This is an album about life and death and love and transcendence–subjects not much discussed on the brave new dance floor these days–and for Chrissie Hynde and her battered band, it is a triumph of art over adversity. To say that Learning to Crawl reconfirms Hynde as the most forceful female presence in rock already demeans her achievement: The matter of gender aside, she is the most unaffectedly personal of contemporary singer/songwriters, and surely the most astringently intimate lyricist working within a real rock & roll context. And if this third Pretenders album lacks the sense of revelation, of a new voice being heard, that so distinguished the group's first LP, the
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insights here are deeper, the wisdom harder won.
The unusual richness of this material becomes more readily apparent with a bit of background. The story so far: Chrissie Hynde leaves her home in Ohio and sets out for London. There, she gets caught up in the mid-Seventies punk-rock ferment and forms her own band with her drug-loving English boyfriend, who's a bass player, and a previously unheralded guitarist and drummer from his provincial hometown. Their first single is a hit, as is the group's debut album, released in January 1980 to international acclaim. It is dream-come-true time. Hynde meets her idol, Ray Davies of the Kinks, and becomes pregnant by him. Then the dream starts to sour. The Pretenders' bass player, Pete Farndon, has become a junkie and must be sacked from the group. Two days after Farndon's departure, the band's guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, another longtime drug enthusiast, dies of cumulative abuse. Ten months later, Farndon also dies, from drug-related causes. Kaboom, as they say.
This history has left Hynde, as she says in "Middle of the Road," the first cut on Learning to Crawl, "Standing in the middle of life/With my past behind me." A less gifted artist might easily have turned the reverses Hynde has endured into a maudlin chronicle of Hard Times in Hip City. But Hynde has emerged from the human wreckage of the last twenty months with her cold eye and cleansing anger intact. There are no outright sob stories here; the heartbreak seeps through between the lines.
In January 1983, in the midst of the Pretenders' personal and professional nightmare, Hynde gave birth to a daughter, Natalie. And while she doesn't try to disguise the fact that the child's arrival has profoundly altered her world view–a reaffirmation of life amid the death and decay all around her–neither does she exploit the baby's significance for the usual weepy purposes. Instead, she overlays her new maternal insights upon the larger world of the six o'clock news and the daily papers, and tells us what she now sees: "There's corrugated tin shacks filled up with kids/And man, I don't mean a Hampstead nursery/When you own a big chunk of the bloody third world/The babies just come with the scenery."
It is a hallmark of Hynde
With two key members OD'ing, it looked like the Pretenders were finished. Instead, the band came back with its best-selling -- and best -- album. Once again, FM rock, New Wave and punk fans came together for an LP loaded with too many classics tracks to mention. Hell, we can't help ourselves: how great is "Back on the Chain Gang"?
