Permanent Records is an ongoing closer look at the records that matter most.
Chrissie Hynde was approaching 30 when The Pretenders released their first single, a cover of The Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing,” in 1979. After spending a few years kicking around the nascent U.K. punk scene with younger amateurs, the Ohio-born Hynde found some simpatico musicians and pursued a sound that was alternately abrasive and soft, and always utilitarian—like the rock ’n’ roll equivalent of a kitchen sponge. But though Hynde had a spiky, bratty personality as a performer, she carried herself as someone more attuned to the generation that came before her than the one that was following behind. She was more of a Patti Smith than a Siouxsie Sioux. After all, she was only seven years younger than the man who wrote “Stop Your Sobbing”—with whom she’d have her first child, just a few years later.
Not long after giving birth to Ray Davies’ daughter, Hynde wrote and recorded “Middle Of The Road,” which would become the opening track to The Pretenders’ third album, 1984’s Learning To Crawl. Toward the end of the song, she sings, “I’m not the cat I used to be / I got a kid, I’m 33.” A woman who’d built her reputation on two LPs full of sexually aggressive rock ’n’ roll filled her the next record with songs about motherhood, fear, regret, insecurity… and even one about doing the laundry.
Mostly though, she sang about loss. In June 1982, after The Pretenders finished a tour supporting the commercially and critically disappointing Pretenders II (an album that sounds much better in retrospect), Hynde sat down with her heroin-addicted bassist and ex-boyfriend Pete Farndon, and told him he’d been kicked out of the group. Two days later, guitarist James Honeyman-Scott died of heart failure, brought on by a bad reaction to cocaine. A month after that, Hynde was back in the studio with drummer Martin Chambers and two hired guns, Big Country bassist Tony Butler and Rockpile guitarist Billy Bremner, to record a new single: “Back On The Chain Gang,” backed with “My City Was Gone.” Both would later appear on Learning To Crawl, with the lilting, regretful “Back On The Chain Gang” becoming The Pretenders’ biggest Billboard Hot 100 hit, reaching No. 5.
Talking to Rolling Stone in 1984 about the decision to press on, Hynde said, “What else were we going to do? Stay at home and be miserable, or go into the studio and do what we dig and be miserable?” Through the rest of ’82 and ’83, in between taking a break to have a baby—and to mourn Farndon, who died of an overdose less than a year after Honeyman-Scott—Hynde would return to the studio periodically with Chambers and new Pretenders Robbie McIntosh and Malcolm Foster, to piece together an album that she’d name after her daughter’s first attempts to get around. Learning To Crawl would go on to generate seven singles and/or album-rock focus-cuts, with four of those songs—“Back On The Chain Gang,” “My City Was Gone,” “Middle Of The Road,” and “2000 Miles”—becoming staples of classic rock and adult contemporary radio for decades to come.
Yet the magnificence of Learning To Crawl is best-defined by two songs that aren’t played quite as often, even though one of them was a Top 30 Billboard hit back in 1984. The shimmering mid-tempo rocker “Show Me” exemplifies the side of The Pretenders that’s hard to nail down or deconstruct. Like “Up The Neck” and “Talk Of The Town”—and even “Back On The Chain Gang”—“Show Me” is rhythmically limber, pleasantly melodic, and stealthily emotional. The guitars have some of the brittle echo of the post-punk sound that was dominating the U.K. underground at the time, but Hynde’s vocal sounds like it’s drifted in from ’70s AM radio, in the time when singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell shared airspace with sophisticated R&B artists like Donny Hathaway. The lyrics—which grapple with the overwhelming hugeness of love, humanity, and international conflict—contrast with music that’s easygoing and unpredictable, with a bridge and a coda that feel like spontaneous expressions of need.