Falling in love with Renée was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-along. She would wake up in the middle of the night and say things like “What if Bad Bad Leroy Brown was a girl?” or “Why don’t they have commercials for salt like they do for milk?” Then she would fall back to sleep, while I would lie awake and give thanks for this alien creature beside whom I rested.
This might be the saddest love story ever told. But it might also be the a great illusion. It’s easy to idealize a person that’s no longer with us, in fact it’s the only thing you can do.
As far as mix tapes go, “Big Star: For Renée” is totally unimaginative. It’s basically just one complete album on each side of a tape. But this is the tape that changed everything.
Everybody wants to find a love like that. Nobody wants to loose it. Just go read this love story and listen to Wavorly: A Summer’s Song.
She had more energy than anybody I’d ever met. She was in love with the world. She was warm and loud and impulsive. One day, she announced she had found the guitar of her dreams at a local junk shop. I said, “You don’t even play the guitar.”
And Don’t Stop Believing.