return to menu of Pretenders articlesoriginally posted at: http://www.papermag.com/magazine/hynde.html
I remember the first time I heard "Precious" blasting from a friend's stereo. Chrissie Hynde's signature voice could spell seduction and destruction in a single breath. It was a catcall reversed, a fierce dose of female machisma and, for an awkward teenager like me, that overwhelming sense of sexiness and self-confidence was intoxicating. Later on in the song, when she exclaimed, "But not me baby, 'cause I'm too precious/So fuck off," I knew she would be the rock role model for me.
Hynde wasn't your typical rock chick who was too jaded to have feelings. She was always a dreamer, a devoted lover who dared to stand by a man when it would have been easier to denounce him. Her ballads revealed a vulnerability few other women singers would touch. And she always had enough composure to know when to stop. That's why the Pretenders' latest outing, The Isle of View (Warner Bros.), on which they perform their "greatest hits" with the Duke String Quartet, is nothing short of brilliant. The band played an acoustic set - "unplugged" if you must - with all the fire and passion of their early years. Hynde is no aging rock star making a comeback. She merely took an eight-year leave from touring to raise her daughters. She's a survivor, an artist who never settles for less, a mother who isn't trying to juggle it all. Sitting in her hotel suite a few days after her shows at Symphony Space, Hynde spoke freely about her music, her image, her life.
Marisa Fox: Did you miss touring all those years?
Chrissie Hynde: It's like getting back on a bike. I wasn't at liberty to do much for eight years. I had children just getting into school.
MF: I grew up on your records, and here I am in a different place in my life. The songs on The Isle of View were performed in a way that allowed me to absorb them in a different capacity, and they still had such poignancy and meaning.
CH: When you're young, you don't feel like it's all ever coming to an end. You have this furtive feeling in your 20s. It just looks endless; life has no boundaries. By the time you're 30 and you're trying to dump all of your addictions, you start to stop and reconsider: Wait a minute, where was I? It's coming-down-to-earth time a little; you realize there's a lot of shit to get rid of. And now I'm 44, and I've gone through many years of "This can't last much longer."
MF: Do you ever get overwhelmed by the emotions of some of your earlier songs like "Back on the Chain Gang"?
CH: Not often. I don't usually get a flood of memories or anything like that. Sometimes onstage I'm reduced to tears. Fortunately, no one's up that close to see it.
MF: Through the years you've been hailed as this...
CH: ...Hard-ass. I know.
MF: Yet the songs express such depth and vulnerability. It's such a different sensibility from...
CH: ...Well, that rock-chick handle.
MF: Is it something you think women have been forced into?
CH: No, I have never been forced into anything. I've flippantly dismissed the female rock question for years, but now I find it interesting because there are a lot more women in rock. It's valid now. I never had to work harder or fight harder or not be taken seriously. The record company never suggested that I show more Cleveland, uh, cleavage. I don't know what everyone was complaining about - it never happened to me. I'm no pioneer. I've done nothing groundbreaking. If anything, I've been traditional. I'm in your typical four-piece rock band, and as it so happened, no chicks ever applied for the job. We advertised.
MF: So where do you think the tough-chick thing came from? Were you a hard-ass growing up?
CH: No, I think people just assume. My strong point is that I led my band to glory and that my guys do their best performances with me. Maybe I'm a loudmouth, I don't know.
MF: How are you raising your kids?
CH: Well, I have girls, so it's different. But if I had a boy, I'd certainly teach him how to make his own fuckin' bed. But I don't really want to talk about my child-rearing. I feel it somewhat violates the privacy of how we do it at home. It's pretty regular stuff: say prayers when you go to sleep, grace before you eat, normal, thoughtful things - don't torture animals. They've only ever seen one of my shows, and that's because it wasn't past their bedtime. I would have been horrified if my parents had dragged me into the public eye in any capacity, 'cause I know how shy I was. I always remember seeing pictures of Christina Onassis and how unhappy she looked.
MF: What is music's importance at this point in your life?
CH: I enjoy it a great deal, like someone else might enjoy stamp collecting. I think I'm good at leading a band. Maybe it's that maternal thing again. It seems to be something that women are plagued with. We meet these guys and we immediately see their potential and we fall in love with that potential. Unfortunately, we waste most of our lives helping guys realize their potential, and rarely does it happen. I can see the potential in my band and I can make them perform and deliver and I get a great deal of satisfaction out of that. Maybe that sounds sobby as hell. Girls around the country will probably be gagging when they read this, but it's true.
MF: You've said some pretty funny things about riot grrrls - like they should shave their legs and learn how to sing.
CH: Well, I don't know that much about them except that it's been a fabrication of the English press - "There's nothing going on this week, so let's invent riot grrrls." And then all these girls started writing and saying, "Hey, I'm a riot grrrl." To me, it isn't such a novelty for a woman to get up onstage, it's more about what they can do once they're up there. It's not about what they're wearing. They have to hold their own with rock bands. If anything, I feel women are the ones who are getting all the attention now. It's easier for a woman to get on the cover of a magazine than for a guy band. It's guys who are getting the shit end of the stick a little bit these days 'cause, well, look at the gallant men of Urge [Overkill]: If they were chicks, they would have been on the cover of Rolling Stone every month this year. I dare a guy to write a whole song about eating out a girl in a cinema. Guys are so worried about being PC, but it's blow jobs all around from the riot grrrls.
MF: How has Urge Overkill been a motivator to you?
CH: The first time I read anything about them, it totally made me laugh. It sounded like a return to the early days of the Pretenders. We were the most irreverent rock band you ever saw in your life. That was the whole tone of being in a rock band. That's what we all loved about John Lennon, those horrible stories of him kicking out crutches from under cripples when he was a teenager and being a nasty guy, that's the stuff we love - "Rock on, John!" We want our rock heroes to be assholes and not thoughtful, introspective saviors of the planet. What I got out of reading the Urge article was that they said, "Hey, we like fast cars and sex and drinking." I thought, "Wait a minute, guys, you're not supposed to do that," and I loved that. It's been taken to an extreme these days, where all rock bands talk about is their cocaine and pharmaceutical intake and they're all strung out on smack. It's all gotten kind of uncool and I don't need to hear about people's rehab. Just fuckin' deal with it. But in that article, it was funny. That's what I love about rock: We're ugly ducklings, but we don't care. We're ugly and we're proud.
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