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

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.
             
    If Rick is to be trusted—and he always is—bitch power is the juice, the sweat, the blood that keeps pop music going. Rick James helped me understand the lesson of the eighth-grade dance: Bitch power rules the world. If the girls don’t like the music, they sit down and stop the show. You gotta have a crowd if you wanna have a show. And the girls
are
the show. We’re talking absolute monarchy, with no rules of succession. Bitch power. She must be obeyed. She must be feared.
    As a thirteen-year-old boy, I had plenty of reasons to fear bitch power. But when she came knocking, I had no choice. I bowed and worshiped. Toot toot. Beep beep. But I have to admit, I have no regrets about including the live version of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.” I picked the song because it was a slow dance, but I picked the live version because Steven Tyler screams the word “motherfucker” in the second verse (“all the things you do, motherfucker, come back to yooouuuuu!”), and that was just
so
cool. For that one line, I cranked the volume up into the red, hoping it would rile the chaperoning math teachers, not realizing that they were way too stoned to notice. I also knew that “Dream On” came on right after “Off the Wall,” and I decided to exploit this inside knowledge. I innocently chose that moment to ask the beautiful Sarah Farrah Field Hockey to dance, before she or anybody else realized it was Aerosmith slow-dance time. This is one of the most daring things I did in my entire life. But I paid the price. As I held loosely to the long-pined-for waistline of Sarah Farrah Field Hockey and frantically tried to hide my boner, my friends were making faces at me behind her back, trying to make me giggle. While Steven Tyler was dreaming on until his dreams came true, Sarah Farrah Field Hockey was smirking, “What’s so funny?” The horror. The horror.

tape 635
    JUNE 1980

    C
amp Don Bosco in East Barrington
, New Hampshire, was a Catholic summer camp for boys aged eight to fifteen, run by priests and brothers of the Salesian Order. I was a camper there in the summers of 1980 and 1981. It was in the middle of a pine forest four hours north of Boston, with a lake and grassy dells, far from any other human dwelling. St. John Bosco (1815–1888) was an Italian priest, canonized in 1934, who founded the Salesian Order to bring the gospel to destitute boys.
    Almost