The Pretenders Ain’t Sobbing
Chrissie Hynde, the Pretenders‘ singer and songwriter, unzips her trademark black leather pants and pushes them unceremoniously down around her ankles. She is wearing what appear to be old-fashioned white cotton underpants. I try not to gawk. The silence here in the quilt-walled living compartment of the Pretenders’ comfortably appointed tour bus is broken only by the clatter of a relentless March rainstorm playing popcorn rhythms on the metal roof, and by occasional shouts and soggy laughter from a nearby group of about a hundred Pretenders fans lined up outside an already-packed club called Detroit, in Port Chester, New York. Chrissie reaches into a capacious handbag, pulls out the elastic support band she has nearly forgotten, slips it over her foot and up her leg, and positions it around her right knee, which — she informs me — she recently strained.
“Ten minutes left,” says Dave Hill, the Pretenders’ manager, who is alertly perched on the edge of a chair near the bus door. “Ten minutes?” Chrissie responds. “That suits me. It’s just ten minutes less of me boozin’ before we go on.” She flashes Hill a reassuring grin as she hitches up her britches. “But I haven’t had a drink,” she quickly adds. Hill, shiny-cheeked and boyish at twenty-six, is businesslike in a low-key, British way, and he casts an appraising glance at his chief charge. The pale, mercurial Hynde, who’s twenty-eight, looks tired. Nine days into the Pretenders’ two-month maiden tour of North America — with the group’s self-titled debut album already bulleting toward the U.S. Top Twenty — the booze, the boredom, the incessant rain and general dankness of life on the road already are taking a toll on her.
“You’ve got those black lines under your eyes,” Hill says solicitously. Chrissie’s forehead — what can be seen of it through her long, raven bangs — crinkles in mock dismay. “It took me five minutes to put’em there,” she protests with a wounded whine. “I don’t feel quite like a woman until I’ve got my eyes drawn on,” she tells me, turning to assess her reflection in a full-length mirror. “I’ve got a technique that doesn’t take any time, and you can do it when you’re drunk.”
Not quite happy with her somber ensemble of black leather and dark blue denim, she reaches over to the sofa for her favorite hat — a screaming pink, fake-fur coonskin cap, complete with a tawdry little tail. “Got it in London,” she says a bit defensively, positioning the hat on her head. “I don’t try to be tacky and out of fashion, but somehow I can never get it right. If I put on something pretty, it would be a joke, you know? I can’t help it.”
After a last, semi-satisfied look in the mirror, Chrissie sweeps up her red leather motorcycle jacket (“It’s got my perfume in it”), and we both follow Hill out the door and into the teeming rain. It’s show time again.
There’s a pronounced buzz in the air about the Pretenders: this is only the group’s seventh American gig, and the saga of their whirlwind British success (three hit singles and a subtly startling debut LP that reached the top of the charts) has whetted Anglophile appetites here for months. The Pretenders arrived out of nowhere in January 1979 with a billowing, Nick Lowe-produced revamp of an obscure 1964 Kinks track called “Stop Your Sobbing.” It was a breath of classic pop freshness for a musical scene that had bogged down in post-punk predictability. But “Sobbing” gave no hint of the band’s range or originality, qualities confirmed by the self-penned follow-up singles: “Kid,” with its wistful melody and alluringly ambiguous lyrics, and “Brass in Pocket,” a near-Motown-ish declaration of female sexual assertiveness.
The clincher was the LP Pretenders, released last January, on which American expatriate Chrissie Hynde proved herself one of the most completely convincing female rock & rollers in recent memory. A stingingly effective rhythm guitarist whose voice combines the fluidity of jazz singing with the rawness of rock, Hynde wrote or cowrote ten of the album’s twelve tracks, imbuing many of them with a psychosexual candor that goes beyond even the bounds recently set by Marianne Faithfull. Add to this a rhythm section that can rock out ferociously in seven-four time, if necessary, and a lead guitarist whose combination of precision and flamboyance sometimes recalls the young Jeff Beck, and you’ve got an album that — as Pete Townshend recently described it on a British radio show — is “like a drug.”
But the question that hangs in the air here at Detroit is: can they deliver?
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