From The New York Times:
Her City’s Not Gone, and Neither Is She
By ALAN LIGHT
Published: October 3, 2008
A version of this article appeared in print on October 5, 2008, on page AR25 of the New York edition.
MANSFIELD, Mass.
The Pretenders, class of 2008: from left, Martin Chambers, Chrissie Hynde, Nick Wilkinson, Eric Heywood and James Walbourne.
BACKSTAGE at the 23rd annual Farm Aid concert, the sound of Kenny Chesney’s voice filled the air. Chrissie Hynde cursed at her cellphone, pulled off her boots and curled up on a couch, following a sundown set by the latest configuration of her band, the Pretenders.
In typically ornery fashion, the majority of songs they performed came from an album that was weeks away from reaching stores: “Break Up the Concrete,” the first Pretenders album in six years (which will be released on Tuesday on Shangri-La Music; that night, the band will perform at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan).
“Ambition is not my middle name,” Ms. Hynde said. “But I don’t care — I’m up to my eyeballs most of the time goofing off. I’m kind of a hippie, so the idea was not to have goals or anything. Just moving around and observing and living life; that’s necessary before you can make a record anyway.”
Sipping a nonalcoholic beer and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, Ms. Hynde, 57, remains as rail thin as she was almost three decades ago, when the Pretenders’ self-titled debut album perfectly melded punk energy with British Invasion style and hooks. She now allows some gray streaks to show through her trademark black bangs, but with her makeup smeared from the heat of the late-afternoon stage, she still looked every bit the rock legend.
Discussing “Concrete,” though, it becomes clear that Ms. Hynde’s recent thoughts have largely been shaped by a traditional factor: spending more time in her hometown, Akron, Ohio. Like the rest of the Rust Belt, Akron (also the birthplace of eccentrics like the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, the country outlaw David Allen Coe and the garage rockers the Black Keys) has been hit hard for decades; unemployment hovers well above the national average, and only one rubber manufacturer remains in the former Rubber Capital of the World.
Ms. Hynde might seem an unlikely cheerleader. She moved to London, her primary residence, in the early 1970s and only recently took an apartment in Akron. But she has written about her hometown in songs like “My City Was Gone,” and it offers an opportunity to champion causes like mass transit and urban renewal.
“My parents are really old now, and I want to be around more,” she said. “I’m trying to discover my own relationship to Akron — there’s a resonance you get when you go back to the place you were born.”
The band at Farm Aid in Mansfield, Mass., in September.
Most notably, last year she opened a vegan restaurant in Akron called the VegiTerranean. Ms. Hynde is an animal rights activist and has been arrested several times in protests (once for slashing leather products in a Gap store in Manhattan). At Farm Aid, she wore a T-shirt reading “Tax Meat” and called for a day when “all McDonald’s and slaughterhouses are burned to the ground” — presumably not a sentiment shared by the cattle farmers present.
“There wasn’t one vegetarian restaurant in Akron, so I said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and it’s just been a phenomenon,” she said. She described its “international flavor, right down to the tea bag in the pot”; at its opening, she personally served veggie burgers to police officers.
“Everybody told me, ‘Don’t do it, it will not work,’ ” she said of the restaurant. “But I had to do it anyway, because I had to have somewhere I could eat. And more than the music, it’s what I’m about. To me, the music is a vehicle so I can have a voice.
“I don’t think the world really needs another Pretenders record. But frankly, I was getting embarrassed because we hadn’t made a record in so long. And we were doing a lot of touring, and I just can’t stomach doing those old songs anymore. It’s just torture.”
As she began to work on new songs, she found her direction changing. “Spending more time in Akron, I was getting more of an American feel in my sensibility,” she said. In addition, the Pretenders toured last year with ZZ Top, and Ms. Hynde participated in a tribute concert to Jerry Lee Lewis. When she went to Joshua Tree National Park in California and found where the ashes of the alternative-country pioneer Gram Parsons had been scattered, “I sort of had my epiphany there and I thought, Wow, I think I know how this thing is going to go now.”
Cut live in the studio in less than two weeks, “Concrete” is loose and scrappy, shot through with rockabilly and country. It offers yet another version of the Pretenders, whose lineup Ms. Hynde has continually juggled since the deaths of the founding guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, and the bassist Pete Farndon in the early ’80s. The drummer Martin Chambers, the other most consistent member, is touring with the band, but the session ace Jim Keltner plays drums on the album. “Chrissie is as subtle as napalm,” Mr. Chambers said in a phone interview. “She’s absolutely uncompromising. She knows when there’s something wrong that needs to be fixed, and she does it.”
The album’s title track is a high-speed meditation on urban sprawl and cultural homogenization, but at Farm Aid, Ms. Hynde expressed optimism. She cited wider acceptance of vegetarianism and increased attention to downtown areas as evidence of changing attitudes.
“I have a very good sense of these things,” she said. “Like when I was moving around in the ’70s, trying to get a band together. I went to Cleveland, I went to Paris, but around 1976, I could just sense something was going to happen in London. Sure enough, in 1977 the whole punk thing broke loose. And I have that same feeling right now about America.
“Believe me, I don’t feature any false optimism. I’m very realistic about things. But I can sense that there is this change coming, and a lot of it is because people will have no choice.”
Ms. Hynde performing in 1980
Though the Pretenders have never matched the peaks of their 1979 debut (which included the hit “Brass in Pocket”) and 1984’s glorious “Learning to Crawl” (“Back on the Chain Gang”), the band managed to become a kind of institution. Ms. Hynde’s bravado and ragged style influenced subsequent female rockers from Shirley Manson and Liz Phair to Lucinda Williams; today, her spirit is visible in the likes of Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
“Why hasn’t a movie been made about her?” said the pop-rocker Katy Perry. “She is the pioneer for female rockers with her personal style, a female Mick Jagger, but more punk.”
Every few years, the spotlight swings back to her: her appearance on “Friends,” for example, or Carrie Underwood’s cover of “I’ll Stand by You.” Despite its punk origins (Ms. Hynde played in early versions of the Clash and the Damned), the band is now a staple on classic rock radio and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005.
Ms. Hynde, though, adamantly refuses to think in terms of the band’s legacy. “I hate all that,” she said, calling the Hall of Fame “another American cheesy moment.” She added: “A Hall of Fame is for sports. It was a big deal to my parents, but I don’t see it as any kind of honor.”
The common perception is that, at some point, the Pretenders turned into a solo project, backed by whatever musicians Ms. Hynde pulls together. She said, however, that the Pretenders will always remain a genuine band. “I’ve changed the band over the years, but I’ve never been sued, I’ve always remained friends with the guys,” she said. “They can see that I can’t play very good, but I’ve got a certain vision — and that my loyalty always has to be to the music first.”
“I never would have been interesting if it would have been me alone,” Ms. Hynde concluded. “If it was Chrissie Hynde and her guitar, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. You wouldn’t even know who I was.”
Tickets are starting to go on sale this week for The Pretenders‘ European Summer Tour. It’s been really great for RCC to get international recognition through having the tour merchandise. We’re even seeing a lot of people picking up some RCC gear along with Pretenders’ merch. How cool to see Akron pride in some of Europa’s finest cities?!
It’s always great to hear that our friends and fans are spreading the word about 
AKRON ROCK ICONS DO CIVIC DUTY
