from the LP Pretenders II, Sire Records, 1981It’s pretty hard to resist Chrissie Hynde, I don’t care what your age, race, gender, or sexual orientation is---this woman is the real deal people, and she often lets you know that in no uncertain terms; great, starting off that way I’m already feeling remiss for not choosing a more aggressive song to post, where she’s snarling…okay, perhaps that side of her is better illustrated in the form of a story: in John ‘Johnny Rotten’ Lydon’s autobiography No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, Ms. Hynde admitted to being one of the many people surrounding the Sex Pistols who hated Nancy Spungen, confessing to having cleaned her fingernails with Nancy’s needles, in hopes that she would contract an infection while shooting up and die…ouch. When she sings, she almost sounds motherly, yet the moment she breaks out of verse and into spoken word, it’s like being rammed up against a wall; that dichotomy gave her a lot of wiggle room, something most other women in rock don’t enjoy. Chrissie has seen it all, from being a young art student at Kent State when the massacre happened, to losing half of the band you hear playing on this track to overdoses within a year after its release (guitarist James Honeyman-Scott to cocaine & bassist Pete Farndon to heroin), and she keeps on trucking; I just read a recent interview with her a couple summers ago, touring with ZZ Top, and she said her favorite thing about it was smoking a joint and rocking out to ZZ every night from the sound booth---how fucking cool is that?! This angular, reggae-fied jam has one of the greatest lines in history, in my humble opinion, care of Oscar Wilde, “…we are, all of us, in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars…” Amen.
