One spring, I even decided to give up evil music for Lent. It meant seven weeks of listening to the radio and wondering which songs were evil and which songs were just about evil. I decided the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” was okay because it was anti-devil, but the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” was soft on Satan. I gave myself permission to keep cranking Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” because it was so saturated with evil that it amounted to a critique of evil, but not Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” which was just plain evil. I made a specially edited tape of London Calling to omit the nunfucking. These theological judgments made my head hurt, and I was relieved when Lent was over. On Easter morning, I treated myself to “Walk on the Wild Side.”
My rock heroes were wild-side jaywalkers like Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie, guys who smirked at heartbreak through their inch-thick steel shades. They gave me the hope that teenage outcasts could grow up to be something besides corpses or cartoons. Jesus was my Major Tom. He said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” So did Bowie. It tapped into the whole Catholic idea of creating your own saints, finding icons of divinity in the mundane. As a religion, Bowieism didn’t seem so different from Catholicism—the hemlines were just a little higher. Of course, when Madonna hit, she was a one-woman Vatican 3, but at this point I had all the rock-star saints I could handle.
At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like Good News for Modern Man. They had groovy titles like The Word or The Way, and translated the Bible into “contemporary English,” which meant Saul yelling at Jonathan, “You son of a bitch!” (I Samuel 20:30). Awesome! The King James version gave this verse as “Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman,” which was bogus in comparison. Maybe these translations went a bit far. I recall one of the Bibles translating the inscription over the cross, “INRI” (Iesus Nazaremus Rex Iudaeorum), as “SSDD” (Same Shit Different Day), and another describing the Last Supper—the night before Jesus’ death, a death he freely accepted—where Jesus breaks the bread, gives it to his disciples, and says, “It’s better to burn out than fade away,” but these memories could be deceptive.
At Camp Don Bosco, I met another camper who was a Beatles freak, which was like finding gold. Aldo Rettagliatti and I spent hours debating the Paul-is-dead clues and Abbey Road (his favorite) vs. the White Album (mine). Since we were out in the middle of the woods, with no radio and a load of religious tracts around, we soon got into some Catholic-mystic Beatle talk. We elaborated ideas about the way “Revolution 9” rewrote chapter nine of the Book of Revelation. We took our theory to Brother Larry, but he assured us that the Book of Revelation was too hard for us to interpret, and besides, Jesus didn’t write it, and anyway, everything after Sgt. Pepper was crap.
Socially, the campers split into three groups: tough guys, wise guys, and pussies. The pussies spent the summer in constant danger from the tough guys, while the wise guys tried to nyuk-nyuk-nyuk their way out of violent situations, mostly by making fun of the pussies. I was a wise guy, except when my inner pussy would slip out from under my cassock and surplice.
Camp Don Bosco was my first male peer group, and it was a shock to learn that boys were, in fact, dipshits. The mystery I’d always thought surrounded tough guys just disappeared. Here’s an actual conversation I heard on the picnic tables outside the canteen that summer:
CRANDALL: So, how many times have you done it with her?
COLANTINO: None. She’s a virgin bitch.
CRANDALL: Virgins are the worst kind! It takes so long to get it!
COLANTINO: But virgins are the best kind when you do get it.
CRANDALL: But it takes so long!
Crandall was a fourteen-year-old dork, and sounded like a real idiot bragging about sex, but he was in with the tough guys because his best friend was ringleader Steve Doherty, a sociopathic Scott Baio look-alike. The only kid allowed to give Crandall shit was Doherty’s little brother, who was in St. Pat’s. Spaz was a tiny kid from Dorchester who lost more fights than he won, but he was crazy and would fight anybody, so he got the respect normally reserved for the tough guys who spent their leisure time kicking the shit out of Spaz. Spaz wore a scapular around his neck, a string of holy medallions that consecrated him to Mary. Supposedly, if you die wearing one, you go straight to heaven. But one night, Brother Al told us all a cautionary tale about a man who thought he could get away with his sinful ways because he wore the scapular. “He led a very immoral life,” Brother Al told us, pacing the floor after lights-out. “He did everything.” After he died in a car crash, the police found his scapular . . . dangling from a nearby tree!
Mike McGrath was the only tough guy who took a liking to me, and without him, I wouldn’t have lasted a week at Camp Bosco. Mike was from my parish, St. Mary’s, and we’d been confirmed together. His big brother, called “Urko” after some evil gorilla on the Planet of the Apes TV series, was one of Milton’s scariest delinquents. Mike was just a joke back home, but at camp he told everybody he was “Big Mac,” and I didn’t blow his cover, so he looked out for me. (“Ape shall never kill ape.”)
Everybody complained that Camp Don Bosco was too far from Boston to pick up our beloved WCOZ. The only radio we got was a local country station, which only Brother Al could stomach. We all missed WCOZ on Sunday nights, which was when the Dr. Demento show aired. But instead of radio, we had Bubba Colantino’s “master blaster” boombox and five tapes in heavy cranktation. Our two biggest albums were “2” and “Zeppelin,” normally listed in reference works as Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin IV. Some people call the latter “Zoso,” but I never heard it called that at Camp Don Bosco. Damone in Fast Times calls it Led Zeppelin Four. The Columbia House Record and Tape Club ads listed it as Runes. But the guys at camp just said, “Put the Zeppelin on.” (A “Zeppelin” was also a kind of bong that looked like a thermos and held two roaches and filled up with enough smoke to choke an elephant.) When Steve Doherty said, “Put on two,” he meant the album with “Whole Lotta Love.” The three other albums we blasted all summer were Hi Infidelity, Crimes of Passion, and Back in Black—Brother Larry approved of the theology of “Hells Bells.”
The guy with the most Zeppelin tapes was Mullen, the junior counselor in charge of St. Pat’s. I knew him from my grandparents’ parish, St. Andrew’s in Forest Hills. Mullen shaved his head and never said a word. There was a story going around that some lady had offered him a hundred bucks to beat up her son all summer, to toughen the boy up, but that Mullen had turned her down. Nonetheless, all the Magone guys were too scared to touch any St. Pat’s kids because that was Mullen’s cabin. I didn’t understand the tough guys—I thought the whole point was to be tough so you wouldn’t have to be afraid, but it seemed to me that the 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
This 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 Y
ale, 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 romantic crises and answered their tearful late-night calls. I knew the hell they wreaked on their boyfriends, and I thought it was funny—man, their boyfriends were suckers. I was too smart for such things. I lived by the code of Emersonian self-reliance. “Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee,” Emerson thundered. “If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.”
I was young, idealistic, and reluctant to learn any of the ways of the world, even when it would have been to my advantage to do so. I was wasted, not on drugs, but on something possibly worse. I read an aphorism of Nietzsche’s, in which he says, “The man who despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” I laughed and said, Totally. That describes everybody I know, except me. It was time for a change.
But how do you start getting out of your room? I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, “The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.” My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It’s like he’s reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I’ve been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I’m spinning through the same sounds I’ve been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I’ll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people? How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else? I loved a Modern Lovers song called, “Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste,” and I didn’t want to waste mine.
I felt like I was strong enough for a girl, but made for a woman. Yet I had no idea how to start looking to find this woman. Fortunately, she was looking for me.
Maria was a cool, punk-rock girl from Georgia who worked at the Waldenbooks in the Chapel Square Mall. She dyed her hair red and played bass in a hardcore band, the Uncalled Four. She’d dropped out of high school and taken the bus to New Haven to be with a boy. They broke up as soon as she arrived, but she stayed around town and got a job. One night, she spotted me at a hardcore show and smelled blood. She invited me over to her place. The first things I noticed were the Michael Stipe poster on the wall, her boombox, and loads of tapes. Then I noticed that she had no furniture except a mattress on the floor. You know the Beatles song where the girl invites John to sit down, except she doesn’t have a chair? This girl didn’t even have a rug. She put on a tape from her vast collection of R.E.M. bootlegs, a rehearsal tape from 1982. Michael Stipe started to sing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” The room began to spin.
I couldn’t believe she liked me. I couldn’t believe how much I liked her. She told me I looked like Dr. Robert from the Blow Monkeys. No girl ever told me I looked like anything before. In the evenings, I would get off work at the library and take the bus up Whalley Avenue to her house, where we’d order pizza and watch MTV. It was a great summer for bittersweet songs about the pangs of first love: Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue,” Simply Red’s “The Right Thing,” Eddie Money’s “Endless Nights,” Janet Jackson’s “Let’s Wait Awhile,” Mötley Cruë’s “Too Young to Fall in Love,” Sheila E.’s “Koo Koo,” Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me.”
It was the first time I had ever been in love. Suddenly, I felt like part of the world. I had never met a southern girl before, so Maria was full of surprises: She baked pies, she fried catfish, she pronounced “umbrella” funny, she called me “baby” totally unironically. I wondered, Where have southern girls been all my life? She was also an avid shoplifter. She told 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
As 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!”
Love Is a Mix Tape Page 4
