Brass Tactics

Chrissie Hynde Is Not Pretending

When I was 8, I used to go to a roller rink called Hot Wheels.  It was the first kind of athletic thing I ever did, and I got to be decent at it, even though a more graceful skater told my mother that I stooped.  I could live with that.  They had slow skating for couples, something to aspire to, something that finally happened once.  There was a red-haired girl liked.  Her name was Eva, and when and a slow skate came on, we held hands.  I really thought I could have died right there.

One of the songs that came on was “Brass in Pocket” by The Pretenders.  I had seen the video, with lead singer Chrissie Hynde as an emotionally needy waitress.  She’s waiting on the guys in the band, and she wants them to know she’s special, so special.  They’re in a diner, so there are signs that say “Special.”  As I was having this otherworldly experience, holding hands with a girl, another girl said, “Mama said that’s a nasty song!”  For years, I wondered what that could have meant, even when I was old enough to know.  The video tells a story of sexual desperation—maybe that’s what Mama was talking about.  But the lyrics are really about being tough.  It’s a way of saying, don’t fuck with me. You don’t know what I’m carrying.  The lyrics are flirty, but not explicit.

I got brass in pocket
I got bottle, I'm gonna use it
Intention, I feel inventive
Gonna make you, make you, make you notice

I will stand in front of you and deliver.  I have no fear.  I will not falter. 

Like Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde started out as a rock critic.  Truffaut and Goddard started out as film critics.  Some critics fear the daemonic threshold that separates the artists and the critics, but some have brass in pocket.  Being on the evaluative side doesn’t hurt when you are delivering the goods without fear.  Elvis Costello, who sang with Hynde on “Satellite,” looked like a rock critic and, when he wrote about music, had an attitude and breadth that made him seem like one of us, even though he had this whole rock god thing going.   Elizabeth Nelson, who fronts The Paranoid Style and has a hell of a voice as rock goddess and critic, continues in this tradition.  Hynde’s vibrato sounded world-weary, as if she had been waiting on tables for a long time.  It’s a sultry contralto, tough and tender, like Rizzo from Grease. She’s gonna use her arms and legs—that could be nasty, I suppose.  There’s something called the Detroit Lean that people in Akron know about.  It’s a kind of attitude at the wheel. Won’t someone realize she’s special, so special?

Hynde’s voice had that quality of sounding like she was singing right to you, tough as leather and soft as silk.  It made sense that she made a lot of noise when Joni Mitchell played a rare gig at New York’s Time Café in 1994, because Joni was pretty much it for her. (Joni told me that the night before, a sober Hynde was complaining to her about being jumped by overwrought female fans.)  “Let it out, Joni!” she yelled, and Carly Simon—who wanted to listen to Joni--had to hold her back.  Couldn’t she see that she was special?  “That’s a real singer up there!” said Hynde. 

Hynde is definitely a real singer.  She’ll rock you under the table, break your heart with a ballad, and make you feel completely persuaded by everything she delivers, even if she does a little damage.  If there were awards for vibratos, she would sweep--never too much and never not enough.  So many great Pretenders songs, too many to mention, and I’m not just talking about hits like “Kid” or “Talk of the Town” or “Message of Love,” but listen again to “Precious” or “The Adulteress.”  Listen to “My City Was Gone,” lyrics that sound like a sequel to “Big Yellow Taxi.”  It was, alas, used as a theme for a radio show by a certain right-wing megalomaniac, but we don’t need to get into that. 

I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride

Joni’s paved paradise is right here, hence getting restrained by Carly Simon at that Time Café gig.  The song is no longer being used for that radio show because the host is dead.  “My City Was Gone” is still true, unless you happen to have an interest in a chain of Gallerias.   

But all of this leads to the Pretenders songs of all Pretenders songs.  It’s mourning, it’s melancholia, it’s the return of the repressed.  It’s “Back on the Chain Gang.”  Chrissie Hynde fired Pretenders a lot.  How do you know when you’re pretending to be Pretender?  Chrissie Hynde will tap you on the shoulder.  Bassist Pete Farndon was fired for being a drug addict.  He started a new band, shot up, and drowned in his bathtub.  Guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, who was in on the firing of Farndon, died of a cocaine-related heart attack two days later. 

I found a picture of you, oh-oh
Well, it hijacked my world at night
To a place in the past we've been cast out of, oh-oh
Now we're back in the fight

We're back on the train, yeah
Oh, back on the chain gang

When The Pretenders were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—in Cleveland! Just in time for the new hall!—they played “Back on the Chain Gang,” then followed it with a cover of Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done,” and if anyone had the right to sing these lines, it was Hynde.

I hit the city and I lost my band
I watched the needle take another man
Gone, gone, the damage done

Hynde lost her band that time, then lost more.  At the beginning, the death of her band members meant the loss of the original lineup.  It turned out that loss would be the new normal.  Hynde got maximum meaning out of Young’s song, but she was tough as nails, brass in pocket, not to be fucked with for a second.    

Years ago, I was rehearsing with Karen Oberlin, a wonderful cabaret singer I had accompanied before.  Because I am not as tough as Chrissie Hynde, Karen could bring me to tears with Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Harold Arlen.  She was planning an 80s show, and we were looking at lyrics to “Back on the Chain Gang.”  “Let’s try this as slow as we can possibly do it,” I said, “because this song is really a dirge.”  Karen’s voice is full of emotion, and she really knows how to tell a story.  It must have lasted about five minutes, and it had the weight of the world.

Old photographs display the thing we can’t get back: all of the distractions of today, the romance of yesterday.  The technology changes—“the phone, tv, and the News of the World” might now be “TikTok, Twitter and all that makes me bitter,” but the idea is the same.  Information invades us, but the thing we really want is all we can’t get back.  There was a time when holding hands with a girl at the roller rink was a big deal.  There was a time that the slightest touch could make me tremble.  It’s not over yet.

Hynde began her career on the arm of Ray Davies, and her version of “Stop Your Sobbing” is more than convincing and though Davies’s demo of “I Go to Sleep” is a miracle, her finished version is definitive.  We lull ourselves into believing our delusion, then we wake up.   And when we do, it’s back to the salt mines.  We have to chisel through the past, bit by bit.  And if we aren’t good at what we do, Chrissie Hynde could fire us.   She won’t sugar coat it. She will not be George Clooney.  She’ll let us know if we are not hitting those skins right, if we are falsifying.  She has a vision.  She must be brutal.  When she’s in the middle of the road, she remembers her reckless youth and thinks that this milquetoast version of life is bullshit.  Pedal to the metal, Detroit leaning.  Mama said that’s a nasty song!  Reality is for everyone.  Pretending is special, so special.  That picture of you, it hijacked my world that night. We were cast out of the past a long time ago, but we still remember it.  Especially when we can hear a real singer up there.