Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629)

by Hynde, Chrissie

  Chart positions and reviews were things I avoided. Good or bad, I tried to keep an even temperament and not react either way, and the easiest way not to react was to never look or inquire. I found a good friend in Moira Bellas, who handled the publicity at Warners. She would explain what I was to expect as I went to what, to me, felt like “slaughter,” then give me the gist of any press that came out so I wouldn’t have to read it myself. I needed someone diplomatic so I wouldn’t sink into a depression, knowing I was in the papers; Moira saved me over and over.

  Liz Rosenberg, her American counterpart, had the pleasure of watching me have many a meltdown. She’d meet me in the morning if I was in New York City and we’d go to Central Park to walk her dogs.

  —

  After writing a song, there’s first a feeling of elation followed by the sinking feeling that it will never happen again, and you go back to thinking that you can’t do it. It creates an ongoing feeling of inadequacy.

  I didn’t know how to write in a team; I’d been doing it in solitude for so long. There was the occasional collaboration by accident, such as “Brass in Pocket.” I heard Jimmy playing a riff I liked, and I put it on a cassette and wrote the song around it. That was a true collaboration. But I didn’t know how to sit in a room with someone and say, “Okay, what are we doing?” I would learn that much later.

  Mick and Keith, the Glimmer Twins, had churned out stunners year in, year out. I struggled on my own, but it was all I knew.

  —

  I moved into a house on Endell Street in Covent Garden, just the next street over from Neal Street, where the Roxy had been. My new housemates were Steve Mann, who typeset Private Eye, the satirical political weekly, and Kevin Sparrow, who did artwork for bands—record sleeves such as the famous Stranglers covers and the one for Eddie and the Hot Rods featuring Aleister Crowley wearing Mickey Mouse ears.

  Kevin and Steve were perfect housemates, interesting and smart. Steve was a bit of an intellectual, and Kevin had a Keith Richards thing going on, the tooth earring, the get-down haircut. And now they had a little recording artist at the top, in the room next to Kevin’s.

  Like all my rooms, I had a mattress in the corner and my guitar within reach. Simple. I’d really moved up in the world; I had a single out and an actual paid-for room in Covent Garden. I felt good.

  An incessant squeaking noise kept me awake one night. What the hell was it—something in the pipes? I couldn’t work it out but hoped to get to the source in the morning. But by then it was too late. When I pulled my mattress out to make my bed I found a mouse, flat as a pancake. It had got trapped under my mattress and I’d killed it! I was horrified as I picked the poor thing up by the tail and took it down to the street to bury it.

  The next week, we got a ginger tomcat, the only solution we could think of, and we were all pretty pleased to have this addition to our domestic arrangement. We named him Basher after Nick Lowe, which was what those working with Nick called him: “Bash it down.”

  —

  It was Christmas Day, 1979. “Brass in Pocket” was riding high in the charts. Randall Lee Rose, aka Ace Doran, invited me to spend the holiday with him and his wife, Laura, in their little mews flat on Rabbit Row in Kensington. We were finishing dinner and listening to records when the phone rang. Randall passed it to me. Who would call me here at this time? I wondered.

  It was Steve Mann: Kevin was dead. He’d died on someone’s kitchen floor after a combination of whisky and heroin had got the better of him.

  I went back to the house on Endell Street and sat there with Steve. We’d been given an eviction notice the previous week, so we had to pack up and get out soon. I noticed that one of the jigsaw puzzles Steve had spent weeks on was broken up and ready for the rubbish. I’d admired that picture of symmetrically placed blue-and-yellow pills, about sixty of them in rows. I’d thought it was quite an achievement to put that together and now it was back in pieces again, which bummed me out, the symbolism of it. Then I saw his jigsaw of the Lone Ranger rearing up on Silver, also in pieces. It was too much to bear.

  I went up to Kevin’s room. All he’d owned were the few tin toys he collected and a small pile of dirty laundry. I couldn’t have anyone finding his laundry like that, so I put it in a bag and went across the street to the launderette. I watched his clothes go round in the machine knowing that he’d never wear them again.

  I returned the little pile and shut his door behind me, then walked into my room and looked around. The Sony radio-cassette player that Dave Hill had given me was facedown in the corner. It had seemed so shiny and big, the most expensive thing I owned, at first; now it looked small and insignificant surrounded by all my new boots and jackets. I went back down to sit with Steve.

  There was nothing to say. We were surrounded by packing boxes and he’d taken everything off the walls. Our cat hadn’t come home for the night. That wasn’t like him.

  Suddenly, we heard an enormous howl. It was Basher. He’d come in through the cat flap and was running like a dog, tearing from room to room, meowing like mad. He’d never done anything like that before. Steve and I looked at each other, our eyes like saucers. It was as if the cat was frantically looking for Kevin, and we got the impression that Kevin hadn’t completely left yet. Basher finished his search mission and belted back out the cat flap. Then silence. We couldn’t speak.

  We both slept in the front room that night.

  Two weeks later, “Brass in Pocket” went to number one. I knew then that victories were always just the other side of tragedy.

  —

  When “Brass” was released I’d felt a modicum of regret, having said, “It goes out over my dead body,” at the first playback. But I had been unanimously overruled, so when it raced up to the top of the chart I could only remark, “See, I told you I was wrong!” Walking down Oxford Street and hearing it blasting out of shops increased my unease. I didn’t like that feeling. I wanted to be heard but I could see that containing the outcome and not letting it get bigger than life would be where to put the smart money. Stay in the middle—the Tao.

  Nothing was going to compromise my freedom to walk the streets whenever, wherever and with whomever I wanted. I saw fame as being akin to living in a high-security prison, and I didn’t want to go there.

  How can you win just enough and then leave the table? Go to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting and you’ll see it’s easier said than done. I’d have to be very careful not to let things get out of control.

  I resolutely avoided looking at charts, bank balances, reviews, radio or television appearances, and carried on like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The last time I ever looked at a bank statement was when I saved the $500 to go to England.

  31

  FOR THE RECORD

  Chris Thomas had taken us into the studio and shown us who we were. The process was obvious after a while, but not at first. We were all over the place. That’s what a producer does: one mind on it. If everybody’s trying to get their ideas in, nothing gets done. Democracy is just a word used to placate everyone.

  The producer spends a lot of time playing psychologist. Late night phone calls from me, panicking, unable to finish a lyric or pleading to change something that had taken seven hours to get down on tape. The band disagreeing about everything. Hungover late arrivals, defensive ill tempers. The list of the producer’s peacekeeping duties is endless.

  Martin was always a calming presence and arbitrator from within. Chris Thomas himself, who we soon referred to as the fifth Pretender, was highly strung and cantankerous, often more like one of the artists. I was scared of him, terrified of pissing him off—we all were. The tension kept us wound up tight. Chris used it to his advantage to control the sessions like a captain getting a ship through all manner of weather, and it worked.

  Basically, the recording process for the album went like this:

  The band got in a room together, the amps miked in separate booths. The band played a song and everybody’s part
was recorded on a different track. The best drum track was chosen or edited using a combination of different takes—the best fill here, the most consistent feel there. This would take some time as the tape op would have to splice the tape with a razor blade in the exact spot, then tape it back together.

  Then the bass would be replaced to the edited drums. That’s what an overdub is: a guy alone in the booth or the control room wearing headphones and playing along. Then the guitar overdubs. If the drummer played to a click track (a metronome he’s got in his headphones), it’s easier to edit because the tempo is consistent. Using a click track was not a popular thing to do because it fucked with the ebb and flow of the feeling, but it was necessary sometimes to get the best backing track if edits were required.

  Then, everybody was asked to leave while I, silently having a nervous breakdown while frantically finishing lyrics in my notebook, added the part that turned the whole thing into a song. No pressure.

  It might be another hour before I’d get a headphone balance I was happy with, but more likely it was a ploy to stall for time. Then I’d sing it five or six times, and Chris and I would comp the best lines together, or get it in one take if it satisfied us—but more likely make a comp.

  The songs had been run in and played live, so the whole process could be done relatively quickly. The engineer was a crucial factor: Bill Price was Chris Thomas’s right hand.

  —

  For the album cover photo I wore the boots I’d had made at Costa’s, a little Greek shoemaker in Kentish Town. There had been a bootmaker in Toronto who some of the get-down boys had come back from, wearing block-heeled Faces-type things, and I’d always wanted to do that, design and have my own boots made, so it was the first thing I’d done when I got the band together. That and buying an eight-ounce bottle of Fracas from the shop on Shaftesbury Avenue that had wigs and a big Durex sign in the window.

  Oh, and my red Lewis Leathers jacket. I had recently discovered Enter the Dragon and fallen in love with Bruce Lee. When I heard that he was dead I went into mourning and painted a black armband on my jacket and couldn’t quite get the dye off for the photo.

  We walked in off the street wearing what we wore every day. I tried to smarten the guys up a bit. Pete was mindful of how he looked, especially after the gig supporting Johansen’s band at Barbarella’s. I’d stitched the Triumph badge onto the sleeve of his biker jacket. He liked that.

  To be fair, Mart, Pete and Jimmy all had their own looks, just not very good ones. Neither did I. Martin especially planned out his wardrobe to the letter: three-piece suits, the country gent (farmer), or his American football gear for live shows. I couldn’t criticize, as I’d had a bunch of jockey silks made up and would go onstage with a riding crop. A football player, a jockey, a biker and a cowboy onstage: we looked like the Village People.

  We stood there in a studio in Covent Garden, sulking in front of the camera as Chalkie Davies snapped away. We were always uncomfortable posing in front of cameras. No one rose to it or liked it; we saw it as a necessary evil and nothing more. Besides, the guys were wasted after eating a shitload of marijuana brownies. We’d been in Joe Allen’s in Covent Garden for lunch before the shoot, where they were already incapable of getting through a simple bowl of black bean soup without collapsing into insane, pot-induced laughter. And it continued into the photographer’s studio.

  “C’mon, shuddup, we’re trying to do this thing!”

  Jimmy farted. “Smell that focker!”

  That was the cover.

  32

  PRETENDERS

  The album, Pretenders, went in at number one in the UK. Some people said it was hyped into the charts—maybe it was. If so, thank you, John Fruin, head of Warners. The music business? Everyone knew it was corrupt—payola everywhere. Record companies sending in office-worker types to buy up their artists’ releases in the designated chart shops. Top of the Pops even had a little scam going. You were supposed to (union rules) re-record the song in the BBC studio and mime to that version for the show, but most of the time your plugger, in our case Clive Banks, who held our hands throughout, would show up with the tape in a can and then switch it for the single version just before going on. Everybody knew it and everybody did it.

  But with or without the hype, people liked our album and they liked us. Pretenders was also a huge success in the States. American audiences revered guitar-based rock, so we were home free with Jimmy, and my being a Yank helped too; Americans like American things.

  Dave Hill explained that I should meet some industry people in New York. I balked at the idea but I had to do what I had to do. We wanted a US tour and I had to learn to meet and greet—or kneel and suck, depending how you looked at it.

  So I went with Dave, without the band. We got to New York and, to my total amazement, who did I see leaning up against the wall of the Iroquois Hotel on Forty-fourth Street as our cab pulled up? Iggy Pop.

  I went to my room and sat on the edge of the bed, dazed to have seen him again. I’d just finished taking off my make-up when Dave knocked on the door. “Iggy is in the bar,” he said. I drew my eyes back on and, as nonchalantly as I could manage, slipped down to the bar.

  “Hey! This is great,” he said, looking like Alfred E. Neuman and shaking my hand. He seemed as happy to meet me as I was him, as he introduced me to his girlfriend, Esther.

  In accordance with everybody else who’d met him, I found out that you either got Jim Osterberg, the straight-A Midwestern bookworm, or Iggy Pop, the drug-crazed, platinum-blond lunatic. The guy in the bar that night was Jim Osterberg.

  So now I’d actually spoken to him. I took that as auspicious, a good beginning to my introduction back into America. I had, after all, gone straight from Akron to London, so I now felt almost like any English kid in a band coming to New York City for the first time.

  I was going to have to go into the offices of Premier Talent the next day and spend a couple of hours listening to Frank Barsalona describe how he’d been responsible for bringing all the big acts to the world and inventing touring. That was going to take superhuman strength, but now that I’d been touched by divinity I was more than equipped.

  Barbara Skydel, “the Yiddle,” took over and did all our bookings out of Premier; she became not only a best friend, but my Yiddish teacher—me, the shiksa.

  “Good evening my shayna maidels! Not you in the third row, you meeskite!”

  Barbara Skydel and Liz Rosenberg were the soul of New York City as far as I was concerned. I didn’t hang out with the band much on downtime. They wanted to go to bars or record stores. Give me Zitomer with Barbara or Liz any day. We could spend all day at the perfume counter then go to Three Guys for a grilled cheese or blintzes—or both.

  Dave Hill hired Marianne Campana in the States to oversee all of our affairs down to the most minute detail. She essentially was our American manager. I could get a proper cup of tea and her homemade Italian stuffed artichoke whenever I was in Venice Beach. She more or less ran the Pretenders single-handedly in the US.

  —

  The only way to do it right and get a loyal audience was to tour your ass off, and we went for it, especially in the States, which was the essential market to claim if you were serious about staying in the game for life. Like elephants, the Yanks never forgot. A guitar-based rock band could tour there indefinitely.

  Weeks on end on a tour bus is something that all guys love. Well, why wouldn’t they? After the show, after getting loaded in the dressing room with their guests, the band would climb onto the bus and stay up till three or four a.m., listening to music at a silly volume and getting hammered on the remains of the rider and on the buds that fans had thrown onto the stage, then stagger off one by one into soiled bunks, leaving it to the driver to do his best to clean the bus sometime later in the week. Guys don’t mind sleeping in brown polyester sheets for six weeks at a stretch and sharing a toilet with a driver, band and tour manager. I didn’t mind it, either. We all loved it. Anyone in
any band loves the bus, no matter how rank it is.

  I could never sleep on the bus, and I spent many hours up front in the cab with the driver. Whenever we’d pass a cattle truck in the night I’d get that old wave of horror and indignation—then I really couldn’t sleep.

  Sleeping in the bunk is an art in itself, a discipline I couldn’t crack. The roaring, churning, changing gears beneath and jostling, jerking motion is not everyone’s cup of Jägermeister. Passing out certainly helps, rather than trying to read by the little overhead light in the coffin-like bunk with the curtain shut to get you off to sleep. The curtain can’t block out the sound of the party going on three feet from your head. Passing out really was the only way.

  Sleeping on the bus was an ongoing dilemma and the source of not only insomnia, but the fear that keeps all singers up at night: losing your voice. Rock singers aren’t schooled to take care of their voices. There is no training involved in singing rock and roll. If anything, voice lessons or a voice coach would probably work against you, as would anything that might make you sound like someone else.

  Distinctive voices in rock are trained through years of many things: frustration, fear, loneliness, anger, insecurity, arrogance, narcissism, or just sheer perseverance—anything but a teacher.

  —

  The things that really could mess up my voice were lack of sleep, smoking and air-conditioning. The rest was psychological. Opera singers warm up, rock singers light up.

  When we finally arrived at our destination, the band would debus and go to our hotel rooms after skulking through the lobby, hoping that no fans would be lurking in wait to take a picture. If there were fans, we’d fumble around through our jacket pockets looking for sunglasses while dragging suitcases behind, trying to look cool—belt undone, shirt on back to front, still drunk.

  Now was our downtime—time to make phone calls and the last chance to get some sleep. Trying to go to sleep knowing that I only had three hours before soundcheck, probably with drilling going on somewhere close to my room, was tough, and knowing that if I didn’t go under I might have no voice by showtime would keep me awake.