In May 1970, Chrissie Hynde, who then went by Chris, was an 18-year-old student at Kent State University who believed the Vietnam War was an untenable moral abomination. The state of Ohio could run conservative, but Kent State was a hotbed of subversive art and revolutionary mobilization. The Students for a Democratic Society had staged controversial on-campus actions in ’1968 and ’69, and in the days after Nixon announced his invasion of Cambodia, someone— presumably protestors—set fire to the college ROTC.
This turned out to be a terrible idea. Following a confrontation between police and local protesters, the Ohio governor called in the National Guard, also composed almost entirely of twentysomethings, who were not trained in how to keep over a thousand hippies from running roughshod over their own campus. When the protestors kept coming, the National Guard unleashed teargas canisters, creating a stampede. As Hynde recollects in her 2015 memoir Reckless: My Life as a Pretender, “It was a no-win situation. If you fell over, you’d be trampled underfoot.”
The next day, things got worse. Protesters screamed epithets and threw rocks. Some Guardsmen got spooked and fired on the crowd. Chris Hynde was protesting on the other side of campus, so it wasn’t until shortly after that she learned her friend’s boyfriend, Jeff Miller, was one of the four dead that day outside Prentice Hall. All over America, for the previous several years, the fabric of the nation had been fraying, but here was something different: white college kids, thought to be a protected class, slaughtered on their own middle-American campus. Hynde described the pathetic confusion of the immediate aftermath of the shootings: “The Guardsmen themselves looked stunned. They were still surrounding the burned-down building. What had they been guarding? There was nothing to protect; the ROTC building was gone now. …We looked at them and they looked at us… There was a sense of incomprehension.”
Up to this point, Hynde had been a rebel, a troublemaker, and a party girl, suspicious of authority and attracted to notions of social justice that had the added benefit of annoying her straitlaced parents. Now she was a radical, the kind of person who would one day offer the following testimony in her greatest song: “Well, 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.”
What kind of radical Hynde became is a complicated question—indeed, the enigmatic fulcrum of her remarkable American life. After Kent State, Neil Young would write the incendiary “Ohio,” an elegy but also a warning: “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming/We’re finally on our own.” It was the best song written about Ohio in the ’70s. Hynde, desperately trying to shrug off the trauma of the shootings, allowed in her frequently beautiful but emotionally circumscribed memoir that Young’s song “made us feel better.” Fourteen years after the massacre, she would write the best song about Ohio in the ’80s.
By 1984, Hynde was a minted rock star facing her Rubicon. The run-up to her success reads like a peculiar but well-plotted biopic. She briefly collaborates with Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh at Kent State, then gets herself over to England, where punk rock is just taking off. The great songs that she always imagined began to pour forth like warm pub ale. She gets a gig writing for the NME—that’s when she becomes Chrissie. She forms the killer band the Pretenders, whose very first single, produced by Nick Lowe—a glorious cover of the Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing”—is a shot across the bow signaling an incandescent new talent on the scene. The first two Pretenders albums are tours de force of punk, pop, soul, glam, and art rock that establish Hynde as a new archetype in popular music, although the shadows of her antecedents (Patti Smith, Linda Ronstadt) can be seen in her outline.
Filled with unimpeachable classics, 1980’s Pretenders and 1981’s Pretenders II were commercial hits and critical fetish items. Then came the double-hammer blows of 1982 and early 1983, when her bandmates, guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon, died of drug overdoses in rapid succession. Make that a triple: In 1983, Hynde gave birth to her first daughter.
Two polarities define Hynde’s work. One is an intuitive, if sublimated, strand of compassion, which had been recently stirred by her stature as a new mother. The other is a thorough cynicism inculcating her with a belief that she was living through times of almost limitless avarice and corruption—“a world in decline.” Learning to Crawl is a desperate attempt to integrate these two worldviews.
The album was recorded over two sessions in 1982 and 1983 with the legendary Roxy Music and Sex Pistols producer Chris Thomas at the helm, who had also been on the boards for the first two LPs. Hynde needed new people, obviously, and she recruited some of the absolute best. Billy Bremner, formerly of Rockpile and guesting on guitar, plays a fair share of the record’s moving instrumentation. The birth of the baby, the sudden introduction of whole new players. It is a tribute to her genius that everything musically moved forward despite the disruption. No one would have been remotely surprised if Learning to Crawl had been a steep drop off from its estimable predecessors. No one could have known how down to the bone it would go.
It is difficult to reconcile Learning to Crawl’s boundless, full-hearted prayer for compassion with the churlish, even cold-hearted, version of Hynde portrayed in James Henke’s April 26, 1984, Rolling Stone profile of the Pretenders, in which she refuses to go so far as to characterize the loss of her bandmates as a tragedy. The article is called “Chrissie Hynde Without Tears.” It is possible that the magazine was just going for something sensationalistic, but that’s not how it reads to me. In response to Henke offering up the recent Rolling Stone review that described Learning to Crawl as “a triumph of art over adversity,” Hynde quickly snapped back: “I hate this sort of romantic or sentimental take people have on it—you know, the tragic demise, the reawakening. I even regret naming the album Learning to Crawl, because it just sounds pathetic. I mean, I’m not sentimental.”
This is one of Learning to Crawl’s great themes: Life’s events, its catastrophes and joys, are plotted with such absolute randomness that everyone should at any moment be prepared for the worst. Echoing both John Lennon’s “The Word” and “Beautiful Boy” in “Show Me,” a profoundly touching paean to her infant daughter, she seeds the future with the following fine how-do-you-do: “Welcome to the human race/With its wars/Disease/And brutality.”
On the topic of Pete Farndon’s death, Hynde is bordering on cruel. “The guy blew it,” she told Rolling Stone. “He shot up a speedball and drowned in the bath. It’s not really my idea of a beautiful rock and roll image: the tattooed arm, hanging out of the tub, turning blue, with a syringe stuck in it. But that’s what it came to in the end.” There are many plausible explanations for the eviscerating harshness of her tone in that moment: the impotent rage of losing someone to addiction, the towering anger of being left behind to pick up the pieces. But the whiplash from kindness to cruelty is a feature of each of the Pretenders’ classic first three records, none more so than Learning to Crawl.
The rock’n’roll tradition is filled with no shortage of requiems. Like AC/DC’s Back in Black, recorded after the death of Bon Scott, the death-addled Learning to Crawl kicks out the jams right away. The first two songs are mirror images of rage and vituperation cut through with something approaching a transcendent feeling of cosmic love. With its indelible guitar riff and brutal critique of music-business misogyny, “Middle of the Road” is a subversive masterwork. Slithering with scene-setting menace, it rides its killer riff and equal-opportunity insult machine into four minutes and 15 seconds of glorious garage rock. “I’m not the cat I used to be,” she admits; “I got a kid/I’m 33.” Still, a cat is a cat, and the song is a challenge—to the label managers, the landed gentry, anyone who might try to wield their power over her in some unseemly way. “Come on, baby,” she hisses. “Get in the road.”
Like funeral chimes, Hynde’s beautiful 12-string chords and Bremmer’s lyrical opening riff rip off the bandage and open the floodgates on Hynde’s eternal soul anthem “Back on the Chain Gang,” a perfect song. “I found a picture of you,” she begins. “Those were the happiest days of my life.” From the Cure to Ringo Starr to Def Leppard to J. Geils, there are many great songs about photographs, but perhaps none quite so transporting. “Circumstance beyond our control,” Hynde allows, a significant admission for a consummate control freak.
With its marvelous and unexpected commingling of Byrdsy, West Coast jangle and deep Southern soul, “Back on the Chain Gang” genuflects towards Sam Cooke’s 1960 mesmerizing classic “Chain Gang” while simultaneously grafting onto it a lifetime’s worth of feminine perspective: the exploitative businesspeople, the handsy men, the abusive political structures. Hynde’s voice, never less than an extraordinary instrument, is heavenly here, paradoxically achieving a sound tougher than steel wool and fragile as stained glass. It strains against the bondage of her circumstances before finally soaring free of it all. It fights with every breath in her body.
And with that, the flies disperse. Following the emotional bloodletting of the first two songs, Learning to Crawl wrestles with the thorny problem of what to do next. The Gang of Four-style “Time the Avenger” furthers the us-against-them stakes with a fury verging on the apocalyptic, casting one powerful man after the next into the same ironic hell: “With your girls/And desk and leather chairs/Thought that time was on your side.” Then there’s “My City Was Gone,” a great and complicated American song. Amid the caustic rave-ups, the crushing ballads, the art-rock explorations, the Pretenders had always been a little funky too. With its strutting groove and Booker T. & the M.G.’s-worthy bass hook, this would be the funkiest they would ever get.
Hynde was born into a middle-class family in Akron, Ohio, in 1951. These were the high-Caesar years for the American Rust Belt, and Akron was America’s undisputed rubber capital, home to B.F. Goodrich, Firestone, Goodyear, General—pretty much all of them. This was the beating heart of the industrial Midwest, yielding a pungent memory in Hynde’s memoir: “When you walked down Main Street in Akron you either caught the fragrant whiff of rolled oats from the silos at the Quaker Oats factory, or the acrid smell from one of the rubber factories.” What’s indelible about “My City Was Gone” is its perfect capture of what was truly happening in 1983—the invasion of chain stores into previously untouched regions, the slow-growing specter of corporate welfare, local downtowns rent asunder under intolerable economic weight. She’s been away for a while. She’s absolutely baffled. Imagine coming from an actual place and then returning to a geographic nullity. Released a year ahead of Bruce Springsteen’s equally revelatory song on the same topic, “My Hometown,” Hynde’s verdict twists the knife in the cruelest possible Midwestern way, inverting the Ohio State football team’s iconic “Buckeye Battle Cry” with the raised-eye suggestion: “Ay, oh/Way to go/Ohio” To paraphrase John Jeremiah Sullivan paraphrasing Joan Didion: She’s not saying there’s no there there. She’s saying there’s no there.
It is no great demerit to state that Learning to Crawl is an album defined by its raft of standards, a degree of highest-level songwriting that for every understandable reason cannot be fully maintained over its 40-minute runtime. There’s nothing wrong with the cheerfully bratty ramble of “Thumbelina” or the pulverizing, reggae-adjacent “I Hurt You”; they would be standout tracks on a lesser LP and suffer only by comparison with the bona fide classics in the running order. Similarly, a stately cover of the Persuaders’ 1971 estrangement anthem “Thin Line Between Love and Hate” is useful insofar as it reveals one of her inspirations for the LP, but the Pretenders’ faithful reading does little to improve upon the original. Still, it fits both the mood and the theme of a record about love, alienation, and the thrills and consequences of coloring outside the lines.
With its surfeit of runaway hooks, its working-class rage, its ad-hoc penchant for insult comedy, and its communion with the idea of genuine human understanding, the dissociative classic that Learning to Crawl ultimately resembles most is John Lennon’s Imagine. How do you metabolize all this love and death? The crowded cityscapes and backwards contradictions of rock stardom are endless. How do you sleep? Any way you can.
Hynde is not an easy person to understand. Short of an abiding solidarity with underdogs of every stripe, she seems disinclined towards political orthodoxies, other than her long-standing status as a vegetarian and animal-rights activist. To wit: “My City Was Gone” was the interminably long-running theme song for the late Rush Limbaugh’s 40-year struggle against common decency. It’s said she made a deal with him, possibly involving PETA. Joe Strummer she is not.
