Stay Tuned By Stan Cornyn: Chrissie’s Pretenders

Every Tuesday and Thursday, former Warner Bros. Records executive and industry insider Stan Cornyn ruminates on the past, present, and future of the music business.

Women in rock, there’ve been plenty of them, but seldom a woman who rose to the top strictly by becoming one of being a willful and supremely talented rock voice. That one, we believe, was only Chrissie Hynde, leader of her group, The Pretenders.

Early in the ‘60s, when women got audiences in rock, they were often out front as “pin-ups”, or as “lost souls,” most often as dream girls. But seldom if ever were they the driving force behind their own rock back.

How Chrissie Hynde achieved that needs remembering:

Chrissie Hynde Teens Up

Chrissie was a 19-year-old student at Kent State University, Ohio, on May 4, 1970, the day the U.S. National Guard shot down and killed four of her fellow students in what soon got named The Kent State Massacre. The government, pro-Vietnam, objected to students shouting at it.

One of the students killed, Jeffrey Miller, was a friend of Chrissie’s. As the Massacre did to many students that day, it stunned Chrissie, shook her, made her wonder what this life was for, angered the hell out of her for years to come.

She was hardly alone. Across the land, people acted out their outrage. Neil Young composed and sang the day’s anthem, “Ohio.”

Chrissie had not felt such outrage before. She was Christine Ellen Hynde, born in Ohio in 1951, daughter of the local phone company’s Yellow Pages manager and daughter of a part-time secretary.

In high school, she was... not into high school. She never dated. Instead, she spent weekends soaking up performances by local bands. That rock was her kick. As a teen, Chrissie had heard garage bands in Akron. From her teens on, Chrissie yearned to be a rock star. She learned to play guitar. But if you’d grown up in Akron, college had been a more obvious choice. At least, at Kent State, she could attend the Art School, and that she had, for three years now.

Her studies came in second, maybe third. While at Kent State, Chrissie took 40-mile trips to Cleveland, just to experience more bands. She confessed she was never “the model teen girl that any parents would have wanted. I didn’t date boys and I was a lousy student. All I wanted to do was go out and see bands.”

She’d joined a local rock band called Sat. Sun. Mat. She was its vocalist, but a shy one, so shy she’d take the mike into the laundry room, close the door, and belt the lyrics there. Not enough, it turned out.

Like many at Kent State after the Massacre, Chrissie dropped out of college. She tried waitress-ing (cocktails). After a year or so, that, she felt, was going nowhere. She imagined where “more” might be in life.

At age 22 and on little money, in 1973 Chrissie followed her ears to London, where “swinging” London and Carnaby Street had faded away, but in their place a tough new music was emerging.

London Is No Akron

She first landed a job working for an architect. She lost that job. Her next real job was with newspaper New Music Express writer Nick Kent, who wrote about local music and spent time loving her.

In 1975, she’d left Kent and moved to Paris to be with the drummer of The Frenchies, a momentary Glam Rock band: Kiss Olivier aka Olivier Legrand.

A year, then the Frenchies turned cold. Chrissie, on her own, moved back to London, where she scraped by. To live, she sold purses on street corners, slid her way over underground turnstiles, drew fake coats of arms, anything for dinner money. She’d drink, attack customs officials, assault cops, kick her manager in the balls. She later recalled, “For every act of sodomy I was forced to perform while hitchhiking, I got £10,000 to show for it now.”

Her category of dare-you-to young “adults” often found themselves down in lower London, at the far end of Kings Road. Streets to wander. Shops like Let It Rock, where its owners, Malcolm McLaren and his girlfriend Vivienne Westwood, were getting attention (his profession) by changing their store’s attitude and stock. McLaren had just moved their clothes from ‘50s rock style over to ‘70s bondage. Like T-shirts printed with dangling penises, and featuring tributes to the Cambridge Rapist.

Chrissie got work clerking at McLaren’s boutique. Malcolm just renamed it “Sex.” 430 Kings Road, where the newest “it” was happening. BIG sign outside the boutique. Funk inside. Unofficially, Chrissie became a Sex clerk.

SEX drew crowds like the red lights hooker lanes in Soho. Society crowded in, and crowded out outraged. Perversion clothing for sale. The staff spent their days kicking out kids who wanted to see it all for a giggle, and handling the police’s Obscenity Squad.

Sales got good, but McLaren wanted more. A band named for his shop would do that. Sex (plus…how about) Pistols. The band’s skills needn’t be music. Mainstream media would headline punk junk, especially with the shock and outrage the Sex Pistols could generate. (Others would come along, like Siouxsie and the Banshees, who wore Hitler-ite regalia, and the Vibrators, who kept singing “I Wanna Be Your Nazi, Baby.”

London, at least down near SEX, had gotten tough.

McLaren’s Punk Band Born

On the side, entrepreneurial McLaren already managed a band named The Strand. He just renamed it, then recast his band’s members.

Chrissie had been working her way into infant bands, too, ones with punk names like Masters of the Backside, and another called Big Girls’ Underwear, bands that would last between one day and one week. Nothing hot came of those, but Chrissie got to guitar in them, and sang her heart and ass off.

McLaren told Chrissie Hynde she was not a good fit with his new band. Instead he replaced two members of The Clash with guys who had been hanging-out at Sex. He tapped on two Johns, Ritchie and Beverly.

McClaren fixed their last names: John Ritchie became Sid Vicious, and John Lydon became Johnny Rotten. This new band lingered in the Sex boutique, while McLaren molded them into The Sex Pistols. Rotten became the Pistols’ snarling front man; McLaren taught Rotten snarling-while-you-sing technique. Taught Sid Vicious “attitude.” They became unschooled “punks” who started fights with any audience.

Chrissie watched, listened, and drifted into other band-attempts. She had no U.K. Work Permit, so she asked Sid Vicious to marry her; so she’d be legal. After he said “yes,” he came back later and said “no.” Johnny Rotten did the same: yes turns into no.

Chrissie Has to Scramble

Chrissie scrambled. To France, where earlier she’d headed to join with that drummer for The Frenchies. No work there.

Back to London and a series of “didn’t happen” bands: 999, Masters of the Backside, and then and then and then... None of Chrissie’s band gigs had lasted. Before she moved back home, she’d told the guys she’d met in bands, “Thanks a lot for lettin’ me come along.”

Back to Cleveland. Chrissie remembered leaving town via the underground, weeping as she went. “All the people I knew in town, they were all in bands. And there I was, like the real loser, you know? Really the loser.”

(To follow the growth of the Sex Pistols, and their future in America, you can read the Stay Tuned blog post called “Warners Courts Sex Pistols,” by clicking HERE.)

Chrissie Grows Pretenders

Left behind in London, and elsewhere, Chrissie Hynde + Guitar kept after “rock,” a music form somewhat more melodic than “punk.” Despite some of her behavior, she didn’t breath punk-ness.

Chrissie Hynde shifted her “what next” from just joining a band to actually creating a band she’d play in. She and her band guys would then create demos to lure a record deal now.

She assembled a quartet, perhaps because the Pistols had been a foursome. They made demos, inexpensively.

She gave one demo to Dave Hill, head of a minor, England-only label he’d named Real Records. Hill heard a hit. He called a colleague with another wee label, Sire Records, and encouraged Sire’s head, Seymour Stein, to catch this new band/singer: Chrissie Hynde. Stein caught her band in a little club called Klooks Kleek, in West Hampstead, next to the old Decca Recording studios.

The band was announced as the Chrissie Hynde Band, but by the end of the evening, she’d renamed them the Pretenders. She was now 27, she explained, “I want this to be a real band. I want everyone to be a part of it.”

Stein, too, was blown away. He and Hill would sign this band and, 50/50, would share the Pretenders on their two labels. Real+Sire began in a spare office for Warner Bros. Records, London, run by John Fruin. (The office for Real/Sire was next door to Fruin’s, one that the Warner exec had formerly used to display his electric train set.) Hill supported Chrissie, paying her rehearsal room debt and letting her build her band. After a year of this, in 1978 Dave Hill decided he’d rather manage the Pretenders, full time.

With Hill managing, Sire took over as the one-label for the Pretenders. Seymour Stein got what he describes as “one of the most highly unique and identifiable voices in rock music, which is very important. She is also a tremendous song writer.” And Sire would be her label, completely.

Chrissie was in her dream world, and doing what she wanted with her life. She described it this way: “Look, as long as we can make records and sell enough so we can do some shows, that's all I want. You know what? I just want to play guitar and be in a band. Same as I always did.” When she heard herself sing, in her heart and head she heard the voice of Iggy Pop and Jimi Hendrix.

Four Pretenders Join Together

In Spring, 1978, the Pretenders became a band. Chrissie assembled her other three: first Pete Farndon (black jacket; bass guitar), who then found James Honeyman-Scott (keyboards), and Martin Chambers (drums).

Chrissie’s initial name for this band – The Rhythm Method – was discarded after they figured its contraceptive connotation would kill airplay. They confessed to their new band name’s inspiration: Sam Cooke’s version of the song “The Great Pretender” by The Platters. That name, Chrissie said, was “totally unpretentious.”

“Stop Your Sobbing”

They created their first single: “Stop Your Sobbing” backed by “The Wait.” They traveled to Paris to play some gigs, then back home. In January, 1979, “Sobbing” had stunned them all. It’d gone Top 30 in the U.K. When they played dates in the U.K. now, they got cheered and rave reviewed. Rolling Stone wrote “Pretenders stands as some of the freshest, most provocative music around.”

Chrissie was performing boldly. She flexed her full-bodied voice while stalking the stage with her tough-talking guitar, making it clear she’s the toughest boy in the band. (She was. In April, in Memphis, the police handcuffed her, tossed her in jail, after her fight in a barroom brawl. “I’ve got a lot of pressures on me, and when I get a little jolly (her term for drunk and disorderly), it’s because I’m just moody.”

Their First Album

On January 19, 1980, their first album came out: called of all things Pretenders. It hit big. Hynde moaned, crooned, belted, quavered, and seduced. She shouted her singing, but was right on note. It sounded like nothing before. One of her lyrics: “But not me baby. I’m too precious I had to fuck off.”

Rock ‘n’ rollers felt blessed, because this was not disco crap. Radio hooked millions of listeners.

Next single, her label wanted, was called “Brass in Pocket.”

Chrissie expressed doubts about that next. She told her producer (the popular Chris Thomas, who’d also produced the Sex Pistols) that he could release it “over my dead body.” The song was based on a phrase Chrissie had heard when a second-rate band called Strangeways asked her for money, asking for “brass in pocket.” Her labels (Real+Sire) got insistent. The song was a big one.

Once again, the charts smiled on them and their newest, biggest hit, “Brass in Pocket.” Chrissie sang with a mixture insecurity and swagger.

For a YouTube of “Brass,” click HERE.

Music writers were already branding the Pretenders as “post-punk.”

Also on Chrissie’s agenda was her about-to-be-broken love affair, Farendon, (left on the cover above, in his customary black leathers). Soon, Chrissie would have to drop him from the group, because of his drug addiction.

Connecting with Ray

The good times rolled.

With hits, Chrissie’s feeling hot. Three singles became solid sellers from the Pretenders album. Besides “Brass in Pocket,” there’d been “Kid” and, earlier, “Stop Your Sobbing.”

1980 turned into touring for the band. Hot makes that happen, and vice versa. When the band played New York, Chrissie noticed that Ray Davies’ band The Kinks were playing there, too. She’d tried before to meet him. Davies had been one of her early heroes as an Akron girl, right up there with Iggy Pop and the Stooges.

She wanted to see him, to thank him for his “Stop Your Sobbing” song. They met.

“This sounds daffy,” Davies recalls, ”but she said ‘Hello’ and I thought she was really saying ‘Help me.’ She couldn’t take the sudden fame that had come to her, and I think she saw me as someone who had done all that rock ‘n’ roll stuff and understood it. It was a good friendship for a few weeks, but that should have been it.”

Just beginning was “it.” They became a couple, despite Davies’ own marriage. In 1981, “besotted” was how Hynde described how affectionate it all was happening. In September of ’81, Davies and his second wife divorced, with Chrissie named in the divorce papers. Two years of this, and from Ray and Chrissie came their daughter, Natalie Hynde, born in January 1983.

But they never married. Close, but on the closest they got to marriage, they argued so much inside the Registrar’s office that the official in charge moved on to marry waiting couples, and then refused to issue a license for them to marry.

Davies later described their years as “a fairy tale romance written by Alfred Hitchcock.”

They had out-depressed each other. Or as Davies once said, “If I had my life to live over, I would change every single thing I have done.”

Pretenders II

Concerts made money. On stage, Chrissie stared out at big crowds over her guitar and under her bangs. She sang mean truths. Unlike any “girl singer” before her.

Unlike other new bands in town, the Pretenders sang their flip-tough songs with style. People listened. Downtown crowds partied in rowdy ways, but these concerts were less about throwing crap at others in the audience. More about songs with street smarts.

In August, 1981, Pretenders II came. The demand was there, though the songs were not. An EP had come out in March. Critics noticed “left overs” in the new II. But there was plenty of sex-sizzle, especially tunes “Bad Boys Get Spanked” and “The Adultress.”

Most-to-be-expected was the album’s “Day After Day” track, which describes the bad side of the Pretenders’ new celebrity: their constant rushing from gig to hotel, their life turned exhausting, the track ending in the middle of its guitar solo with the noise of crashing plane.

(The re-released version, out in 2006, grows to be a two-disc set, including live tracks, out-takes, and tracks from a 1982 WB promo album, the Pretenders Live at the Santa Monica Civic. Record labels do get hungry at times like this.)

Drugs and Death Next

By 1982, drug abuse had wiped out two of the four Pretenders: guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon. Both men OD’d to death in under 12 months. On June 16, 1982, James Honeyman Scott was found dead of cocaine-induced heart attack. Then, on April 14, 1983, Pete Farndon drowned in his bathtub after ODing on heroine.

Keep going, Chrissie believed. Even with only half a band now. It was what she knew: “I was a single mom with two kids. What else was I going to do? It was either be in a band or be a waitress.”

 

Not quickly, Chrissie Hynde assembled another, a new Pretenders group. She was now entering her thirties. She was strong. Streetwise. She wrote good songs. Behind her in the new Pretenders, she assembled a bass guy with solid punch (Malcolm Foster), and a muscular guitar guy (Robbie McIntosh from Manfred Mann’s Earth Band), joining her and her emotive drumming guy Martin Chambers.

And she was pregnant. Her first child, Natalie Hynde, was born six months after the collapse of her first band from those ODs. Born in January, 1983. Father Ray Davies was not willing to act fatherly.

So, in her life mode, she kept going maternally, too.

“Learning to Crawl”

The title of the (new) Pretenders’ third album, Learning to Crawl, has been attributed to Chrissie’s baby girl now (it’s now early 1984) after two years off to attend to her baby. (Others believe the phrase was Chrissie’s self-depiction about her own life.)

Learning to Crawl became a huge high, especially on Sire in America. Up to #5 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart. And not just one of those pop-up hits. From Crawl, single after single made the charts: “Back to the Chain Gang” (#5 Pop Single); then “Middle of the Road,” “My City Was Gone,” “Show Me,” “Thin Line Between Love and Hate.” Ten hot tracks (the 2007 re-release adds seven re-releases).

Chrissie’s (First) Actual Husband

With no Kink to marry plus a Natalie, Chrissie quickly found a legal marriage to Glasgow-born Jim Kerr, lead vocalist of Simple Minds, on May 5, 1984. She and he’d met in Australia, both touring with their bands.

Quickly, Chrissie is pregnant again. Another daughter was coming to town.

Chrissie was still non-English, still American. With her baby girl plus Kerr, her new, rockin’ husband (he eight years younger than Chrissie), Chrissie was now safe to stay there with her baby. England got safer.

There was complexity to all this. Chrissie’s marriage to frontman Jim Kerr took place in 1984, in New York. Just days after the marriage, Kerr, age 24, flew off on a two-year world tour, leaving behind his pregnant bride, Chrissie. Thus a second daughter was born to Chrissie: Yasmin Kerr, born March 25, 1985.

Or as Chrissie’s song “Private Life” said, “Your sexual complications are not my fascination.”

Mother of Two

Now with two daughters by two rock’n’rollers, Chrissie stopped touring for the next eight years. She wanted to look after her children.

Six years later, the Kerr-Hynde marriage ended in divorce in 1990. Touring remained occasional now. Divorcee Chrissie-Plus-Two moved to a home in Madia Vale, north of Paddington, London.

Instead of world touring, making recordings by the Pretenders became Chrissie Hynde’s Number One Fascination.

Those recordings continued to please the world. They also pleased their distributor, Seymour Stein, and his Sire label.

Chrissie and the Pretenders stuck with Seymour Stein and Sire for two decades. “Without Seymour, I’d still be a cocktail waitress in Akron,” she said back in 1986.

Albums Galore

In the years since Learning to Crawl, Chrissie and the Pretenders got less ... less … run-around.

They still made hot albums, nine more studio releases, plus live and compilation albums.

Let’s make a list, but without … without … run-around.

1986: Get Close
1990: Packed!
1994: Last of the Independents
1999: Viva el Amor
2002: Loose Screw
2008: Break Up the Concrete

And what else? … and … and Chrissie finally had a distinguished marriage in 1997 to artist Lucho Brieva. Lucho and Chrissie separated in 2002. Five years there.

She dueted with Frank Sinatra in his Duets series on Capitol: “Luck Be a Lady.”

In 2005: Chrissie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On stage at that career-climaxer, she said, “I know that the Pretenders have looked like a tribute band for the last 20 years, and we’re paying tribute to James Honeyman Scott and Pete Farndon, without whom we wouldn’t be here. And on the other hand, without us, they might have been here. But that’s the way it works in rock ‘n’ roll.”

In 2007, she opened her own vegan café in Akron: The VegiTerranean in 2007. Chrissie is in her sixties, again single, but dates younger men.

- Stay Tuned

Where Are They Now:

As for all those others?

Martin Chambers: The Pretenders long-time drummer continues as just that. He came back in 1994 for Last of the Independents. He recalled, “Chrissie asked me back because no one could make it work quite like we did.” And Chrissie adds, “I missed him terribly. Both he and I were floundering – and probably not playing well – and I need someone to kick me in the ass and inspire me. We went through one song and it was the same buzz as when we first played together. No one has that swing and feel. (Hot Press, 1994)

Natalie Hynde: Chrissie’s daughter by Ray Davies, in her 30s, still with estranged parents. The duet she assembled for her still disconnected parents, Ray and Chrissie, is on YouTube: “Postcard from London.” Natalie had to record it in two separate session; mom and dad wouldn’t be in the same studio together.

Jim Kerr: He continues to lead his band, Simple Minds, which he created in 1977 from the punk band, Johnny & The Self-Abusers. After his marriage to Chrissie Hynde, in 1992, Kerr married actress Patsy Kensit, then they divorced in 1996. His band has evolved from post-punk to New Wave to pop. In 1984, Simple Minds had a #1 album, Sparkle in the Rain.

Yasmin Paris Kerr: Chrissie’s younger daughter lives in London, working as an actress there. She is married with twin boys.

Malcolm McLaren: In 1985, he lost all rights to the Sex Pistols in a lawsuit brought by John Lydon (Rotten). He moved to Hollywood to make movies, living with Hollywood actress Lauren Hutton. Signed but then cut at Paramount. Born a decade before the Pistols were, he lived long, passing on April 8, 2010. He remained, through life, a performer and impresarioHe is buried at Highgate Cemetery, London; his plaque reads “Malcolm Was Here.”

Seymour Stein: From his days as a Ramones-signer, Stein moved through decades, most often with his Sire label attached, then in 1976 he partnered Sire for distribution with Warner Bros. Records. That partnership lasted ‘til 1995. In 2003, Stein returned to the Warner family. Signing was his life work, from the Talking Heads to Madonna. And as of this writing (2013) he’s still at it.

Vivienne Westwood: Born 1941. While living with McLaren during the “Sex” era, she and McLaren had a son (her second). She created clothes for the rest of her life. Her designs continued to get pop recognition and awards, post-SEX. She is now married to her former student, Andreas Kronthaler. Her first son, Ben, is a photographer of erotica. Her son by McLaren, Joseph Corre, has a luxury lingerie brand called Agent Provocateur.