DB's Song of the Day (day 251): "BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG" (1982) The Pretenders

Yesterday’s birthday girl—sharing a birthday with Buddy Holly—is Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, born in 1951. Cool. And since it was also the deathday of Warren Zevon, why not a song about loss?

The Pretenders, as a band, suffered greatly from the death of James Honeyman-Scott in 1982, after the second album. Today’s song* was released in October, four months after his death. It was “the end” of The Pretenders, in a way, in as much as JHS was a big part of their sound. Hynde recorded this song in tribute and then, eventually, in 1984, had enough of a band to release a new Pretenders album, Learning to Crawl. It was all a holding pattern with “The Pretenders” consisting mainly of Hynde and different groups of musicians. It was rare for the same nucleus to play on all the tracks on an album.  Which is not so strange, these days, when band names—Cat Power, Bright Eyes, Iron & Wine—are given to what are essentially solo artists working with different people. So, yeah, this was sort of the end of the illusion that “the band” played the album. Certainly there were lots of session men on albums in the Sixties and Seventies, but it was much less acknowledged at the time.

Anyway, I picked this as the song to pay tribute to Hynde because it comes at the end of the initial Pretenders period and is a great song, certainly one of her best. It has more gravitas than she usually manages—the B Side “My City Was Gone” is a great one too—and some interesting lines: “what hijacked my world at night?” “A place in the past we’ve been cast out of” “Got in the house like a pigeon from Hell / Threw sand in our eyes and descended like flies” and, my favorite, “Like a break in the battle was your part / Oh-oh-oh-oh / In the wretched life of a lonely heart.”  There’s also a touch of score-settling: “But I’ll die as I stand here today / Knowing that deep in my heart / They’ll fall to ruin one day / For making us part.” Not sure who the “they” is. Since JHS died of heroin, I guess it could be drug biz, music biz, pushers, or people who just won’t let you be.

And of course the whole song keeps turning on the line “I found a picture of you.” So, yeah, more ghosts, this time one very recently deceased, but haunting everytime one hears/plays the song. And of  course more ghosts join “the train” as we go on listening to the song in later eras, picturing others at our last parting from them or in some prior snapshot fading into dust.

The figure of the “chain gang” is tonic, actually. It feels like the song—with echoes of Sam Cooke’s “sound of the men working on the chain gang”—is about getting over loss and getting on with it. We’re back on the chain gang, back to the routine, back to our place on the train. The dead get to forgo all that, preserved in their eternal and admirable indifference to the shit we gotta deal with. “We’re back in the fight.”

And it was a good sign that Chrissie—who was a good songwriter and a welcome female singer back there in the early Eighties, also “hot” in a very hard, cool way—wasn’t going to throw in the towel but would soldier on. I know only the first four LPs, before the big four-year hiatus, and on each there are some stellar tunes and lesser stuff. The first Pretenders LP had a great sound though, thereafter the main draw is the sound of Hynde’s voice and her ability to keep those guitars jangly. “Chain Gang” has a nice lead that feels bright and a touch elegiac. And the vocals keep up a lovely swirl of tough and vulnerable, particularly the catch in her voice when seeming to confide outright:

Those were the happiest days of my life

I can believe that.

[*I’ve linked to the track, not the video, because Eighties videos just embarrass me, mostly, when they don’t annoy the crap out of me; Chrissie walking around like some New Wave Kommandant while a mix of white guys and black guys hack with pickaxes at some rock? No thanks. And lip-synching is so idiotic. And what’s with the guys “sky-diving”?]

DB's Song of the Day (day 122): "TALK OF THE TOWN" (1980) The Pretenders

Today’s song dates from the beginning of the Eighties. The Pretenders were a big radio presence with their first album and its string of hits in 1979-1980. “Talk of the Town” was the first follow-up track, and I liked it better than any song on the first album. The second LP didn’t quite live up to it, so I’ve always had a special feeling for this song as a “stand alone”—actually I first got it on an EP with “Message of Love” and “The Cuban Slide.”

“Such a drag to want something sometimes / One thing leads to another I know / Was a time wanted you for mine / Nobody knew.”  There you have it. One of the great attestations to surreptitious desire, affection, love you could ever hear. Then comes the switch: “I made a wish / I said it out loud / Aloud in a crowd / Everybody heard / ‘Twas the talk of the town.”

The “talk of the town,” of course, is one of those phrases for gossip, for buzz, for whatever is making tongues wag. A new band, led by a woman, in 1980, like The Pretenders, were the talk of the town in that way. They were as hot and hip as anything happening. They had presence, moxie, a great two guitars, bass, and drums sound, the basics of rock served up crisp and fresh. It really did make you feel that rock’n’roll can never die. And Chrissie Hynde was something long awaited—a real female rocker. You can talk about Heart, Stevie and Christine in Fleetwood Mac, maybe even Linda Ronstadt, but. Chrissie was the one. She could be, to use Joni Mitchell’s line, from “The Jungle Line,” “coy and bitchy, wild and fine.”

And those guys backing her up were pretty gear, wot? James Honeyman-Scott I appreciate more as the years go on. Not flashy leads, just good, interesting fills. But Martin Chambers is the real deal, drummer-wise. It’s a good sound on that first album especially. The second album is more flawed, but “Talk of the Town” always recalls to me that time when they were right on the money, before the dissolution and deaths in the band. And Chris Thomas, again, y'know?

The song is about pining for someone who is rather mercurial—“Who were you then / Who are you now / Common labourer by day / By night, highbrow”—and gives us the feeling that, almost, the singer is putting him down, even while still infatuated. I’ve always been impressed by the way the song features that give and take, like when you’re arguing with yourself over someone’s obvious desirableness for you, and yet, you’re trying to take him/her down too. “Oh, he’s not all that!”

“You’ve changed your place in this world” has the effect, too, of signaling that this is about someone who’s becoming Something. Like, for instance, The Pretenders did. Hynde struggled for a long time to get a band together and the one she got didn’t last, though her career did as a capable songwriter and a very recognizable voice. That sinuous, insinuating vocal on this song is still my favorite of hers. The song is a moment where she seems to be willing to recall her status as a fan, looking on from afar at someone who is making it.

Oh, but it’s hard to live by the rules
I never could and still never do
The rules and such never bothered you
You call the shots and they follow

That gives a lot of power to this dude, but, y’know, if the shoe fits . . . . Then comes the part that makes me love this song because you can really hear the longing in it: “I watch you still from a distance, then go / Back to my room, you’ll never know / I want you—Oh—I want you but now / Who’s the talk of the town?”

Hynde packs so much feeling into that “I want you—Oh—I want you but now . . . .” it’s just killing. And the final line suggests that maybe it’s our girl who is now “the talk of the town” or gonna be, and so, keeping her distance is the best thing. It often is, friends, it often is.

And so I dedicate this song to all the times I have kept my distance, and to the few times I didn’t.

Maybe tomorrow, maybe someday.