(#221: 19 January
1980, 4 weeks)
Track listing: Precious/The Phone Call/Up The Neck/Tattooed
Love Boys/Space Invader/The Wait/Stop Your Sobbing/Kid/Private Life/Brass in Pocket/Lovers
of Today/Mystery Achievement
“Change has a way of just walking up and punching me in the
face” – Veronica Mars
The scene now changes; this blog is now being written by two
people – Marcello Carlin and me, Lena Friesen.
For the rest of this blog’s (un)natural life we will both be writing
here, and it has been a long wait for me to arrive; in part because I am a bit
younger, and thus was a mere bystander to the on-going colourful slo-mo crash
which was the 1970s. So I am starting
right here, in 1980, with the first album I ever owned, knowing that this was
my new favourite band; that this was more than just an album, in some ways.
Let me set the scene; it’s Los Angeles, spring of 1980. At some point I get a radio with a tape deck
and earplugs; at some point, I get this album on cassette. I know nothing – repeat – nothing about punk. I am so naïve, I don’t even know about Joan
Jett, let alone the Runaways or the Ramones – I listen to Top 40 radio and
serious AOR stations and Dr. Demento and Rick Dees and KRLA with Art Laboe, who
will play oldies, particularly plaintive ballads for the low riders and those
who love them. New Wave is a concept I
understand; but the radio had so many great singles in ’79 that going out to
buy albums seemed unnecessary. Dr.
Demento plays the anti-disco anthem out of Chicago and I am suddenly aware
there are disco-haters out there, people who would hate my neighbourhood in
L.A. – Silverlake - where the Toy Tiger and the Frog Pond are local gay
clubs. The New Wave hits keep coming (I
now understand some of them as New Pop) – Gary Numan’s “Cars” and M’s “Pop
Musik” and even Tusk could be seen as
a New Pop gesture. As 1979 waned, there
was an impatience in the air, an eagerness, to see this decade out, gone, never
to return. A decade of men who could not
be trusted, disaster after disaster, the whole way through. But it was also a
time when women were, Equal Rights Amendment or not, gaining strength and
dominating the radio – Debbie Harry, Donna Summer, Stevie Nicks, Christine
McVie and Linda Ronstadt, to name a few that could be heard at almost any given
time on L.A. radio, sometimes on FM for a whole commercial-free half hour.
But then Pretenders
came out, and assumed (for me, anyway) an overwhelming prominence. I had just turned 13; I’d had a radio for two
years, had listened dutifully to it for that time, and had never heard anything
even close to this. I was still learning about the history of
rock ‘n’ roll at the time, and unwittingly bought only one of the most
important albums ever; absorbing it, assimilating it, and realizing slowly that
this was new, with the equally
newfound arrogance of the teenager who believes she has a favourite band that
was far superior to anything else,
and that everything in the future would have to be as good as this or she just wouldn’t bother with
it. I listened to Pink Floyd’s The Wall
because the serious heads at KMET told me it was an instant classic, and I was
impressed; but its deeper meanings, because I was naïve, were lost on me. (I had no idea who Syd Barrett was, and FM
radio never played any Syd-era Floyd.)
But no one needed to tell me Pretenders
was a classic; it was mine, and
needed no hype.
The album tells a story; so I will go through it song by
song. The band were named after the song
“The Great Pretender” by The Platters – Chrissie Hynde had a pal who, when he
was in a bad mood, would go into his room and play the song over and over. It is a song about being brave and showing no
misery after a breakup; one of many songs where the man pretends to be happy
when he isn’t. At first Hynde makes it
very clear that she isn’t pretending…but is she?
“Precious” is a song of – well, from the first drumstick
clicks and inchoate yells, this is not your ordinary song. Hell no.
Hynde and James Honeyman-Scott’s guitars surge back and forth so
intensely that you know there’s a tug-of-war here; between the nervous narrator
(because this album is so autobiographical I will just call the narrator Hynde)
and the superior proto-preppie she’s with, the big frog in the small pond
(small in Hynde’s view) who leaves her with a “bruised hip” but also makes her
feel like she’s “shitting bricks” as she knows she can’t live up to whatever he
wants from her. Swearing! Swearing, dammit! It has taken us this long to get to a woman
who really doesn’t give a crap and is going to swear, is going to make a lot of those guys who run radio stations
a little…nervous. The song’s not even
over and I love it already; the dive-bombing guitar as she goes into the break
wherein she seems to make fun of…the idea of having a baby which automatically cancels out a thousand ‘baby’
lyrics in so many tacky songs. The
conventional life of a suburban Akron teenager was supposed to aspire to,
accept. You can just tell she’s not going to settle for that, no way,
and then it gets very quiet; Hynde’s voice is miked very close, her every
breath and inflection can always be heard.
“Trapped in a world that they never made” is what anyone in the 1970s
could say, and when Hynde then says, heroically, “Well not me baby I’m too
crazy – fuck off” it’s as if the 1970s barely existed. They’re dead, as Hynde escapes in 1973 to be
in a rock band in London, come hell or high water. The push-and-pull ends, Honeyman-Scott gets
the visa and plane ticket and the door all but shuts at the end, Martin
Chambers’ drums providing the slam.
And that’s just how it starts.
“The Phone Call” is one of the many songs here (the album
didn’t, and still doesn’t, come with lyrics, and in 1980 you just had to make
them out yourself as best you could) that I never really understood, other than
it was in an odd time signature (7/8) and was about someone getting a call that
was urgent, from a callbox, with the phone ringing and ringing on the other
end. The song is urgent, claustrophobic,
fixated on the one thing; the security of whoever is supposed to get these
messages – a spy? A woman in danger? A gang member? If this is another song about escape, it is
an escape that is full of running, sudden stops, pieces of paper shoved under
doors – it’s a getaway car ready with the motor running. “This is a mercy mission” she says, her voice
muffled as PJ Harvey’s will be one day, with the guitars ascending and
descending like the breathing of a nervous person, willing themselves to be
calm, only just holding out. It ends
with a long exhale of final freedom, with the phone back again, the line
engaged. Beep-beep-beep-beep; you hope
the person who is there heard about the parcels in the mail. There is danger everywhere, this is the
1970s; or should I say, the 1970s themselves had to be fled, to be
escaped. (This album, quite pointedly,
doesn’t sound like anything from the
1970s or earlier.) So are we free yet?
“Up The Neck” is a laid-back song about “anger and lust”
that is just as claustrophobic in its way as “The Phone Call” except now it’s
the apartment, the flat, and not the callbox that’s the setting. The gruesome relationship is spelt out with a
veteran’s sneer from Hynde on the one hand, and a kind of crushed innocence on
the other. “Under the bed with my teeth
sunk into my own…flesh” is how badly she feels one morning – UNPRECEDENTED here
in Then Play Long, and her
description of sweaty sex as “it was all very…’run-of-the-mill’” then followed
by how the relationship was full of “bondage to lust” – the two people as
physical beings only, with nothing else between them. Her continuing cries of “I said, baby? Oh, sweetheart…” grow less ironic as she
realizes that that’s all there is. Sticky
shag rugs, dirty tiles, tongues and lips and bulging veins…and then the
relationship dies, the guitars churn and churn mechanically, the ease of the
song gone, evaporated. The relationship
never got above the neck; it was all kisses and slugs, no heart. She walks out, sorry and rueful, sadder but
wiser. (How many girls like me learned
so much from this, as opposed to the cheery advice columns in Seventeen or Glamour?)
Pretenders was an
album bought by girls, after all. And
guys too; Hynde’s no-bullshit singing/songwriting was a fresh breeze at the
time, and a big corrective to having to listen to “Whole Lotta Love” and other
such paeans to the female sex yet another
time. And the next song is one of those
that simply separates – as if the three before hadn’t already – this from
anything else even thinkable in rock ‘n’ roll at the time. For one thing it’s a 7/4 -4/4 time signature,
meaning producer Chris Thomas had his hands full trying to keep this erratic
and wild song from coming right off the damn rails. That he and the band could do it was a
testament to their intense rehearsing and gigging, meaning that the album was
done quickly and (I assume, I don’t know this for sure) as live as possible. This is a band,
after all, Chrissie’s band, and the unity and skills shown by everyone here is
amazing. Along with Hynde’s voice, the
band is also close, all the better to emphasize the intimacy of the songs; you
feel as if you are there, though Hynde’s voice is the guide, letting you in on
some things while leaving other things to your imagination, which Hynde assumes
you have.
“Tattooed Love Boys” rings like a bell and before you know
it, the struggle is on. “Little tease – but I didn’t mean it…but you
mess with the goods doll, you gotta pay, yeah…”
Her “tease” is squeaked out as if maybe she wants to, and maybe, she
doesn’t. She knows how to flirt, but
she’s not with the flirty types; these are bad boys, the kind she’s read
about…and now here they are.
The song comes to a stop after yet another unprecedented lyric: “I shot my mouth off and you showed me what
that hole is for” and here Honeyman-Scott stings, floats, wrenches his guitar,
bitter and fierce, as Hynde groans and says “oh baby baby baby” as if reinventing
the blues, the band then leaping from one speed to another out of the mystery
of what happened to the consequences.
Well, it’s not pretty for him; “you’re gonna make some plastic surgeon a
rich man” she crows, with the song ending with nothing but contempt for her
would-be…attacker? Rapist? “Another
human interest story…YOU ARE THAT.” And
the song ends, abruptly as it started.
Our heroic narrator survives hanging out with some tough guys who maybe,
really, aren’t so tough. She is not
singing those kind of blues – not yet, anyway.
“Space Invader” is an instrumental – one that points back to
1970s rock and yet lighter, simpler, pacing around at its root like a lioness
stalking prey, or for that matter someone playing the video game of the same
name that is sampled at the end. “The pulse
of the new” as I noted, and this is where Pete Farndon and Honeyman-Scott shine;
the song is like a knot being tied and untied, yet another breakaway from the
past, the bomb effectively dropping, the past being destroyed, for lack of a
better word. (Already I can sense all
sorts of guitar players, teenagers and rock stars alike, listening to this
album and playing along, from Johnny Marr to Lindsey Buckingham, from Courtney
Love to Neil Young.) The bravado and heroism
continue.
“The Wait” is yet another song that is sung so quickly and
rhythmically that just what it’s about and what is going on is only
half-understandable; even knowing the lyrics now I still don’t know what it’s
about, besides a child who is forgotten, alone, kicking a ball up and down the
street, an outcast, a loner, who is hurting and who only Hynde seems to care
about. But there is the wait; something
is coming, something Hynde knows is coming that in the tense breaks of the song
– again it is one that is brutally physical, meant for pogoing (in 14/8 time
what else can you do?) – and you can
hear her breathe as if she has run in the studio, as if she is actually waiting
along with the hapless “child” for The New to occur. Hynde is particularly vocal here, calling
out, snarling, as the song yanks itself this way and that. Honeyman-Scott’s guitar after the break is
nearly atonal, as if he is trying to make the ugly beautiful, the beautiful
ugly; in part I think this is due to his not really enjoying doing guitar solos
as such, so they tend to be brief and to the point, sardonic even, a good match
for Hynde’s voice.
“Stop Your Sobbing” was, as I eventually understood it,
their first single, produced by Nick Lowe; it is a song by The Kinks, one I had
never heard, and yet another turning-around of rock conventions – Hynde is now
singing to some guy that it’s about time he laughed and had fun instead of just
crying and bringing her down. Here the
band prove that yes, they can play your normal 1960s pop just as well as
anything else; and it continues the theme of the crying man, unable to hide his
emotions. (“Stop snivelling!” she yells
at the guy in “Tattooed Love Boys” – as if she’s
the guy now, and he’s the weaker sex.
Hmmmm….) Jangly fun, but Hynde’s
doubled voice at the end is desperate, as if she is somehow singing to herself
as much as him; even from the start, there is the undercurrent of never quite
knowing what is going on, in these songs, despite the authority and power of
them. It’s itchy and uneasy. Even the future she writes for herself here –
meeting and falling in love with Ray Davies, who wrote the song – is going to
be unpredictable and troublesome.
“Kid” is by far the most ‘normal’ song here, echoing Hynde’s
beloved Beatles; the boy is ashamed of something, feels it’s wrong, and won’t
hold her hand; why we never know. He
leaves, too proud to cry, though she begs him to cover his face, and Hynde’s
voice is direct and yet full of the blues and sorrow that he can’t accept her
for what she is; the situation is hopeless, and the song is cheery and upbeat
as the scene is quiet, final. “Kid, my
only kid” – he goes, beautiful and young and uncaring, it seems, about her
feelings. The album is suddenly
revealing (literally; this is the other side) that Hynde isn’t just a tough
chick from Ohio who has been the victim and victor in physical
encounters*. There is another side here,
one where a guy will just dump her, and she longs for him, “full of grace” but
it doesn’t matter. Write a pretty song
about it and have a hit single, I can imagine Hynde thinking; and so they
did. But then, Hynde finds herself in a
whole other situation.
“Private Life” is a slow reggae – menacing, erupting with
nagging/nail-digging solos from Honeyman-Scott that emphasize just how
impossible the title really is. A wife –
unhappy, theatrical – comes to Hynde and pleads for advice, help. Hynde pushes her away, dismisses her like
dirt: “Your marriage is a tragedy but
it’s not my concern.” But the woman
continues, complaining about her sex life, about everything, and Hynde just
tells her to leave the “somebody you deplore” and accuses the wife of
“emotional blackmail.” Pity, contempt,
hatred; she asks continually to be left out of the whole mess, but the pressure
builds and builds, and none of Hynde’s tactics here seem to work. Hynde moans with pain as the guitars pierce
her side; “Oh you’re mean!” she says, dying of a thousand insinuations and
threats. Does she give in? Has she met her match? It ends so quickly it’s hard to know, but the
pressure breaks, and now there is no escape.
Hynde the Heroic of the first side is no longer able to conquer; the
lies and stories and constant talking of the wife are too much.
After this, “Brass in Pocket” can be seen as a relief but
also as a sharp irony. Here is she is,
detailing everything about her that is so special, but it seems like an
inventory mostly to impress herself; she’s all ready to go, but is anyone
actually noticing her? Again the lyrics
and music go arm-in-arm, slinking down the street, but the attention she craves
never seems to come, and she is alone at the end, and maybe someone noticed her
and maybe someone didn’t. She’s got so
much to show, to tell, but there is an odd emptiness in the song, a kind of
false hope that if she likes herself so much, then surely there must be
somebody out there who will really appreciate her. She stood up for herself in the first song,
after all; but since then has yet to find that right person. And then…
And then she does meet someone; and there they are, late at
night, in bed. He is crying (again,
there’s no explanation; he just is) and it is breaking Hynde’s heart. The
delicate figures of the song – hesitating, hoping – as she tries to comfort
him, tells him that he makes the birds sing and the stars shine – the song
leaps up to the dramatic, as Hynde wails her “oooohhh” and their relationship
falters, as she tries – tries – to
talk to him. Hynde sounds as if she is
finally crying too; the whole song is a lament for those who are scared to see
people in love, people brave enough to take a chance, and for those who are too
scared of having their hearts broken to get involved in the first place. (If Brett Anderson owned this album, as I’m
sure he did, this is the song that undoubtedly influenced him the most.) The break is power chord glory mixed with an
acidic lace, that this is how it
ends. She has tried and tried and found
boys and kids and mere children to care about, and now (presumably when she is
truly in love, not lust, not bondage) she has to face herself and know herself
with as much acuteness as she has brought to bear on everyone else. And it’s terrifying.
“No…noooo…” she sings over and over, in total
disbelief. It’s the loneliest and
coldest feeling in the world, this one.
She can’t leave and shut the door on it.
Because for once it’s not him; it’s her. “No…I’ll never feel like a man in a man’s
world.” The whole album, nearly, leads
up to that moment, as the song fades, as the relationship is engulfed by the
sky, the birds, as being a woman is something she has tried to escape, to
pretend wasn’t real, that she could move to London and be one of the blokes in
a band and hang out with her punk band friends and never get hurt – the
vagabond above the law. But there’s law,
and there’s what you can’t escape from, which is yourself. She sings a lullaby but sounds as if she’s
about to have some kind of breakdown herself; that promise of whoo-hoo
self-definition badass which got her this far is of no more use. So now what?
“Mystery Achievement” looks at the facts straight; where is
her sandy beach? What is success, in or
outside of the band? She just wants to
have fun, be in a band, get drunk and dance the Cuban slide but the trophies
–the promise of fame and fortune – she could care less about. (How many debut albums come with a song about
how the singer doesn’t actually want to be famous?) The song is a classic of a
sort – drums first, followed by an audible Hynde sigh, then bass, then
guitars. Her worried “oohhs” are all
over the place, and the instrumental break is one of joy; you can hear all the
band somehow talking to each other, Hynde’s voice coming in for what sounds
like her real happiness – finally she
has her own band, they’re doing her
songs, and they are having fun doing them.
(That a bit of it sounds like Magazine is par for the course; I mean,
who wasn’t listening to them at this time?)
That she has done all this, had hit singles, survived the 1970s – seems
unreal to her, as if it was a bad dream, that she is being rewarded for all the
wrong reasons.
.
Privately she may be the woman looking for the one good man,
but here in her band, she has gotten what she has had to work hard to achieve;
what she set out in 1973 to do, while those in Ohio called her crazy. She was virtually the last one of the Sex
shop on King’s Road set to get a band together, to play gigs (the first on the
day Sid Vicious died), to make music so stunning that this album was the first
debut album by anyone to enter the UK charts at #1. This
was in part due to anticipation of the band’s fans, but word of mouth as well,
from girl to girl, woman to woman: she
is telling it like it is. Pete Townsend found it, well, compulsive
listening as did I; there was nothing else like it, and it jolted just about anyone
who heard it (including fellow rhythm guitarist John Lennon) into some kind of
action. Words like “tough” and “tender”
are used to describe Hynde and this album, but her voice has a piercing urgency
to it that make generalities like those pointless.
This album is a record (literally) of courage; of chances
that led to ugly disasters, bodily harm, but also self-knowledge, to where she
ends with a kind of Zen knowledge/not-knowledge situation. She has a lot to learn, but at least she
knows what it is she doesn’t know (hello Juliana Hatfield) and what she does; a
heart that hurts is a heart that works, and being a woman in a band/a woman
otherwise doesn’t have to be – cannot be – an either/or proposition. Hynde showed a whole generation or two how it
could be done; how to be frank and noble and most importantly, be herself and have her own band. One woman talks and sings the truth of her
life, and a whole world opens up; a world that leads to Sinead and Alanis, to
Madonna (who saw The Pretenders live in 1980 in Central Park**) and L7, but
just as importantly, to all the young future Britpop stars like Justine and
Brett and Damon, who all inherited different aspects of the band’s works. (Heck, even Katy Perry cites Hynde as an
inspiration, but then her first album is called One Of The Boys,
which this album could’ve been called, too.)
The Pretenders succeeded where The Clash, Hynde’s friends from way back,
couldn’t; as great as London Calling is, this is what the public wanted***, and the plethora of female
voices now springs from only a few voices from the past; and Hynde’s is one of
them.****
This was a band that was almost too intense and brilliant to
last; just months after the unnecessarily rushed Pretenders II,
Honeyman-Scott died of heart failure in June of 1982, just a day after Pete
Farndon was dismissed from the band – Farndon died less than a year later. Hynde and Chambers found a new guitarist and
bassist, Robbie McIntosh and Malcolm Foster, and continued to record startling
singles and a blazing album, Learning
To Crawl, the band on the cover dressed in black, as if still in
mourning. At the same time she was in
love with a new man, and I will be getting back to that relationship in a few years…
And so at 13 I realized that it was possible to go somewhere else - this mysterious place called London - and I looked up to Hynde as a model of what I could possibly, just possibly, be...an American girl in London. I realized there were other places to live, other countries (besides Canada, where I'd already been and would return to sooner than I'd thought)...and as I took Hynde as a role model, I realized there was more to the world, more in the world, and that it was right to be romantic and heartbroken, as long as I kept going. And so I am writing this in London, a place I never thought back then I would get to visit, let alone reside in. But I did visit, and years later, did move. This album started that whole process, that opening up of possibilities.
What else can 1980 offer?
As she sings in "Brass In Pocket" Hynde is “Detroit leaning.”
And so off to Michigan we go…
*Hynde was attacked by Nick Kent one day in the Sex shop; he
beat her with a cheap belt as she tried her best to hide. The album makes it sound as if she dealt out
karate chops to guys, but in reality Vivienne Westwood thought she was causing
a disruption, and thence Hynde was dismissed and oh-so-coincidentally later
Nick Kent was beaten up at a Sex Pistols gig.
**The live version of “Precious” on their EP is from this same concert. It is, if you can believe it, even faster and
more intense than the original.
***Note how these days bands like The Specials (whom Hynde
also knew) and The Clash will go on the radio and reminisce about ’79-’80 while
Hynde pointedly refuses to indulge in any sort of nostalgic looking back. This is more proof, I feel, that Pretenders is a far more rebellious and
troublesome album for all concerned, and a lot of the songs still aren’t ‘radio
friendly.’
****Hynde herself would acknowledge Sandie Shaw and Joni Mitchell
as influences, even as she would downplay her own singing and guitar
playing. Part of her appeal is that
she’s not a diva in any sense, and is very much someone who would say “If I can
do it you can do it, if you have the nerve.”
