BIG STAR: FOR RENEE October, 1989 Side One Big Star: Sister Lovers plus The Bats: Sir Queen Velvet Underground: Radio Ad; Side Two Big Star: Radio City; plus Lucinda Williams: I Just Wanted To See You So Bad; The Raincoats: Only Loved At Night; Marti Jones: Lonely Is As Lonely Does; As far as mix tapes go, Big Star: For Renee is totally unimaginative. It's basically just one complete album on each side of a tape. But this is the tape that changed everything. Everything in my life comes directly from this Maxell XLII crush tape, made on October 10, 1989, for Renee. Renee and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renee was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renee's bourbon-baked voice.
The bartender put on Big Star'sRadio City. Renee was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song - the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She'd never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I'd told every other woman I'd ever fallen for: "I'll make you a tape!" As Renee left the bar, I asked my friend, "What was that girl's name again?" "Renee." "She's really beautiful." "Uh huh.
And there' her boyfriend." The boyfriend's name was Jimm, and he really did spell his name with two M's, a dealbreaker if I ever heard one. Renee had actually just broken up with the guy that night, but I didn't know that yet. So I just cursed my luck, and crushed out on her from afar. I memorized her teaching schedule, and hung around the English department whenever she had office hours, hoping to run into her in the hallway. I wrote poems about her. I made her this tape, and slipped it into her mailbox. I just taped my two favorite Big Star albums, and filled up the spaces at the end of the tape with other songs I liked, hoping it would impress her.
How cool was this girl? She was an Appalachian country girl from southwestern Virginia, Pulaski County. She had big curly brown hair, little round glasses, a girlish drawl. I just knew her favorite Go-Go was Jane Wiedlin. One Saturday night we met at a party and danced to a few B-52's songs. Like all Southern girls, Renee had an intense relationship with the first three B-52's albums. "All girls are either Kate girls or Cindy girls," she told me. "Like how boys are either Beatles or Stones boys. You like them both, but there's only one who's totally yours.
" Her B-52 idol was Kate, the brunette with the auburn melancholy in her voice. I wanted to stay all night and keep talking to Renee about the B-52s, but my ride wanted to go early. So I left her stranded and went home to pace up and down the parking lot outside the subdivision, shivering in the cold with my Walkman, listening to Prince's 'Little Red Corvette.' The ache in his voice summed up my mood, as Prince sang about a girl driving right past him, the kind of car that doesn't pass you every day. Renee and I ran into each other again when the poet John Ashbery came to town for a reading. He was one of my idol.