The Smiths

It is hardly a new re index velation that the music of one’s youth is that which is most resonant throughout the rest of our lives. It is the soundtrack of our adolescent development, the rhythm of our initiation into love, into heartbreak, and who we are in the process of becoming. And it sticks with us no matter how far beyond it we grow.

It is a conversation I frequently have with a colleague and friend. And though our references are often separated by a generation or two, there is enough overlap that we understand each other completely.

Libby Cudmore’s The Big Rewind is crafted around that very concept. The music throughout the novel –and there is a lot of it– is the underpinnings of both the solution of the murder mystery and the liberation of its protagonist, Jett Bennett.

Bennett, who had come to New York hoping to land a job in music journalism, feels very much a square peg in the ultra-hip(ster) world of Brooklyn. Her downstairs neighbor, KitKat, who is at the vortex of Brooklyn hipdom, has befriended her, but she dies in the first few pages, brutally murdered with a rolling pin.

And Bennett is the one who finds her.

Bennett had been bringing a mixed-tape to KitKat which had come in the mail and had mistakenly been delivered to her. Later, she “inherits” an entire box of KitKat’s mixed-tapes, music selected and arranged in such a way that Bennett believes they point to the identity of the killer.

And as she goes through KitKat’s tapes, she also re-discovers her own tapes and takes a journey through heartbreak and love and hope and despair. It is this music that will ultimately scattered the clouds that have been hanging heavily upon her.

Capturing the hipster world of Brooklyn, the basement night-clubs and the trendy brunch-eries, the world of vegans and punks and poseurs, among those selling vinyl records and those selling pot-laced cupcakes, Cudmore gives us a fast pace mystery that is fun, nostalgic and wry. Her eye for detail is unerring –given to us often with tongue firmly in her cheek. Irony is alive and well in Libby Cudmore.

Libby Cudmore

And Bennett is a hero we can love. She is vulnerable, honest, and striving to understand herself. And she believes in her truth, for which she will fight. With her friend Syd, she immerses herself into the world of punk music and strippers, academia and neighborhood community, of fetishes and memory. And she comes out okay.

There has been much written about The Big Rewind and comparing it to Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. And that is somewhat accurate. But whereas, Hornby’s novel is ultimately about his protagonist’s understanding his failures, successes and lost opportunities in love, The Big Rewind seems a little different. For one, it is a murder mystery and a fairly good one. And even after the solution seems evident, there are still enough issues yet to be resolved to keep the reader racing towards the end.

And that’s what I did. I began it somewhere over the Rockies on a red-eye flight to the East Coast and had it finished when I landed. It is that captivating.

I admit that much of the music, I did not know. Though there was still much that was familar. And many of Jett’s obsessions are understandable and familiar as well. At one point she plays Warren Zevon’s “Accidentally Like a Martyr” over and over again. I’ve done the same with the same song. (Both she, her friend Syd and I are serious Warren Zevon fans.) I know people who, like Jett, have had similar obsessions with the Cure and the Smiths, and some who know even the more obscure bands, like the Clarks. (Very big in Western Pennsylvania.)

Libby Cudmore is a shrewd observer, and the world she creates for her protagonist is honest and real. The Big Rewind is well worth the read.

It’s like finding a vinyl Tom Rush in the sales-bin.

“Love is a Mixed Tape”
illustration 2014 by jpbohannon
(based on book cover)

On two separate occasions, my friend Jim has stopped the car on the way to dropping me off at the train station to finish listening to Neil Young’s “Country Girl.” For him, he remembers a particular girlfriend who broke up with him oddly and for whom this song is a reminder. For me, I remember hitchhiking across Canada, sitting on the floor of a Winnipeg record store (Winnipeg was where Neil was born) and copying down the chords from a fake book. For both of us, the song is a lot more than just music and lyrics.

Jim and I often do this. The “where” and “when” of a song, the lives we were leading, the dreams we were having, the people we were hanging with, are as much a part of a song than any of its recordable parts. And for each of us, those elements are different and recall a thousand different memories.

This is the basis of Rob Sheffield’s memoir Love is a Mixed Tape. Sheffield–a writer for Rolling Stone–writes about his late wife and himself through the skeleton of different mixed tapes. The sub-title of the book is Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, and this is exactly it: the life of a man and the life of the woman he loved told through the soundtrack of their lives. And, for some of us, it is our lives as well.

Sheffield starts off going through his dead wife Renee’s belongings and discovering several of her mixed tapes, spending a sad night listening to the first one–The Smiths, Pavement, 10,000 Maniacs, R.E.M., Morrissey, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Boy George among them–commenting on her choices and their lives together when she made them. He talks about the various types of mixed tapes: the Party Tape, the “I Want You” tape, the “We’re Doing It” tape, the Road Tape, the “You Broke My Heart and Made Me Cry” tape, the Walking Tape, the Washing the Dishes tape. etc. From here he sets up his frame work–the tapes of our lives are the record of of our lives.

And so he begins. He starts by dissecting his own tapes, chronologically starting from a mixed tape he made as a thirteen-year old for an 8th-grade dance through his first romance and subsequent break up to his meeting Renee, their courtship and marriage, her sudden death and his struggles to continue on afterwards. It is poignant and wise writing about love and loss and survival.

Mixed Tape Sheffield made for his 8th-grade dance

Many of the bands I had never heard of–both he and his wife were music writers–but the pure affection and excitement that these two shared for new and old music was infectious. He was an Irish-Catholic boy from Boston who grew up on Led Zeppelin, the J. Giles Band, and Aerosmith; she, an Appalachian girl from West Virginia as familiar with George Jones and Hank Williams as she was with the punk bands she adored. Together they made a likeable pair. And their knowledge and love for music is wide and inclusive.

Sheffield met his wife in 1989 and she died in 1997. Their relationship lasted most of the 1990s and this is where Sheffield the music critic is at his best. His analysis of that decade, where the music was going and what it was doing is trenchant: he understands the phenomenon of Kurt Cobain, the importance of female empowerment in 90s’ music, the resurgence of guitar bands. (His discussion of Cobain’s late music/performances as the plights and pleas of a pained husband is unique and insightful and bittersweet.)

The naturally shy Sheffield–understandably–reverts into himself after his wife’s death. He is more and more asocial, awkward and uncomfortable. He writes eloquently about the pain of loss, of the condition of “widow-hood,” of unexpected kindness, and of the haunting of the past. Sadly, music–which once was his buoy in life–is pulling him down, especially the music that he and Renee had shared. In the end, however, it is music that pulls him together as well. He moves out of the south and to New York City, he reconnects with friends, makes new friends, and–of course–starts seeing and listening to new bands.

This is the tape–the last in the book–that Sheffield made when moving into a new apartment in Brooklyn, December 2002.

Love is a Mixed Tape was recommended to me by a friend, Brendan McLaughlin. Brendan was born in the mid-80’s, not long before Sheffield and his wife first met. He is connected much more closely to the music than I am, and I am sure that he recognized a lot more of the bands and songs cited than I did. But that is the great thing about Sheffield’s memoir: you don’t have to be completely tuned into what he is listening to, just to what he is saying.

And what he says is true.