The next morning I opened the book without studying the cover very closely and started reading. Here's Rob Sheffield, a music journalist I know I've seen a couple of times on one of those VH1 "Best Hottest Mostest F****ingest Greatest" clip shows that we're all secretly addicted to, the sirensong of Def Leppard causing us all to crash on the rocks on a lazy Saturday afternoon. The conceit of the book is Rob reviewing his mixtape collection and recalling for the reader the events in his life when he made each tape. The first chapter reads like he's just broken up with his wife Renee, and I was grooving on Rob's style, he's clever without being smarmy, a great mix of the raw emotion he's recalling and the sense of humor that time's perspective has given him. I kept grooving until I hit the end of the chapter: Renee didn't break up with him. Renee died, dropped to the floor in midtask with a pulmonary embolism. I looked at the cover more closely and read the subtitle: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time.
Damn, I just got over The Road, could I take another downer?
Luckily for me I pressed on. This isn't an epic love story, these aren't lovers trapped behind enemy lines during a blizzard running from Nazi pitbull cyborgs. This is the story of two people who fall for each other, fall hard like we can when we're too damn lucky to know we're that lucky. Their initial common touchpoint is the music they both love and that grows into the music they each love and introduce to the other and the music they discover together, and Rob lays it out for us tape by tape, a mental soundtrack that carries their story along. They're one of those great couples you think will go on together forever. And then they don't. It's both heart-breaking and life-affirming, but Sheffield doesn't make the argument that her death and his loss made him stronger. In fact, he finds great identification with a quote from Emerson: "I grieve that grief can teach me nothing[...]."
Rob and Renee were DJs at their local radio station. Some of the happier times of my life were when I was a DJ on my college station. It was the late 80's and our station thumbed its nose at the top 40 sound the local pro station was running into the ground (I think they took 'top 40' literally, they never seemed to have more than 40 songs in rotation). Instead, we played music from the growing college radio scene, bands like Hüsker Dü, R.E.M., 10000 Maniacs, The Clash, Fishbone, The Smiths. Some of the bands we played I can't find record of anywhere, even as I can still hear their songs in my head. For a guy raised on Billy Joel and Chicago, being a DJ there opened my ears to a whole new part of my personality.
One album all the DJs played until you could see through the grooves was Prefab Sprout's Two Wheels Good, known outside the U.S. as Steve McQueen.
I'd first heard another DJ closing his shows with "Moving The River" each week, then began picking tracks blindly during my own shows. One day I was thinking of playing "Goodbye Lucille #1" since I hadn't played it yet, and another DJ passing in the hall rapped on the studio window, shouting behind the glass, "'Goodbye Lucille'!" Sounded like divine intervention to me, so on it went. Divine indeed, the song hooked me and the album became the very first CD I ever purchased. It was pop, perfect pop, baby, yet it was hip enough for the cool crowd. It burned up the UK charts for seven or eight months.
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