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

me it was easy—the managers at chain stores were not allowed to interfere with shoplifters because the corporate bosses were afraid of lawsuits, so she could walk right through the scanners with her arms full of goodies and they wouldn’t do a thing to stop her. All my female friends assured me this was a lie. Maria invited me to watch her shoplift but I was too nervous to make a good wheelman.
    She’d keep me on the phone for hours during my all-night radio shows, and I would play songs for her, improvising a mix tape on the air. If anybody else was listening, which I doubt, they probably had no idea what was going on. Maybe indie rock circa ’87 was not the most romantic music—boys in basements screaming for other boys in basements—and yet there was plenty of romance to be heard in that, if you were listening. And we were. I had been to lots of rock shows, but I had never held hands at one. Maria used to play me R.E.M.’s live version of “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” recorded the same day she got off the bus in New Haven. We listened to Prince’s
Sign ‘O’ the Times
. (Everybody’s favorite Prince album must be the first one they heard while actually making out.) I made her a tape called
Cic-cone Island Baby
. She made me a tape called
Jumpin’ Sylvia Plath, It’s a Gas Gas Gas
. It was love, obviously.
    Maria was a door-slammer, big on stomping out of rooms and expecting me to follow. I was new at this boyfriend stuff, so I didn’t question her way of doing things. Her roommate hated me (I used too many paper towels), and they had screaming fights about me, which was hot. But things started to wobble around the time R.E.M. put out a truly wretched album called
Document
, the one that made her reconsider whether she could continue to worship Michael Stipe. I blamed R.E.M. for not saving us by making a better record. That, I realize now, was unfair.
    It was young. It was true. It lasted about six months. October first was the end of the world as I knew it. She called to say it was over. Well, not in those words—what she said was, “I’m fed up to my back teeth with you.” I sat on my bed and looked out at the city lights. My clock radio was playing Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” I realized I would never get to put this song on a tape for Maria, and my face began to crumple. She gave me a farewell gift, a 1988 Bon Jovi calendar shoplifted from Sam Goody, which was a nice gesture, but that was the end. I felt sad when her friends stopped saying hi to me at rock shows, but I didn’t realize that’s just the way it rolls. I loathed myself for secretly wishing I’d taped her records before she ditched me.
    At least I had Martha and the Vandellas to guide me through the experience. They didn’t have any good news, but they sure didn’t lie. Love makes me do foolish things. I was lucky to learn early.

big star: for renée
    OCTOBER 1989

    A
s far as mix tapes go,
Big Star: For Renée is totally unimaginative. It’s basically just one complete album on each side of a tape. But this is the tape that changed everything. Everything in my life comes directly from this Maxell XLII crush tape, made on October 10,1989, for Renée.
    Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris at a table in the back when I fell under the spell of Renée’s bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star’s
Radio City
. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song—the acoustic ballad “Thirteen.” She’d never heard their third album,
Sister Lovers
. So, naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!”
    As Renée left the bar, I