Book Review - Reckless: My Life As A Pretender by Chrissie Hynde
Dubbed the “high priestess of badass rock ’n’ roll,” American singer/song-writer and founding member of the seminal post-punk1980s band the Pretenders, Chrissie Hynde, has one of the most recognizable faces and voices in rock and roll.
Who can forget seeing her for the first time on the cover of the band’s 1980 debut album, Pretenders, with her jet black hair and bangs, kohl-rimmed eyes and red leather bomber jacket, flanked by her three sullen band-mates?
And that voice – sassy, wavering, ethereal and haunting, coupled with her trademark approach to phrasing on tracks like Brass In Pocket, Precious,Kid and Tattooed Love Boys (more about this latter track below).
In Hynde’s aptly titled new memoir, Reckless: My Life As A Pretender, she recounts her drug and alcohol fuelled quest to be a member of a rock ‘n roll band in an engaging conversational style, replete with self-deprecating observations, humorous quips and one-liners. And it is, indeed, a quest that included a great deal of reckless behaviour; and, by her own admission, one during which Hynde more often than not bluffed and conned her way in and out of situations.
In her Prologue, Hynde explains why she has waited to tell her story: “I couldn’t have told this story when my parents were alive, I would have had to leave out the bad language and tell a lot of lies about what I’d been doing all the time I was gone. I’m so sorry for that, Mom and Dad, I know you were proud of me. I regret half of this story and the other half is the sound you heard.”
Born in September, 1951 into a relatively straitlaced middle-class home – her father was an ex-Marine who worked for the Ohio Bell Telephone Company, her mother a part-time secretary and housewife – Hynde’s 1950s childhood centred around drawing horses, sewing, and playing with friends and her older brother on the tree-lined streets of Akron.
That all changed when she reached adolescence in the mid-1960s. Like many others of her generation, Hynde expressed her rebelliousness through Sex, which had become a “recreational lifestyle choice” thanks to the pill, Drugs, which were readily available to her, and Rock ‘n’ Roll as played by Cleveland’s underground FM station WMMS.
“The sixties were exploding with great bands, and not everything in rock had been explored. A bit of tape played backwards was innovative and wildly exciting – we were a rapt audience. We were explorers. We wanted to nurture our consciousness, and we had a new world of mind-expanding aids to help us on our way. Pot and LSD would see us right on our journey of self-discovery,” she writes.
The teenaged Hynde saw concerts by the likes of the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, the Velvet Underground, Paul Butterfield, Sly and the Family Stone, Alice Cooper, Tim Buckley, the Jeff Beck Group, and soul singer Jackie Wilson.
Hynde says that seeing Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels perform confirmed what she wanted to do with her life: “That sealed it. There would be no turning back for me. I didn’t imagine that I would ever get in a band, but I was now eternally devoted to the idea.”
A self-proclaimed “underachiever” in high school, Hynde managed to secure a spot at Kent State University despite her “flunky grades” as the state school was obliged to take her because of her Ohioan status. It was here she witnessed the on-campus shooting deaths of four students at the hands of National Guardsmen during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in May, 1970.
Shortly afterwards, the then 19-year-old Hynde made her first trip to Yorkville-era Toronto, a place she considered starting a “new life” until her male companion convinced her to return home to Kent and Ohio. A few years after her return to Ohio, Hynde fell in with some “Heavy Bikers” leading to the incident recounted in the book which has garnered so much press and social media attention.
Stoned on Quaaludes, she found herself at a “party of one” with a group of bikers in “a white slum that had ‘Jeffrey Dahmer’ written all over it.” Pushed into a dark room and pelted with lit matches, Hynde was sexually assaulted by the bikers. The incident provided inspiration for Tattooed Love Boys, a track on the Pretenders’ eponymous debut album.
She writes:”…technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing and I take full responsibility. You can’t fuck around with people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’ Badges.”
Blaming herself for the incident has prompted critics to accuse her of “victim shaming,” something Hynde denied in a recent ABC News interview: “I told my story the way I saw it and I’m not here to advise anyone or validate myself or justify anything. I said I regret a lot of things I did.”
In1973 Hynde left Akron and the United States behind, relocating in London, England where a chance meeting with rock journalist, Nick Kent, resulted in a year-long writing gig reviewing bands and concerts with the British music paper NME (New Musical Express).
Hynde had no illusions about her writing abilities: “The idea of me writing anything at all was ludicrous. My head was disorganized, a tangle of crossed lines. I couldn’t conclude a thought on a postcard. The more dismissive and poorly written my reviews, the more the NME applauded me. All I had were opinions, but my employers were intent on turning me into the star attraction of the rat pack of the British music press.”
Hynde’s tenure at NME was followed by a stint as a shop assistant at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s clothing store. At this point, a number of serendipitous “being in the right place at the right time” moments and the ingestion of a copious amount of drugs and alcohol brought Hynde’s pursuit of rock ‘n’ roll fame to fruition, including rubbing shoulders with the likes of Mick Jones of The Clash, The Sex Pistols (she considered marrying singer Johnny Rotten and Bassist Sid Vicious to stay in England legally) and Lemmy Kimilster of Motörhead.
Eventually she fell in with guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, bassist Pete Fardon, and drummer Martin Chambers and the Pretenders were born in 1978, and the rest as they say is history. Hynde was 27-years-old.
The Pretenders were together long enough to record two albums – Pretenders (1980) and Pretenders II (1981) – before it all fell apart with the premature deaths of Fardon and Honeyman-Scott. Hynde has continued to record and tour with various line-ups under the Pretenders moniker and most recently as a solo act. Her musicianship, outspokenness and advocacy for animal rights have kept her relevant and in the news.
Hynde has chosen to end her memoir shortly after her success with Pretenders, which is most unfortunate as I am sure she has many more stories to tell. Perhaps she has a second book in mind for that part of her life
And if you are wondering, she has cleaned up her act. “Ì think it`s easy to see that the moral of my story is that drugs, including tobacco and alcohol, only cause suffering. I read Allen Carr`s Easy Way to Stop books and I stopped,” she writes in the book`s Epilogue.