Lamentations of the Perfect Mixtape

I came into this world with two reels, 90 minutes of unspoiled magnetic tape, and the hope that one day I would be the demo tape that heralded the arrival of the next great American rock band. I had no interest in pop confections, nor did I want to be just another talentless garage band’s fleeting hopes of escaping an ordinary suburban life. I wanted to be the first chapter of a history book yet to be written. To watch the next rock legends come together in a perfect union of talent, trauma, and sheer determination and, like a pinecone opening in a wildfire, deliver to a world in turmoil the first seeds of a new musical revolution. I wanted to bear the blueprints for a better world, written by commoners who would settle for nothing less than to become kings. 

Short of that, I would have been satisfied to catch on my reels a shooting star. To be on hand for the first and last gasps of a newborn collaboration too talented and self-destructive to survive outside the creative womb. The one and only recording of a supergroup before any of them knew they were super. Oh, that I might have served as the only evidence of the coming together of giants who had not yet grown into their musical beanstalks! To be both birth notice and epitaph to a band that could not survive in the long shadow of its own towering possibility, and later be excavated from some recording studio supply closet and recognized as a holy artifact belonging to a new religion. A lost testament to the dreamers who had not yet struck the chords that would signal their apotheosis into rock gods. That would have been a worthy endeavor. Alas. 

I suppose I might even have been able to endure the indignity of being host to a live recording of one of those inexplicably popular jam bands who seemingly crawled out of the primordial ooze already on tour. The music is barely listenable, sure, but that’s not the point. It’s the unique shared experience, a moment frozen in time, significant only to those who were there to hear it. In this, I would be so many moments to so many people, marking with each 20-minute guitar solo the moment two lovers met in an outhouse, or conceived their child, also in an outhouse. To be passed from one patchouli-scented tent to another in muddy fields across the country, a cherished heirloom shared between a family of thousands. 

A whole world of endless musical possibilities, and where do I end up? As a teenage boy’s romantic mix-tape. The product of a horny adolescent slapping together thematically connected songs written and performed by braver and more talented people. Truly one of the lowest forms of musical expression. 

And this was how I peaked! It was even worse before this, my final form. Let me paint a picture.

The first song I ever recorded was “Hangin’ Tough” by New Kids on the Block. Recorded off the radio in a room with pink walls by a girl with green rubber bands in her braces. She waited patiently by the radio, her finger hovering over the cassette player’s red “Record” button as she listened to the nightly radio countdown of the top ten requested songs of the day. The beginning of the song was cut off on her first attempt because she expected the song to be number one and was pulling a deeper meaning from a signature left in her yearbook when the song came on in the two-slot. She got it the next night, ready at two but thrilled to get a perfect recording when it became the number one song in the land. She played that recording on repeat for a week straight before getting the band’s cassette album for Christmas a few weeks later. 

I was left behind, forgotten in a boombox. Then her older brother Richie found me. 

Richie was stricken by that affliction so many young men succumb to at sixteen: unrequited love. And he made the fatal mistake so many young men have before him—he made her a playlist. “Emily’s Playlist” he wrote on the label, the ghost of “Hangin’ Tough” still visible through the whiteout.

Oh, how he labored over the creation of his masterpiece! He was a baseball player with a poet’s heart who found the poetry for what he couldn’t put into words in the song titles and lyrics of bands he thought he loved until he experienced what he felt for Emily. He labored over the order of the songs, deftly manipulating tempo, genre, and lyrics to chart the highs and lows of his emotional turmoil. The final result was a grotesque melange of hairband power ballads, syrupy R&B standards, and cloying country dirges that, if not for the surprisingly tasteful inclusion of an Afghan Whigs b-side, would represent the worst collection of songs ever assembled. 

I was too busy mourning my own circumstances to have any sympathy for the boy.

Emily, to her credit, got as far as All-4-One’s “I Swear” before she and her friends collapsed into a pile of cackling second-hand embarrassment. 

But a few days later, something funny happened. Emily listened to “Emily’s Playlist” from beginning to end. And then she did it again. Certainly not something I would have expected judging by the proliferation of Stevie Wonder albums in her record collection, which suggested a more refined musical palette. To say I was disappointed was an understatement; I’d been holding out hope she’d record Songs in the Key of Life over Richie’s clumsy overture and put me out of my misery. 

She played those songs day and night, for weeks. Occasionally, she would smile broadly and hit the eject button to trace Richie’s unsteady cursive with the tip of her finger. Weeks ran into months, and soon “Emily’s Playlist” was in the tapedeck of her first car. It was then, when she picked up Richie for what would be the first of countless nights driving together, the Afghan Whigs’ “Mr. Superlove” blaring through her tinny speakers, that I realized what had happened. Somehow, in defiance of all logic, reason, and good taste, “Emily’s Playlist” had worked. 

I’ve traveled a lot since then. I was a permanent fixture in Emily’s first three cars, if only as an often discarded accessory left under a seat. Not as glamorous as crisscrossing the country with Dave Matthews zealots, but by then my dreams of participating in some greater purpose had long faded away, and a quiet year or two on the floor of a Plymouth Neon was about the best I could hope for. 

For a short time, I held an honored position amongst Richie and Emily’s cassette collection in their first apartment, between Emily’s copy of Purple Rain and Richie’s copy of Hysteria. But by then the proliferation of superior listening alternatives had rendered me and my companions obsolete, and soon the cassettes were discarded. Except for me. Nostalgia earned me a pardon from the city dump and a quiet retirement in an old shoebox, laying on a bed of letters exchanged between Richie and Emily when she went away for college. 

And that is where I have been ever since. Until today.

I had long ago accepted that I would never be put to use again. You can imagine my surprise when a young man bearing a striking resemblance to Richie pulled me from my isolation and slid me into a stereo tape deck. Was it the first time All-4-One’s “I Swear” was played in a hospital room? Perhaps not, but I like to think it was. 

Emily was there, in a chair next to the hospital bed where Richie lay. She was so much older than I remembered, until music filled the room, and then she smiled and became the girl who thought all the world’s mystery and possibility could be contained in a handful of tracks and a boy’s messy cursive. 

Track one gave way to track two. Emily put her head on Richie’s narrow shoulder. Their son lingered in the doorway for a moment, a sleeping toddler in his arms, before he closed the door and left his parents to their memories.