I like music and if a story’s about mix tapes, I’m bound to read it. High Fidelity: naturally. The hipster coffee-table book Mix Tape: the Art of Cassette Culture: yes. Even lesser-known classics of the genre, like Sarah Vowell’s “Thanks for the Memorex,” a tale of a long-distance love affair by cassette tape: “While we cared for each other, we cared little for each other’s taste in music. I sent him lovey-dovey lullabies like Blondie’s ‘In the Flesh’ and he sent me back what could have been field recordings of amplified ant farms by bands with names like Aphex Twin and Jarboe.”
So it was a given I’d eventually read Love is a Mix Tape, the thesis of which is “Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.” It’s a memoir by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield of his girlfriend-then-wife Renée, and how their shared love of music and mix tapes shaped and enlivened their relationship until her sudden death at 31 of a pulmonary embolism.
Renée was a saucy Southern girl raised in Appalachia with coal-miner grandfathers. She was obsessed with funky clothes and fabric swatches and made her own dresses. Her (presumably) Southern-isms, made me laugh, aphorisms like “If it’s got tits or tires, it’s gonna cost you money“ and “we’re shittin’ in tall cotton now!” Crushing on Evan Dando, she says, “He must get more cookie than the Keebler elves.” As an adventure-seeking, outspoken woman, she’s exactly the right counterpoint to Sheffield’s introvert. They meet when they’re each 23, at a college bar in Charlottesville, and learn they not only both love Big Star but share the same favorite Big Star song (“Thirteen”).
It’s an easy yet humorous and heartfelt read. I’d invested enough in Renée’s character and her relationship with Sheffield that I’m not too ashamed to admit I cried at the point in the book where she dies. The book’s of definite appeal to a Rob Gordon-type such as myself. Each chapter is prefaced with the actual mix tape playlist that was part of Sheffield’s life at that time, from the late ’70s through last year. Musical references abound: favorite songs, worst songs, songs that stoke memories and crack heartstrings, songs modified for personal reasons (“The only one who could ever reach me/Was the Makin’-the-Pizza Man”).
Music sneaks into the mix indirectly, too. Part of a pop song, often edited slightly to fit the surrounding sentences, will pop up in the middle of Sheffield’s narrative1. There’s Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (“Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.”) and Human League, by way of Philip Oakey and Giorgio Moroder (“Together in electric dreams”), among other picks absent from the college-radio-DJ playlist, like, um, Poison’s “Fallen Angel” (“Rollin’ the dice of her life”). None of these are attributed and to Sheffield’s credit, they fit where they’re placed although they distracted me at times.
The writing gets looser and more rumpled in the chapters after Renée dies, which I guess I can chalk up to the narrator himself getting shoddy. He lives a widower life on frozen steak burritos and Bushmills and sits in his back yard at night, staring into the woods at nothing. All of Renée’s things are boxed and left out in the apartment and it all reminds him of her. After too many nights dining alone at Applebee’s and returning home to watch old movies on TV, he snaps his act together, leaves the South and Renée behind and moves to Brooklyn. There’s a marvelous bit of closure during which he walks the row of benches on the fringe of the Great Lawn in Central Park and leaves one of Renée’s hats on each: a derby, a pillbox, a straw hat. Stuck to each is a Post-it on which he’s written, “Free,” and when he returns 20 minutes later, every hat is gone.
1 Maybe you have and maybe you haven’t noticed topical references to songs and lyrics in my post titles. Glancing at my post log, this year so far I’ve referenced R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Les Applegate, Rod Stewart, They Might Be Giants, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra, Mariah Carey and the Hungarian suicide song. [back]