The Pretenders are an interesting niche outfit in the lexicon of rock and roll.
Perpetually underrated and often overlooked compared to many of their like-minded peers, they nevertheless have delivered a bevy of longtime radio staples to the AM, FM, and satellite radio worlds, with Gen X anthems like Back on the Chain Gang, Middle of the Road, Message of Love, Talk of the Town, and Don’t Get Me Wrong. While their membership has changed many times over the decades, the foremost figurehead of the band throughout all their incarnations is of course Chrissie Hynde.
I’ll admit, as a kid, one of the first times I took note of Hynde was because of the tabloid gossip about her and Ray Davies, the lead singer for the Kinks. I was a huge Kinks fan as a kid. I most definitely got into the Pretenders because of the Kinks. One of the first songs they ever covered on their first record was the Kinks’ Stop Your Sobbing. But what really ended up drawing me to Hynde was her passion for mysticism and her animal rights advocacy. She’s a hardcore vegetarian and has little patience for meat eaters nor folks who support lab testing on animals. Actually, I think it’s safe to say the infamously crotchety Chrissie Hynde suffers very little of what she deems tomfoolery. More on that in a bit.
I didn’t catch the Pretenders live until 2007, when they hosted a co-bill with the Stray Cats here locally in Santa Barbara. They were fantastic, played all the expected hits. There’s something both magical and daunting about the kind of gigs, small or big, club or arena, where an assembly of fans sing the songs louder than the band. It happens a lot at Green Day shows. It’s alternately amazing and confounding. I mean, we are there to listen to them, right? Ha, ha. I know, I’m a Debbie downer.
The next time I caught Miss Hynde was on one of her solo runs, in 2014, at my favorite venue, the Arlington Theater here in town. In all honesty, there isn’t much difference between Chrissie Hynde solo and the Pretenders. She is, indubitably, the Pretenders herself. It was at this gig where I first witnessed Hynde’s famous temper, in her outrage at audience members using cell phones to video or snap pix. She was supremely irked about it, stopping mid-song not once but twice to reprimand fans in the first few rows for holding up their cell phones. She was not in any way genteel about it.
Believe it or not, I tend to lean on the artist side of the anti-cell phone stance, despite all the evidence to the contrary in this column. If cell phones were banned outright at concerts, as they often are for comedy gigs, I’d be perfectly fine with that. We did, after all, used to attend concerts all the time without those crutches. Some things in life really are better marked in memory, without distractions to the experience itself, and logic dictates very few folk are really going to watch that video in the future more than once or twice at best. It’s best to be in the moment when it comes to live music.
As can plainly be seen here in this column, I do like snapping a few pix for posterity. What I try to do is take a few shots during the first couple songs and put my phone away for the rest of the concert. There are some artists who ask the audiences to take videos and pics for a song or two in the beginning and put ‘em away afterward. Very few fans heed this request, alas. I rarely video, with some few exceptions, usually because sometimes my wifey insists upon a vid of her dancing to one of her favorite songs. It’s not cool to keep your phone up that long for the folks behind you. It just ain’t. So I’m all in, when it comes to Hynde’s crabby take on cell phones. Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day is often equitably irked by phone usage as well.
Yet I couldn’t help myself when I attended my last Pretenders gig in 2023, way out in the high desert near Joshua Tree at a small roadhouse known as Pappy and Harriet’s. It’s a club sort of venue in a quaint, former movie studio western outpost called Pioneertown. That gig also earned the distinction of garnering me my very first case of Covid. It’s a good story, told in another sector of this ‘Stack concerning the tail end of the pandemic years, but I’ll share a version of it again here.
The wifey was overseas that month, so I entered a ticket lottery to attend the uber-exclusive Pappy’s gig. Only several hundred Pretenders fans would be allowed inside. It’s a rustic honkytonk place and the likes of Robert Plant and Paul McCartney had played there in the past for a lark between stops on their bigger tours. Somehow I lucked out and was offered a single access pass, and boom, off I went into the desert. I’d been vaccinated to the fullest extent Americans could be at that point, so it was this gig, at long last, where I first let go of wearing a mask in a post-pandemic group setting. Yup, masks work, because whaddya know, as soon as I took that sucker off around lots of other people, that’s when I finally picked up the Covid bug.
The question was, in what explicit social setting at Pappy’s I’d actually inhaled the airborne bugger. In hindsight, there were two significant situations that seemed to have the most likelihood. The first was when I was lined up outside, in blazing Joshua Tree heat to boot. I arrived early to try and get up front near the rail, figuring it was a once in a lifetime Pretenders gig, the exclusivity, the crowd size, the remote venue. The fella right behind me in line, a big, swarthy, leather-clad, high desert rat clearly looking for a buddy, himself attending the gig solo just as I was, proceeded to engage me in loud and raucous conversation, rambling about Chrissie and the Pretenders and classic rock blah blah blah. I tried desperately to keep six feet of distance, knowing all the while such measures would be pointless once we got inside and 800 people would be packed shoulder to shoulder around me.
Nonetheless, I tried all the same. He was red-faced, already three sheets to the wind, a desert soul who lived right down the road off Highway 62, that infamous blood alley I’ve penned so much about over in our sister column The Road. I presumed…I hoped…his blotchy appearance was due to his early drinking, and not, say, an active Covid infection. Every time I took a step back, he’d step forward. You know those kind of bodily space people. Some folk just don’t see it. It happens. After ninety plus minutes of enduring his rants and raves, the line finally was let inside, and he disappeared into the bar to bolster his reserves. I made it up to front row center, right smack dab next to the stage. The desert rat crowd was, shall we say, boisterous. Excited to be at the rare exclusive gig, yes, but also just happy to be out, period, after two years of lockdowns and quarantines. Chrissie and company came on and played a bunch of their newest album, to which the crowd responded accordingly (as in, milquetoast reception per usual for old school classic rock artists), and Miss Hynde started to get cranky about it.
Then her mood worsened, when she started reprimanding folks in the front row for using phones. I know, because she was literally right in front of me and I was one of the guilty parties. See below? Note the disdain in her eyes as I snapped this shot, as well as the header photo above. I couldn’t help it. How often are ya gonna be that close to Chrissie? To be fair, I only took three single pictures, period, and put my phone away for the rest of the show. It was still enough to attract her ire, as can plainly be seen.
A day or two after the show, Chrissie announced a postponement of a couple of pending Pretenders gigs because she and much of the band had come down with Covid.
Woof!
One of two things might have happened there in the high desert.
I may have given Covid to Chrissie Hynde, being that close to her.
Or…she may have given ME Covid!
Yes, it’s more likely the drunken space-invader fella in line gave it to me, yet it’s entirely possible Chrissie herself did, given her singing was raining down aerial droplets all about me and the rest of the front row during the gig. Sure, it also could’ve been any of the sweaty folks in attendance with whom I rubbed elbows, who’d knowingly or unknowingly carried the bug to the show.
But it’s a better story if I either tag Chrissie as my Patient Zero, or myself as the fan who laid low the band, isn’t it? :)
