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Spring, 2008
By Liam Rinehart
A & E Reporter
In a bar in Virginia in the late months of 1989, the shy and soft spoken Rob Sheffield met Rene. It wasn’t excessive drink or a mutual friend that brought them together, but rather the achingly beautiful “Thirteen” by Big Star. Although the relationship was far from easy in the beginning, Sheffield's chronicles how their mutual love of music and the mix tape brought them together in his book “Love Is A Mix Tape.” Even though music is an integral part of the plot, the book is really a memorial to Rene, who died suddenly at 31.
"We had nothing in common, except we both loved music,” he wrote in the book. “It was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. We did a lot of work to meet in the middle. Music brought us together." Their worlds could not have been further apart. Sheffield was a quasi-recluse and Rene, as he described it, was “a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl.”
As is painfully obvious, each of the mix tapes that Sheffield compiles and then lists at the beginning of each chapter helps to illuminate his feelings at the time, especially when it concerns Rene. In an interview with NPR, Sheffield recollected how emotional he became when he started to listen to some of the old tapes while working on this book. There is no doubt that art can have a profound effect on people, and this book helps to bridge that connection between life and music to which so many can relate.
One of the most memorable scenes in the book is one in which Rob and Rene are riding in her Chrysler in the back country of South Carolina. In the middle of a sun drenched Sunday, they began to sing to Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Call Me The Breeze." Sheffield, looking back at this time, wrote “There is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment.”
He went on by explaining that, “There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl's hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else.”
Nick Hornby, the writer of the cult classic “High Fidelity” once said, “I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there’s something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It’s the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part”
Hornby was right. Music can touch us in strange and amazing ways, and the story of Nathaniel Ayers shows how music might transform life. In “The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music,” Steve Lopez, a columnist for the L.A. Times, describes his tumultous and emotion relationship with Ayers.
A couple years ago, Lopez was slowly walking back to his office in downtown LA when he heard the beautiful sound of a violin. As he got closer to the player, Lopez found that a homeless man was coaxing sounds from a violin that had only two strings. Lopez was taken back, and soon he approached the man, trying to strike up a conversation.
Over the next few months, Lopez began to talk to Nathaniel Ayers and soon learned more about his life. At one point in the 1970s, Ayers was a promising student at Juilliard. However, the stress of the school eventually precipitated bouts of extreme schizophrenia, causing him to drop out. For the next 30 years, he was in and out of hospitals. When his mother died in late 2001, Ayers ended up on the streets of Los Angeles, where he began to play his violin because he was, “drawn by a statue of Beethoven in a local park.”
Lopez reached out to Ayers and enlisted the help of doctors, mental health professionals, and professional musicians, to get him back on his feet. Throughout the book, which originally was written as a series of columns, Lopez faces setbacks and disappointments with Nathaniel. At one point, Ayers even threatens to kill him. But, as time passes, both move forward. Lopez gains patience and respect for the calming effect of music, while Ayers goes from a homeless man to a resident in an assisted living complex.
While Ayers has not been fully cured of his mental ailments, Lopez knows that a lot of progress has been made. Indeed, he knows that patience and the hidden intricacies of music can mean all the world.
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