Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (3 page)

roller boogie

DECEMBER 1979

L
ike a lot of stories,
this one begins, “I was too young to know better.” Like a lot of stories that begin “I was too young to know better,” this one involves Cheap Trick.

I’m a man of few regrets. Of course I regret paying money to see
Soul Plane
, and I regret taking a bus trip through scenic Pennsylvania Dutch country once, when I could have stayed home and watched MTV’s David Lee Roth Weekend. (There’ll be plenty of other David Lee Roth Weekends, I told myself. What was I thinking?) But most of all, I regret turning thirteen, and staying that way for the next ten years or so. Every time I dig up one of the tapes from my adolescence, it’s like making the Stations of the Cross, reliving one excruciatingly bad move after another.

Roller Boogie
is a relic from—when else?—the ’70s. This is a tape I made for the eighth-grade dance. The tape still plays, even if the cogs are a little creaky and the sound quality is dismal. It’s a ninety-minute TDK Compact Cassette, and like everything else made in the ’70s, it’s beige. It takes me back to the fall of 1979, when I was a shy, spastic, corduroy-clad Catholic kid from the suburbs of Boston, grief-stricken over the ’78 Red Sox. The words “douche” and “bag” have never coupled as passionately as they did in the person of my thirteen-year-old self. My body, my brain, my elbows that stuck out like switchblades, my feet that got tangled in my bike spokes, but most of all my soul—these formed the waterbed where douchitude and bagness made love sweet love with all the feral intensity of Burt Reynolds and Rachel Ward in
Sharky’s Machine
.

The only reason I ran for student council was so I’d get to be on the social activities committee, which meant planning the only part of the social activities I really cared about: the music. We got three dances that year, and I got the plum job of making the dance tapes.

It went without saying that I had to include “Free Bird” and “Stairway to Heaven.” The other selections were mine. As you can see from the playlist above, I knew school dances about as well as I knew tantric sex.
Roller Boogie
holds some of the least danceable grooves ever passed off in the name of getting down. Jesus H. Christ on ice and Mary in the penalty box! Why did I put Boston’s “Don’t Look Back” on a dance tape? Why did I think anybody would shake ass to ELO? Why was I not tarred and feathered by my classmates by the time the
third
J. Geils Band song came on?

But hey, I was the only kid who wanted the job, and I took it seriously. I borrowed records from people at school, kids who ordinarily would have sooner trusted me with their toothbrushes, retainers, and headgear than with their records. I immersed myself in the glorious masterpieces of the seventies, such as side one of the first Boston album, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, and side two of the first Boston album. I came to regard the J. Geils Band’s second live album as vastly inferior to the first. I wondered what the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven” meant.

I had never made out, smoked, drank, broken a law, set fire to a car, vandalized a cemetery, or worn socks that matched. But I had the passion for rock and roll; I was a regular Dr. Johnny Fever in the body of a Les Nessman. Nobody could truly understand my quest to rock—except maybe Annie, my favorite
Solid Gold
dancer. I was totally clueless about social interaction, and completely scared of girls. All I knew was that music was going to make girls fall in love with me.

So I approached my beatmaster duties with the same reverence I brought to my Sundays as an altar boy serving Mass. I approached my stereo sanctuary and genuflected. I lifted each vinyl wafer to the heavens. I unveiled the cassette ostentorium: “Take this, all of you, and rock. This is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you, and for all who rock, so that rock may be worshiped and glorified.”

Heidi From Algebra pulled me aside in the hallway and handed me her copy of the Rolling Stones’
Hot Rocks
. She didn’t even crack a smile. “‘Wild Horses,’” she told me. “It’s a slow dance. The girls like it.” She wouldn’t let go of the record until I gave her a “Wild Horses” guarantee, and then she disappeared down the hall. It was the only conversation we ever had.

“Rock, I am not worthy to receive you. But only say the word, and I shall be healed.”

“Nobody cares about the music at these things, you know,” my dad told me. “They go to meet girls.” I chuckled. Oh, Dad, you are so out of it.

The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics, as in: “Girl, you really got me goin’, I don’t know who you’re blowin’,” or “Eleanor Rigby, blowing the groom in a church where a wedding has been,” or “Something in the way she blows me,” or “And though she was born a long, long time ago, your mother should blow.” And blow on.

I listened to rock station WCOZ in eighth grade, and slept under a WCOZ poster that depicted a giant space robot who used a light saber to slash “94.5 FM” into the very fabric of the galaxy. I had rock-and-roll parents, who played the Famous Jim Sands Oldies show on WBZ all the time. They used to slow-dance in the kitchen to songs like “In the Still of the Nite.” They watched
Happy Days
with us and explained that the Fonz was not really so cool because he liked Frankie Avalon. In our house, the radio was always on. Even our babysitter Regina, a crazy old Irish lady from Dorchester, used to chain-smoke in the kitchen and sing along with Dionne Warwick at the top of her tarry lungs, when she wasn’t offering my sisters dating advice such as “Never give ’em anything for free.”

I had three little sisters—Ann, Tracey, and Caroline—and we were all devoted to our radios. We bought our first record together, chipping in two bucks apiece and ordering
The Best of the Monkees
off of TV. I adored the Monkees, but I was terrified of Mickey Dolenz. For some reason, I got the notion in my head that Mickey Dolenz was what happened if you smoked pot—you made screwy faces, you talked too loud, you bugged everybody. I was convinced Mickey got this way from drugs, which also explained his dashiki—he was obviously a nice Irish boy gone wrong. I suspect that over the course of my life, my chemical experimentation has been severely curtailed by the specter of Mickey Dolenz.

Ann and Tracey were on the basketball team, so they learned cool dances to go with disco tunes like “It’s Raining Men” and “We Are Family.” I loved those disco hits, but I knew enough to keep this a secret in front of other guys. My sisters were also into Rick Springfield. Every day after school, I’d watch
General Hospital
with them to see if Rick was finally going to make some sharin’-the-night-together magic with Bobbie Spencer. One night, Mom and Dad took Tracey and her friends to see Rick Springfield at the Providence Civic Center. On the way out of the parking lot, they got behind a bus that everybody agreed
had
to be Rick Springfield’s tour bus. My dad tailed the bus all the way up I-95 to Boston, with four girls screaming in the backseat. They lost him on the Southeast Expressway, right near the Chinatown exit, but Dad drove around to all the downtown hotels so the girls could barge into the lobbies and ask for Mr. Springfield. To this day, Tracey’s computer password is MUS-134, Rick’s license plate.

I always envied my friends who had older siblings who could guide them through the teenage wasteland. They got a head start. My next-door neighbor Jeff had an older brother, Barry, and an older sister, Susan. I would often sit in the tree in our front yard and breathe in their aura. Every weekend, Barry wore his T-shirt with the cover of Boston’s first album, and washed his Trans Am in the driveway while cranking “Peace of Mind.” He had a basement room with black lightbulbs, guitars, and a piranha. Some afternoons, he’d let us watch the piranha eat goldfish. He also had a girlfriend named Nancy, who he wouldn’t let us watch at all.

Susan was a real seventies girl, blond feathered hair and all, one braid dangling down the side of her face. Her CB-radio handle was Whammer Jammer, after a J. Geils Band song. Once I was in the tree while she was on the porch with a boy. I was hoping she didn’t see me, but she came over to talk. She said, “You won’t tell my mom I was smoking, will you?” I said, Of course not. She kissed me on the cheek and said, “You’re a doll.” She was more than a woman to me.

Every day Susan came home after school and followed the same ritual: She opened her bedroom window and played one or both of her favorite albums, Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
(side two only) and Boz Scaggs’s
Silk Degrees
(side one only). Sometimes, she would just play her favorite songs. She would play Boz Scaggs’s “Georgia” for hours, lifting the needle over and over. If Susan wasn’t in the mood for “Georgia,” she would play the second half of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain,” starting with the bass solo and then going into the “Chaaa-yaaay-yaaain!” chant. I would sit in my tree, gazing up at Susan’s window and trying to imagine her intense communion with the music and what it must feel like inside her soul at such moments.

When you’re a little kid, you’re fascinated by the mystery of what the big kids do, and for me these mysteries were associated with music. The music I loved kept scaring the bejeezus out of me, with the nebulous concepts of “sex” and “drugs.” I’d sit in the basement with Eddie and Jimmy Durfer, listening to records like Meat Loaf’s
Bat out of Hell
or Kiss’s
Alive II
, trying to figure out the plots. The music was full of danger. Every note evoked the terror of the don’t-take-drugs paperbacks I’d read at school, like
Go Ask Alice
(“Dear diary, the squirrels are eating my face again”) or
That Was Then, This Is Now
(“The colors screamed at me! Purple screamed loudest!”). At school, we studied Rush’s
2112
and
Lord of the Rings
. In the cafeteria, I looked anxiously at my chocolate milk and recalled how Alice got dosed at the sleepover party. Was somebody playing “button, button, who’s got the button” with our lunches? Would my teacher do such a thing? Why not? She was into
Lord of the Rings
. I was just one chocolate-milk mustache away from slipping into a hellhole of bare feet and crash pads and diary entries like “another day, another blowjob” until my inevitable fatal pot overdose.

But I couldn’t wait for the eighth-grade dance—this was the culmination of my years of obsession with rockness. I spent days sweating over those dance tapes.

“Hey, I like this one,” my mom said. “We will, we will rock you! That’s a catchy song!”

I erased “We Will Rock You.”

The night of the dance, the whole class gathered in Strauss Hall. The girls looked very cool over on their side of the room, a swirl of velour and Love’s Baby Soft. The boys did not look so cool. Every time a rocking song came on, the girls would sit down. It was enough to make you doubt their commitment to rockness. When the boys busted out the air guitar, the girls parked the Calvin Klein labels on their jeans firmly on the bench. In fact, the harder the boys rocked, the farther away the girls drifted. That night, I learned the hard way: If the girls keep dancing, everybody’s happy. If the girls don’t dance,
nobody’s
happy.

The girls got hot for “Pop Muzik” and “Heart of Glass” and “Bad Girls.” The boys stood around and waited for rock anthems so we could untuck our shirts and chant the lyrics to “Hot Blooded,” which by some strange coincidence were the same as the title. But all the majesty of rock could not impress these girls; it failed to move their stony hearts despite the cathedral-like grandeur of Tom Scholz’s guitar solo in the second movement of Boston’s “Don’t Look Back.” Asking a classmate to dance was scary enough when the song was a girl-pleaser. But when the song involved acoustic guitars and elaborate metaphors about bustles in hedgerows? Out of the question! Girls did not care whether a dance tape had the live version of “Carry On Wayward Son” or the studio version. In fact, they did not want to hear “Carry On Wayward Son” at all. What was wrong with these people?

It was a painful night, but I got the message: Let the dancing girls dance. That’s the one ironclad rule of pop muzik, whether in New York, London, Paris, or Munich, and I’m just lucky I learned it so early. I had always been taught to fear disco, and to fear the disco inside me. But by the second verse of “Bad Girls,” it was obvious everything I knew was wrong. “Toot toot, beep beep” was meaningful on a much deeper level than I could have fathomed.

For me, this was a humbling lesson, as well as my introduction to the principle of “bitch power,” as first elucidated by the great twentieth-century philosopher Rick James. Bitch power blew my mind. Rick explained it all in an issue of
Creem
magazine that I carried around in my backpack. According to Rick James:

It’s this kind of syndrome—where if a guy sees his girlfriend likin’ somebody, that’s called ‘bitch power.’ Like Elvis Presley was hated by men,
hated
, ’cause he had bitch power. Teddy Pendergrass has bitch power. I just found out that
I
have a little bitch power. But beyond bitch power, I have something else, that men
like
—and that’s the
truth
, and the down-to-earth shit, OK? So men don’t mind bringin’ their women to see me, ’cause I have bitch power but it’s in another way.