Read Online Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rob Sheffield
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form, handed it to the clerk, and a few hot minutes later you had your own Personics Custom Cassette with a foxy silver-and-turquoise label.
Toast in the Machine
, my tape from the Tower Records on Newbury Street, is labeled: “Made by the Personics System Especially for: RENÉE.” Très romantique!
Personics seemed incredibly high-tech at the time, but really, it was just another temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened. The worst song on this tape is “Bird Song” by the Holy Modal Rounders, which I had never even heard before; I included it because I was curious how bad a song had to be to cost only 50 cents in the Personics booklet. It’s two minutes and thirty-eight seconds of giggly hippie folk shit; I think it had a whistling solo, but I don’t have the stomach to listen again to find out. I guess you had to be there, and by “there” I mean “dangerously baked for about three months in 1969.” This tape doesn’t exactly flow; it’s just a bunch of burnt offerings to this goddess girl.
I realize it’s frowned on to choose a mate based on something superficial like the music they love. But superficiality has been good to me. In the animal kingdom, Renée and I would have recognized each other’s scents; for us, it was a matter of having the same favorite Meat Puppets album. Music was a physical bond between us, and the fact that she still owned her childhood 45 of Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” was tantamount to an arranged marriage. The idea that we might not belong together never really crossed my mind.
I went home with Renée,
and she drove me around her hometown, three hours southwest of Charlottesville, down in the New River Valley. We drove around Pulaski County. We went to dinner at the Pizza Den and ate fried potato wedges at Wade’s. Gary Clark, who played for the Washington Redskins, was from Pulaski County, and his mom had a sporting goods store right next to Wade’s, so we checked it out. The closer we got to Pulaski County, the sharper Renée’s accent got. She started using words like “reckon.” I even heard her say “dad gum it” once, in the Safe-way parking lot. We stopped at gas stations along the way and she’d buy Hank Williams or Dwight Yoakam tapes to play until we got near enough to a town to pick up some radio.
Her people were from Greenbrier County, West Virginia, hardcore Appalachian coal country, where her grandfathers were miners. Her parents, Buddy and Nadine Crist, went to work in Washington, D.C., out of high school, and met in the Department of Commerce cafeteria. They got married at Hines Baptist Church, back in Greenbrier County, when they were both nineteen and just before Buddy was transferred to Georgia. Her high school boyfriends were all football players. Her kind of guy drove a truck and wore thermals; she was always amused when she saw thermals in the J. Crew catalog, tastefully renamed “waffle weave.” Every September, no matter who her boyfriend was, the same thing would happen—he’d be out sick from school the first day of buck season, along with all the other guys. Renée considered herself open-minded to be dating a dude who had never shot anything.
When Renée drove me out to Pulaski County to meet her folks, she warned me that her dad was a boyfriend killer. She was right. He looked like Jim Rockford. At our first meeting he shook my hand and went right back into the story he was telling, about one of his least favorite relatives, Uncle Amos, a professional dynamiter whose South Carolina vanity plate read I BLAST . Buddy snorted, “He’s shithead number two.” I came to play ball, so I got right in there and asked, “Who’s shithead number one?”
Buddy nodded in Renée’s direction. “Her
Toast in the Machine
, my tape from the Tower Records on Newbury Street, is labeled: “Made by the Personics System Especially for: RENÉE.” Très romantique!
Personics seemed incredibly high-tech at the time, but really, it was just another temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened. The worst song on this tape is “Bird Song” by the Holy Modal Rounders, which I had never even heard before; I included it because I was curious how bad a song had to be to cost only 50 cents in the Personics booklet. It’s two minutes and thirty-eight seconds of giggly hippie folk shit; I think it had a whistling solo, but I don’t have the stomach to listen again to find out. I guess you had to be there, and by “there” I mean “dangerously baked for about three months in 1969.” This tape doesn’t exactly flow; it’s just a bunch of burnt offerings to this goddess girl.
I realize it’s frowned on to choose a mate based on something superficial like the music they love. But superficiality has been good to me. In the animal kingdom, Renée and I would have recognized each other’s scents; for us, it was a matter of having the same favorite Meat Puppets album. Music was a physical bond between us, and the fact that she still owned her childhood 45 of Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” was tantamount to an arranged marriage. The idea that we might not belong together never really crossed my mind.
I went home with Renée,
and she drove me around her hometown, three hours southwest of Charlottesville, down in the New River Valley. We drove around Pulaski County. We went to dinner at the Pizza Den and ate fried potato wedges at Wade’s. Gary Clark, who played for the Washington Redskins, was from Pulaski County, and his mom had a sporting goods store right next to Wade’s, so we checked it out. The closer we got to Pulaski County, the sharper Renée’s accent got. She started using words like “reckon.” I even heard her say “dad gum it” once, in the Safe-way parking lot. We stopped at gas stations along the way and she’d buy Hank Williams or Dwight Yoakam tapes to play until we got near enough to a town to pick up some radio.
Her people were from Greenbrier County, West Virginia, hardcore Appalachian coal country, where her grandfathers were miners. Her parents, Buddy and Nadine Crist, went to work in Washington, D.C., out of high school, and met in the Department of Commerce cafeteria. They got married at Hines Baptist Church, back in Greenbrier County, when they were both nineteen and just before Buddy was transferred to Georgia. Her high school boyfriends were all football players. Her kind of guy drove a truck and wore thermals; she was always amused when she saw thermals in the J. Crew catalog, tastefully renamed “waffle weave.” Every September, no matter who her boyfriend was, the same thing would happen—he’d be out sick from school the first day of buck season, along with all the other guys. Renée considered herself open-minded to be dating a dude who had never shot anything.
When Renée drove me out to Pulaski County to meet her folks, she warned me that her dad was a boyfriend killer. She was right. He looked like Jim Rockford. At our first meeting he shook my hand and went right back into the story he was telling, about one of his least favorite relatives, Uncle Amos, a professional dynamiter whose South Carolina vanity plate read I BLAST . Buddy snorted, “He’s shithead number two.” I came to play ball, so I got right in there and asked, “Who’s shithead number one?”
Buddy nodded in Renée’s direction. “Her
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