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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A walking contradiction of tough talk and tender gestures, Chrissie Hynde inspired a generation of female rockers and fans.
Apr 6, 1999 | When Chrissie Hynde was a 12-year-old in Akron, Ohio, her teacher asked the class to write a poem about their favorite word. Hynde's favorite word was "England."
For Hynde, and other rock 'n' roll-crazed American kids in the early '60s, England held a talismanic significance. It meant the Beatles, the Stones, electric guitars, exotic accents -- everything wild and cool that their hometowns couldn't give them. Chrissie Hynde wanted to play in a band, in England, and never mind that she was a girl and American. She got her first guitar at 14 and with the stubbornness, desire and bravado that have characterized her music ever since, set out to transcend accidents of nationality and gender. "I was more like a guy, locked away in a room, practicing obsessively," Hynde has said of her adolescence.
The story of Chrissie Hynde's success is one of rock 'n' roll's best fables. She did go to England and become one of the boys, playing guitar in her own rock 'n' roll band. But in being one of the boys, she realized two things: She could never be one of the boys, and what's more, she didn't need to. The first epiphany made her interesting. The second made her great.
Christine Hynde was born on Sept. 7, 1951, in Akron, a Cleveland suburb known as the tire capital of America. She graduated from Firestone High School in 1969 and attended Kent State University as an art major at the height of student protests against the Vietnam war. She played in a local band, then dropped out of college in 1973 and moved to London, where destiny was not as quick in coming as she had planned. Hynde waited tables and fell in with the proto-punk rockers who hung around Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's Kings Road clothing store, SEX. She also worked briefly as a rock critic for the New Musical Express, sang in a group that later became the Damned and shared rehearsal space with Mick Jones before he formed the Clash. A possibly apocryphal story has Hynde almost marrying Sid Vicious in order to obtain British citizenship.
Hynde watched as her pals became punk stars. Years later, in a British music press interview, Hynde remembered riding the subway home from a concert in tears because everyone she knew was in a band except her. Finally, in 1978, Hynde met a pair of musicians from Hereford, guitarists James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon. In 1979, as the Pretenders, they recorded a cover of the old Kinks song "Stop Your Sobbing" for the small punk label Real Records. (Drummer Martin Chambers didn't join the Pretenders until after the first single was recorded; a session drummer played on those tracks.) A dense mix of jangly guitars, stuttering drums and Hynde's sulky-sweet vocals, "Stop Your Sobbing" became a Top 40 hit in the U.K. The Pretenders' self-titled debut album soon followed; it collected almost unanimous raves from critics, climbed to No. 1 in the U.K. and made the Top 10 in the United States. Chrissie Hynde's dream of England had come true.
