Adam Sobsey - Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography

AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES

David Menconi, Editor

CHRISSIE HYNDE

A MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY

ADAM SOBSEY

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Copyright 2017 by Adam Sobsey

All rights reserved

First edition, 2017

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Sobsey, Adam, author.

Title: Chrissie Hynde : a musical biography / Adam Sobsey.

Other titles: American music series (Austin, Tex.)

Description: Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017. | Series: American music series

Identifiers: LCCN 2016033834 | ISBN 9781477310397 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781477313312 (library e-book) | ISBN 9781477313329 (nonlibrary e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Hynde, Chrissie. | Rock musiciansUnited StatesBiography. | Pretenders (Musical group)

Classification: LCC ML420.H9976 S63 2017 | DDC 782.42166092 [B] dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033834

doi:10.7560/310397

For Heather, tough and tender

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Just dont buy the fucking book, then, if Ive offended someone, she said in 2015, in an interview to promote her new book, a memoir called Reckless. Shed sooner lose the saleand fansthan her integrity. Even if it gives offense, she stands by her truth, which in Reckless was all of four words: I take full responsibility.

This is why people love Chrissie Hynde. They love her even if they havent heard a note shes written or sung, in that instantly recognizable voice of hers, since she had her last hit, more than twenty years ago. And most people havent. They love her despite knowing virtually nothing about her or her band, the Pretenders. In a world full of pretenders, Chrissie Hynde is unassailably authentic, and its her authenticity that gathers and unifies the details of her life, that makes it possible to adore her without really knowing them.

She is probably Americas foremost woman rocker: an icon in eyeliner, a voice for the ages, and a great (and greatly underrated) songwriter. She is the greatest female singer, maybe ever, as one eminent music impresario put it,the same as she did when she and her band burst out of Londons punk scene in the late seventies, and there has never been anyone quite like her. Shes a self-possessed, self-exiled idol with no real forebears; a complete original who, despite trailblazing for countless female musicians, has always disdained the idea of women in rock and has no true musical descendants.

Yet as self-contained and singular as she is, as thoroughly herself, Chrissie Hynde is full of contradictions, and she can be hard to apprehend. Every time I try to get close to you, you throw nails in the road, she sings on the 1999 Pretenders album Viva El Amor! That lament could just as easily be sung about her. Shes a Hindu and a vegetarian who has gotten herself arrested protesting animal rights, but she has defended the death penalty on religious grounds. Her songs have featured plentiful and strong sexual content, and her most famous song is about using her body to attract attention, yet she has virtually never presented herself as a sex object, and she sharply criticizes women rockers who do. Shes a generous, charismatic, entertaining live performer who is frequently prickly and combative with her fans, the public, and the press. After half her original band died young of drug overdoses, she made the most accomplished album of her career without them.

Shes the very image of snarling rock-chick toughness, but she writes and sings tenderly, tremulously about the vulnerabilities of love and motherhood; she may be the only significant woman in rock to make motherhood itself an abiding musical subject. She had romances with two high-profile pop stars, but she has mostly lived singly, quietly, and plainly in London, where she raised her two daughters far from the spotlight, taking eight years off from touring to be a mom at the height of her career. Shes an American treasure who has lived nearly her entire adult life in London. Shes a Hall of Famer, a musical force for four decades, but she has made only eleven studio albums.

Chrissie Hynde seems, then, not so much divided as double, as if there is both a Chrissie: the voice, the persona, the rock goddess, and a Hynde: the songwriter, the mother, the Hindu. (Its for this reason that Ive found it comfortable, throughout this book, to refer to her as neither Chrissie nor Hynde, or sometimes as both.) As she singsor warns, or even boastson a late Pretenders album, Im a very, very complex person.

Chrissie Hyndes complexities and contradictions are not only the key to her enduring appeal, theyre also why she is worthy of a book. Yet her own memoir, Reckless, doesnt really do them, or her, justice, and its author inadvertently explained why shortly after it was published: The stuff I really regret, I left out of the book. She left out much more than her regrets. For one thing, the narrative of Reckless ends in 1983, leaving more than thirty years of her life and career untouched. For another, her book often repeats familiar stories she and her cohort have been telling publicly for years. The events these stories recount are now several decades old, and many of her recollections are drug-clouded, so Reckless is twice unreliable. Thrice, really: an assiduously protective type, she takes care throughout the book to be circumspect about the actions and motives of her intimates. Her omissions are sometimes quite conspicuous. The ex post facto controversy over I take full responsibility was far more charged and provocative than anything in Reckless, which, despite its title, is anything but. The memoir is best read not as a historical document but as a Chrissie Hynde album, a retrospective anthology of mostly well-known songs, occasionally interspersed with an early track or neglected rarity. Its most valuable moments are Chrissie Hyndes terse but clear philosophical aphorisms, which give clues to what has driven her actions over the years. (All of the unattributed quotations in this book are from Reckless.)

The most important missing element in Reckless is, glaringly, Chrissie Hyndes music. What inspired it, how it was made, what it might mean to hernone of this is in her memoir. Her music is as closely guarded as her children, and its naturally where my attention turns in this book: this is largely a musical biography, less These unpredictabilities and complexities are nearly always strongly linked to the lyrics, stories, and moods of her songs. I have tried to maintain the same connection in my technical discussions of her compositions.

You may find that this book ends somewhat abruptlyin the middle of the road, to borrow the title of one of the Pretenders hit songsand in fact right where it began, with Chrissie Hynde snarling, Dont buy the fucking book. That is deliberate, and not only for the practical reason that she is very much alive and kicking, and almost surely has more music in her. (Indeed she does, announcing a new Pretenders album as this book was in production.) The controversy over Reckless was simply her last salient act before I concluded.

The books ending-as-beginning and avoidance of finality are also motivated by its subjects spirituality. In her early adulthood, Chrissie Hynde was introduced to the ancient Hindu scriptural poem the Bhagavad Gita, and she has been devoted to it ever since: it is the glory I bask in, she calls it in