My Mix-Tape Heart

I love music.  I love almost all its genres, unless you try to lay some grotesque slab of Swedish death metal or – worse – Justin Bieber, on me … then we’d have kind of a problem on our hands.  Generally, though, in any given hour of the day, I’m quite content – and capable of – listening to everyone from Igor Stravinsky to Roy Orbison, Boston to Nick Drake, Jerry Goldsmith to Motorhead, and, well, almost anything above, below, betwixt, and between.  You get my drift.

I’m not the least bit ashamed to say that in times of seclusion and uncertainty, I gain the greatest sense of solace by going back to the golden oldies that have been playing in the jukebox (or, perhaps as befits modern times, the MP3 player) of my memories since my youth. 

It can sometimes be a great comfort that, for example, when some great never-was love – some boy or classmate who comes to mind who I swooned over from afar in a wrenchingly lovelorn way in middle school and up – comes to mind now, I can pop in Boston’s debut album and let rip with “More Than A Feeling” at top volume, and pathetically attempt to sing along to Brad Delp’s acrobatic tweeter-shattering vocals.  Brad was singing about Mary Ann slipping away, but when I croak it out, I’m thinking of J.J. or Chris or Mark.  Listening or singing along doesn’t literally turn back the clock, nor does it bring my unwitting heartbreakers forward to me in the present day. 

What the music does do is allow me to go into that place in my mind where, although it probably seems masochistic, I can try to reenact, repurpose, or hopefully transcend all the imagined missed opportunities and isolated junior high school Friday nights.  It entreats me to rewrite the yearbooks of my adolescence and gangly, awkward teenage years when – while the other kids where out reveling in sleepovers,  going to parties, sneaking smokes while walking to the high school football games, or trying to get past first base on weekend nights with the homeroom honeys – I was holed up in my family’s basement dorkishly reading Superman comic books or watching the grade-A cornball sci-fi TV programs that were broadcast on Friday nights especially for closet-case, geek-chic recluses like me.

Maybe the music was waiting in the wings, yearning to be played so it could tell me something about the diaphanous mysteries of love and life.  Sometimes, though, the songs stuck the knife in and turned just a little too much for comfort, especially later when the Big ‘80s boomed.  Eddie Money’s “Endless Nights.”  Aretha Franklin’s “Until You Say You Love Me.”  Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy.”  The list goes on almost ad infinitum.

Or Heart’s “I Want You So Bad,” being one particularly beautiful, nasty example.  How discourteous, Ann and Nancy Wilson; if you were standing outside my bedroom door eavesdropping on my muffled, wishful tears falling over the second-period boy in high school who I wanted to kick a little paper-football love note to across the room, the least you could’ve done was cut me a big royalty check and slip it under the door when your Bad Animals CD went stratospheric.  I know you didn’t write the song, but you sang it, for goodness sake.  I’m sure somebody involved with that song was inspired by my bittersweet teen angst agony, you know.  Geez.  That’s gratitude for you.

Looking back, I’m genuinely surprised that my all my cheese-tastic lovelorn sentimentality didn’t take me down like knee injuries sideline football players or tranquilizer darts fell runaway elephants, particularly when you consider that it was set to a soundtrack of so many really bad ‘80s pop songs.  Amazing, really.  (If it’s any reassurance to you, my musical taste has gotten much better since then.)  I could continue to wax nostalgic about all the music that filled the literal and figurative mix-tapes of my youth, but I’d just be digging a deeper hole and you’d lose even more respect for me. 

Or do we all share the same condition of wishing we could press the rewind button and, in spite of ourselves, play that one special song again – however good or bad a memory it may trigger – from the relatively safe retrospection point afforded only by the passage of time and the adulthood that, for all our wailing and whining about the end of the world as we know it, we never thought we’d live to see?