nursed them through