Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

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,