CHRISSIE HYNDE, WITHOUT CRUELTY TO ANIMALS

There was the time, in 1975, Blue Oyster Cult was trying to have a peaceful dinner in Paris and this chick walked across the tables and their dinners...

There was the time a reporter, who’d written a not particularly complimentary piece about the Pretenders was summoned (or so he thought) to discuss it and drove all the way from Detroit to Chicago to find the interview was blown off... revenge or simple misunderstanding?

That was nothing compared to the late night TV show host from Boston who was almost reduced to tears...

Everybody has a Chrissie Hynde story. And not all of them are about how difficult she is. But perhaps it’s no surprise that the first single from her fourth album is “Don’t Get Me Wrong.” It’s not so easy to get her right. No sooner did she get the attention she’d demanded for years before “Brass In Pocket” confirmed her talent was very, very special, then she wanted the world to take a hike.

Chrissie wants people to buy the record, come to the show, and leave her alone. She is not interested in talking about her songs or how she records them, why she canned the last original Pretender, drummer Martin Chambers, and ditched longtime producer Chris Thomas for Bob Clearmountain (Bryan Adams) and Jimmy lovine (Stevie Nicks). Her fourth album, Get Close, bears a disclaimer: THIS RECORD WAS MADE WITHOUT CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. How many records are? Cruelty to people, yes...But if you’ve had the bad luck to bump into her when she was not into being civil to strangers, you know that Chrissie Hynde, the person, is not necessarily the long cool woman of your dreams or the compassionate, beautiful voice that, even on her least significant songs, still leaps out of the radio and strikes a private chord. They day before her brand new Pretenders were to make their first live appearance anywhere in front of who knows how many million viewers on Saturday Night Live, she had good reason to be edgy—especially since the throat thing that had been going around New York had just gotten around to her. But what you don’t expect is her breezing into her hotel room in hula hoop earrings, Catholic girl medal at neck, no wedding ring on hand, to give a lesson in the art of making tea. This is how she does it:

“You heat the teapot by pouring a little bit of water in and swishing it around and dumping it out. Boil the water—it has to be like really boiling—with the kettle. Then you put a teaspoon of tea per cup or something—you can just approximate it after awhile—in the pot. Then you pour the hot water on. Immediately put the cap on. Leave it there for a minute. Take the cap off. Stir it a little bit. Put the cap on. You should really let it steep for a couple of minutes—five minutes, really. Pour it out.”

Many English people “have a little strainer,” she explains, “and they pour it through there over the cup. I mean, personally, I just pour it in and the tea leaves fall to the bottom. I just don’t drink the bottom.” That’s still preferable to the tea ball Americans use with loose tea that lets the water circulate.

“And the other thing is,” she adds, in England “they usually put in your empty cup—your mug—they usually put the milk in first. For some reason, they say it affects the taste. Put the milk in first. And also, it’s more working class to put the milk in first. It’s kind of la de da to put the milk in after. So you put the milk in first and then you put the tea on.” But this isn’t The Galloping Gourmet.

“Some people aren’t good at interviews. I don’t think I’ve ever been good at them,” Chrissie apologizes, swinging her brand new boots up on to the bed.

But that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, so you try to make the best of it by saying things like Why did you call this record, which was made primarily with session people, some of whom turned into your new band, The Pretenders’? Why not The Pretender’ or just Chrissie Hynde?

“I always get that,” she replies. “But the Pretenders is my band. And that’s what it’s called. I got the band together. Dave (Hill) was my manager. He met me, and decided to help me get a band together before I met any of the other Pretenders and it’s still me and him.”

There’s a big change in the sound of the record.

There is a big change. But if you saw the band I was with in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1975, you would see it’s closer to that than anything else I’ve been doing.

So much of the early Pretenders sound seemed based on the interplay of your voice and James Honey man-Scott’s guitar. Then it seemed that Robbie McIntosh had to fill those shoes...

Robbie’s a very similar player to Jimmy, just because they had very similar backgrpunds. That’s why Jimmy was interested in getting Robbie in anyway. I think Robbie was always sensitive to the fact that we had a Pretenders sound, but I don’t think that’s a consideration anymore. Now he’s come into his own...”

Then the next thing on the tape is Chrissie’s comment that “Patti Smith’s doing an album. But I’m not telling you anything I know about it”—and her abrupt question—“Why do you think that chicks don’t get it together on the guitar very good?”

You think it has to do primarily with muscular dexterity.

“I think there is definitely an element of that,” she agrees, “but don’t you think that a lot of guys find it as a way of really expressing themselves? I’m not talking about good guitar players. I’m talking about innovative guitar players like Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Albert King, Chuck Berry, people who take it somewhere that no one else ever took it. These people have obviously found a voice through this instrument and they really can express something experimental, express something with real musicianship and real adventure. I’ve never met a woman or heard a woman play—I’ve seen women who are good—but who have this thing of innovation, real innovation.”

But there are only a handful of women who play guitar—for a whole variety of social and cultural reasons that have nothing to do with technical predisposition or musical potential. Is the percentage of greats among them any different than the number of Jimi Hendrixes among the millions of male strummers? How many painters are Picasso?

“I don’t think chicks can do it,” says Chrissie. “Well, none of ’em have.” Maybe, you suggest, women haven’t been playing guitar long enough.

“We’ve had 20 years to get it together and no one’s done it,” Chrissie says.

“Well,” you say, “it may take longer than 20 years for evolution.” You wish you could discuss it further, particularly because you’re talking to someone who plays OK, if not Hendrix/Beck class guitar, someone who is one of the rare rock ’n’ role models for future Joanie B. Greats. Yet, whatever her technical limitations, she, like many females from day one, who are usually more verbal than their muscularly dextrous bro’s, didn’t need an instrument to find her voice. She found her voice, period, and became one of the most expressive rock artists of her generation.

But she says, “Evolution—let’s talk about meat eating. There’s a good subject. That’s really the only thing I’m interested in other than spiritual things, which I’m not gonna talk about. I think it should be illegal, in the category of cockfighting and slavery—eating animals and killing them. And it’s so widespread. There’s a big, big industry out there—the meat industry.” She reaches over to a sidetable and picks up a book, Why You Don’t Need Meat, by Peter Cox, and leafs through it.

“This is a great book. It just talks about every aspect of the meat industry. Meat, you, and cancer—just about everything in terms of meat. For example, Live Aid was a nice gesture and it helped a lot of people. But if everyone stopped eating meat, there d be enough grain to feed everyone in the world. Over half of the grain in the world is fed to animals. If you grew soya food on ten acres of land and raised cattle for meat consumption on another ten acres, you could feed 60 people with the soya food, two people with the animals. That’s what we’re doing with the world’s food supply.”

Chrissie’s been considering some food supply of her own. She wants to open a chain of vegetarian fast food restaurants.

‘‘Well, it’s me and some other people,” she explains. ‘‘I’m definitely pursuing it, but I’m too busy. I’d like to see one on every college campus in America for a start. We’re setting up a thing called the Reprieve Foundation. A reprieve is a stay of execution. We feel that animals and the people who eat them are waiting to be executed in one way or another. Especially the animals in the slaughterhouse. We’d have people go out and talk in schools and universities to re-educate people and show them how unhealthy it is and how they’re killing themselves, and destroying the whole planet. I find killing animals and eating them akin to, like, child molesting. I don’t think anyone has the right to kill animals anymore than they have the right to kill people. People go we’ve always done it this way, our whole economy is based on it—bring it down! Look at the state of the world. We’re sitting on a keg of dynamite. We’ve got nuclear weapons, we’re burning down the rain forests. 40,000 rivers in Canada are polluted now, completely polluted. A big drug company had some accident and nothing will live in the Rhine for ten years. The real political issue in the world today isn’t the arms race, it’s ecology.” She is so committed to the Reprieve Foundation she says she would ‘‘die for it,” so she obviously gives them a lot of the money she gets from the not-so-little industry she makes records for, right?

‘‘Well the thing is just starting. I’m gonna give my time and stuff.” Would she interrupt her show to give her audience the message?

“No. No, because that’s naff,” she shakes her head. “I’m committed to it, but I’m smarter than that. I want to help people, you know? I want to save them. As much as I want to save myself and my children. I’m concerned about them. Like I’m concerned about those calves that are being taken away from their mothers as we speak. Who are crying, y’know? They want to go back in the other pen with their mother and they’re not being allowed. That concerns me. That keeps me awake at night. Every night. But I’m not gonna stop a show where people have spent, like, 15 bucks tq come and rock out. I’m gonna give ’em what they came for. And that’s all I’m there for, too.”

She will, however, devote'a page of her tour program to the Greenpeace organization. Putting down Why You Don’t Need Meat, she takes a manila folder from a desk stacked with Details, Vanity Fair, and a catalogue of the Met’s latest Vincent Van Gogh show, and spills Greenpeace brochures on the floor.

“Some people aren’t good at interviews. I don’t think I’ve ever been good at them. ”

On record, Hynde is also making more controversial statements. “How Much Did You Get For Your Soul” is an indictment of black artists (Michael Jackson and his Pepsi seem to be the inspiration) who sell out.

“I think it’s ironic that the black community is so eager to do commercials when you’re advertising something you don’t believe in and is actually bad for people and is a very big corporation usually stepping on a smaller guy. I think it’s ironic that it took so long for black Americans to get voting rights and some semblance of so-called freedom. When they finally get the kind of voice that a lot of artists have in 1986, 1987, they seem to have nothing to say. Whereas their forefathers were dying right, left and center to get this far. They got it and the lights are on, but nobody’s home, y’know?”

Hynde seems oblivious to the socially conscious rap movement, or that some people may wonder who is she to tell black artists what to do.

“Then I say, who are you to tell me what to write my songs about?” she counters. “You fuck off and listen to Heart. If people don’t like it, they can drop me from their label. If they don’t like it, they don’t have to buy my records, they can turn me off. What am I supposed to write about—fucking? People are not gonna start telling me how to do my thing. Unless I respect them, unless I think they’ve got their shit together a little more than I do, unless I think they’ve got a spiritual aspect that I can take instruction from. Not from some dickhead who eats at McDonalds. I don’t think that’s controversial anyway, that song. Why is everyone so greedy? Why can’t they get on and have integrity and do their thing? They’re allowed to make records, what more do they want? You know, they should be grateful.

“But,” she adds, “I’m not moralizing. Like here I am, Mrs. Perfect. Just about everything that I could possibly criticize somebody doing, I have done myself. I’ve eaten hamburgers, I’ve uh, you know, taken smack. I don’t want to set myself up as some sort of icon of goodness.”

She’s not always an icon of consistency, either. With all those sleepless nights over crying calves and concern for Michael Jackson now that he’s got the vote, she hasn’t had time for a trip to suffragette city. You wonder whose lights are on when she tells you, “I’m not interested in the female, feminine situation. I’m not interested in feminism.” She can’t relate to feminism, she says (then again, Michael Jackson never had to sit at the back of the bus, either), because she’s never had a problem being a woman other than “It’s not easy to go onstage knowing you have to do a big show and you’re getting your period. It’s hard to get onstage at Madison Square Garden when you just feel like sitting in your room crying.” Way to go, Chrissie! You may help set the women’s movement back another hundred years...

And yet, Get Close’s “Hymn To Her” by Hynde’s high school friend from Akron, Meg Keene, is one of the purest feminist statements to appear on a major record label. But Hynde says, “I have no idea what it’s about. I didn’t write it. So don’t ask me anything about it.”

She chose to cover it, she must identify with it somehow. “I thought it was a cool song.” is her brief, irritated reply.

Nor does she care to discuss any of her other songs, although she does switch off the tape recorder, and pick up an out-oftune Guild acoustic to demonstrate the state they’re in when she shows them to the band. She tries to remember how some of the oldies like “Kid,” “Back On The Chain Gang,” and the newies “Don’t Get Me Wrong,” and “Dance” go. “I have to rehearse,” she laughs nervously.

She should talk about the band, she knows. They always say she didn’t talk about the band. And that’s the only reason she’s doing this. For the band. It’s part of the job. She’d like to tell you how she feels about Robbie McIntosh, her “right hand. He’s like my partner. I want to make sure that Robbie’s happy. If I can’t make him happy, I want to make sure someone in the band can make him happy. He’s a great, great guitar player.

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I’m really glad he’s in the band...” But talking about the band isn’t easy without talking about the band that isn’t here—the guys who selfdestructed or were fired because “they weren’t surprising me with greatness.”

She begins teasing the back of her hair with a comb so it looks like she’s getting ready for Hullabaloo. “Why would anyone want to be interviewed?” she asks. She finds it “humiliating. I’ve never been to a psychiatrist, but I imagine it’s like going to a psychiatrist.” And, as anyone who’s been to the shrink knows, it’s not fun. You’re forced to confront demons, ghosts, and all of the things that hurt. She looks more pained than any of the frightened calves she’s so worried about. They, after all, don’t know where they’re going...

“You have to understand,” she begs, “I’m in a simple rock ’n’ roll band. I’m a pretty simple person. All I want to do is play guitar in a rock ’n’ roll band, make records and do shows. That’s all I ever wanted to do. It’s all I want to do now. Whether I’ve got kids or not, whether I’m married or not. Whether I’ve got money, whatever it is. It’s like no mystery, y’know?”®