Tunes from the Deep End

By JAY COCKS

The Pretenders hang tough and score a new triumph

There were two calls, very much the same, and after the first there was no need to go into detail.

Chrissie Hynde, lead singer, prime force and all-round soul shaker of the Pretenders, picked up the phone one morning in her London apartment and heard the voice of the band's manager. "What is it?" she said, and he said, "We've heard that Jim died. I'll call you back when I find out anything."

Not a year later, the manager called again. "Farndon" was all he said. "Oh," Hynde said, more prepared this tune. "Talk to you later."

Within the sharp, scary trajectory that followed the band's formation in 1978, the Pretenders absorbed some strong doses of success and a few serious jolts of fate. At times it might have seemed like a tradeoff: two hit singles, Stop Your Sobbing and Brass in Pocket, and one Top Five album, Pretenders; two deaths: James Honeyman-Scott, the lead guitarist, whose body finally gave in to the cumulative destruction wrought by massive infusions of cocaine, and Pete Farndon, whose prolonged bouts with pharmacological excess seemed to accelerate in direct proportion to the band's increasing celebrity. "Because fame and success jumped on us so fast, we all had our own ways of dealing with it," Hynde says now. Other English bands of the period got mixed up between amateurism and honesty. The Pretenders, who had their chops down from the start and were proud of it, never made that particular mistake. They were much too busy, thanks, making most of the others.

From the start, this band had a sound recklessness. was both brash and melodic. The Pretenders burned through the pomp and pose that had crusted over the British punk movement by 1980. Other bands, similarly adept and not so heavily brushed by fate, disintegrated. The Pretenders, to everyone's astonishment, including their own, turned out to be survivors. There are two new members now: Lead Guitarist Robbie Mclntosh and Bass Player Malcolm Foster. The two veterans, Hynde and Drummer Martin Chambers, have made a separate peace with the past by putting a stake in the future. Hynde has a 15-month-old baby; Chambers' wife is expecting her own in July. Not incidentally, the band also has a smashing new album called Learning to Crawl (No. 13 on the charts) that has no current rival for tough rock and straight talk. There is the present sellout U.S. concert tour from Honolulu to Radio City Music Hall, ending May 6 in Buffalo. And there are, apparently, quite a few lessons that have been learned.

Learning to Crawl fixes on birth, innocence and endurance as subjects for its ten anthems of independence. All the songs but one were written by Hynde, 32, a woman who has no patience with sermons and no time for homilies. Besides the rueful and gritty Back on the Chain Gang, the album also includes a ravishing love song, 2000 Miles; a corrosive paean to suburban gentrification, My City Was Gone; a sharp bit of blue-collar feminism, Watching the Clothes; and, perhaps best of all, Thumbelina, one of the most hard-boiled lullabies ever written. Set to a kind of choogling Nashville beat, the song manages to combine love for the innocence of a young child ("shuffled about like a pawned wedding ring") and rage over a broken love affair into a song of bitter pride: "What's important in this life?/ Ask the man who's lost his wife."

Most rockers, male or female, play a coy game of footsie under the table with fate. Hynde stomps right on its toes. When she gets kicked back, she writes a song that is part taunt, part testament and part a perpetual reappraisal of the price paid for defiance. This keen balancing act between distance and immediacy is probably what saved Hynde when the going got tough a few years back.

"Pete Farndon was strung out and couldn't admit he was a junkie," Hynde says, reflecting on her old colleague and former lover. Eventually, he had to be dismissed from the band, and Hynde last saw him at Honeyman-Scott's funeral. "He was terribly bitter and resentful. He felt like 'You fired me, but Jim's the one who died from drugs.' Ten months later," she adds, "Pete had drowned in the bath-tub with a needle sticking out of his arm." No stranger to indulgence herself ("I used to take any kind of drug, whatever was going on, but I always kept it in check"), Hynde had begun to pull back by then. "I started drinking less, and I started to look less and less like a rock-'n'-roll personality," she explains. "I didn't want to be recognized."

By this time too, Hynde had met Ray Davies, the sardonic main spring of the Kinks, and become pregnant. Daughter Natalie, currently on tour with her mother and a nimble au pair, also forced Hynde to "tame down. Suddenly, you can't imagine sitting down and smoking a pack of fags or drinking whisky. Being a mother's a real awakening." Hynde is still far from being the sort of model of civic rectitude that the folks back in her home town of Akron might approve. After a low-key, Midwestern small-town childhood, she took off for England, wild and a little desperate, at the age of 22, and plunged into the sort of bohemian life that, with suitable adjustments for advanced age and encroaching gentility, still obtains today. She and Davies live without benefit of paper or clergy in a London apartment, and Hynde still takes a showwoman's pride in turning on an audience. She is a current front runner in all those fan-mag polls about "sexiest woman in rock."

Survival can bring a kind of smugness, a moral certainty that there is an absolute code to obey and a single straight path to follow. Hynde's songs never carry a hint of this. She may have forced a land of necessary rapprochement with her recklessness, but the fire still burns bright--perhaps against the night. She speaks intensely of Natalie, and of "a real feeling of humanity that I hadn't had before." But she also thinks often of a past that dwells persistently, inescapably in the present. "I think about death every day. Always. To me it's just reality. To not think about death is like living in your sleep." For the Pretenders, then, as for very few other bands today, music becomes quite literally a matter of life and death, a way, better than any other, of keeping wide awake.

--By Jay Cocks.

Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Denise Worrell