Pretenders – "Talk of the Town" (1981)

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 [ . . . ]

A “mind rhyme” – also known as a “subverted rhyme” or a “teasing rhyme” – is a rhyme that exists only in the mind of the listener.

But it didn’t get there by accident.  It got there because a poet put it there.

*     *     *     *     *

Here’s the first verse of “Sweet Violets,” a song on the first Mitch Miller & The Gang album – which I listened to about a thousand times when I was a kid:

There once was a farmer who took a young miss

In back of the barn where he gave her a

Lecture on horses and chickens and eggs

And told her that she has such beautiful

Manners that suited a girl of her charms

A girl that he'd like for to take in his

Washing and ironing, and then if she did

They could get married and raise lots of

Sweet violets, sweeter than all the roses!

You think the farmer in “Sweet Violets” is going to give the young miss a kiss (instead of a lecture), compliment her on her beautiful legs (instead of her manners), take her in his arms (instead of her taking in his washing), and marry her so they can raise lots of kids (instead of sweet violets).

Mitch Miller & The Gang

But the songwriter is rope-a-doping you.  Instead of giving you the rhyming words that you anticipate – because those words would not only complete rhyming couplets but also make sense in context – you get something entirely different.

Click here to listen to “Sweet Violets.”  Or you can call me and I’ll sing it for you over the phone.  (I memorized the words to that song when I was about ten years old, and I will never forget them.)

*     *     *     *     *

The lyrics from today’s featured song – the Pretenders’ 1981 hit, “Talk of the Town,” which was written by Chrissie Hynde – contain a pure mind rhyme:

The rules and such never bothered you

You call the shots and they follow

Hynde leaves out the “you” that you anticipate will follow “follow” and complete a rhyming couplet.  Unlike the “Sweet Violets” songwriter, she doesn’t replace “you” with a nonrhyming word – she simply stretches “follow” so its fills the space where “you” might have gone.  (Instead of “FOL-low YOU, she sings “FOL-LOW.”  There are two trochaic feet in each case, but there’s no unstressed syllable in the second example – just two stressed syllables.) 

Let’s look at the lines that precede and follow those lines:

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

I watch you still from a distance, then go

Back to my room, you’ll never know

The listener’s anticipation of hearing “follow you” instead of just “follow” at the end of the fourth line is heightened by the fact that not only does the previous line end in a word that rhymes with “you,” but so do the two lines before that one.  (“Rules” and “you” don’t constitute a perfect rhyme, but they’re close enough to make the absence of that final “you” more noticeable.)

Note also that by allowing the fourth line to end with “follow” instead of “you,” Hynde sets up rhymes with the next two lines (which end with “go” and “know”).

Think about it.  Hynde has gotten two rhymes for the price of one by leaving out “you” after “follow.”  She’s created actual rhymes with “follow,” “go,” and “know” – but she’s created an implied rhyme with the omitted “you.”

Well played, Chrissie Hynde – well played.

*     *     *     *     * 

You may think I’m missing the forest for the trees here.  

Actually, I’m missing the forest for the tree (singular) – after all, I’m talking about one word . . . or, to be more accurate, one non-word.

There’s a lot more I could say about “Talk of the Town.”  For example, there’s its gentle, wistful tone, which contrasts sharply with Hynde’s darker and harder-hitting songs (like the scornful “Pack It Up”) – it turns out that Chrissie has a soft side after all.

Chrissie Hynde

But it’s time for me to get off my Pretenders horse for a while – I’ve been riding it pretty hard, and it could probably benefit from a nice, long rest.

After a few weeks have passed, I’ll come to back to the Pretenders and do some summing up.  I’ve got two or three top-shelf Chrissie Hynde songs in my back pocket, but I want to take some time to think about them before I feature those songs on 2 or 3 lines – I want to do them justice.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to “Talk of the Town,” which was a top-ten single in the UK in the spring of 1980.  It was released on the Pretenders II album in the summer of 1981.

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Pretenders – "The Adultress" (1981)

There’s nothing to understand

It’s understood

I’m the adulteress

In “The Adultress,” Chrissie Hynde has created a protagonist who would likely choose “It’s complicated” for her Facebook relationship status because “I’m an adulteress” is not one of the options.

(By the way, the dictionary spelling of the word is “adulteress” – not “adultress.”  Ms. Hynde may have chosen the nonstandard spelling “adultress” because a three-syllable word fits the meter of the song better than a four-syllable word would have.  Or maybe she flunked spelling in school.)

*     *     *     *     *

The Oxford English Dictionary defines adultery as “voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and someone not his or her spouse.”  That means that lusting in your heart after someone when one or both of you is married, or just kissing someone else’s spouse isn’t technically adultery.  Feel better now?

Technically not adultery

(You lesbians can go a lot farther than kissing – at least in New Hampshire.  In 2003, the New Hampshire Supreme Court held in 2003 that female same-sex sexual relations did not constitute sexual intercourse – meaning that an extramarital affair between two women could not be adultery.)

The protagonist in “The Adultress” isn’t necessarily an adulteress even if she is having sex with a married man.  The Seventh Commandment prohibits adultery – which is punishable by death under Jewish law – but an extramarital affair between a married person and a single person is considered  adultery only if the married party is a woman.  If the woman is unmarried, both participants in the affair are guilty only of fornication regardless of the marital status of the male.  (Assuming incest isn’t involved, of course.)

That’s because intercourse between a wife and a man other than her husband can obviously lead to the impregnation of the wife.  Since Jewish law deemed any child born to a married woman to be the legal child of the husband, this adulteration of the husband’s genetic lineage by the wife's adulterous conception of a child would result in him being legally responsible for that child, which wasn’t fair.  (If the woman had no husband, that wasn’t an issue.)

The legal distinction between adultery and fornication made its way into English common law and the the laws of many other countries because of concerns about paternity.  Given the development of genetic testing, it is now possible to prove paternity with certainty – the husband of an adulterous wife can usually avoid legal responsibility for another’s man child.

But the traditional Seventh Commandment-inspired definition of adultery still applies in some jurisdictions.  For example, a Minnesota statute provides as follows:

When a married woman has sexual intercourse with a man other than her husband, whether married or not, both are guilty of adultery and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than one year or to payment of a fine of not more than $3,000, or both.

*     *     *     *     *

We know that the woman in “The Adultress” is unmarried because she is described as a “spinster,” a word that refers to any unmarried woman – although it is usually used as a synonym for “old maid” – i.e., a single woman who is unlikely to get hitched because of her advanced age.  (The male equivalent of a “spinster” is a “bachelor,” which doesn’t carry the same negative connotations that “spinster” does for most people.)  

If the woman is a spinster, she’s not an adulteress under the traditional definition of that term.  Rather, she’s a fornicator – or perhaps a “fornicatress”?  (“The Fornicatress” just doesn’t have the same ring as “The Adultress,” does it?)

One final note: “adultery” and “adult” come from two different Latin roots.  “Adultery” and “adulterate” both come from a Latin word meaning “to defile or corrupt,” while “adult” is related to “adolescent” – both are derived from a Latin verb meaning “to grow up or mature.”   

*     *     *     *     *

I’ll forgive Chrissie Hynde for her misuse (and misspelling) of “adulteress” because “The Adultress” is such a well-conceived and well-constructed song.  

I don’t know if Hynde based its lyrics on personal experience or whether the song’s title character is a product wholly of her imagination.  Regardless, Hynde’s lyrics are quite understated – she doesn’t stoop to using histrionics to create pathos – but her depiction of a woman whose unremarkable outward appearance belies the bitterness and self-loathing that are roiling her innermost being may leave you feeling a little shaken.

I don’t remember ever having a harder time choosing two or three lines from the lyrics of a featured song to quote at the beginning of a 2 or 3 lines post.

(Did the penny just drop?  Did it finally hit you what the title of my wildly successful little blog signifies?)

There are some great songs that simply don’t have two or three particularly quotable lines – I’ll go through the lyrics several times, struggling to make a choice because there’s no passage that seems quite right.  

With other songs, it’s easy to choose two or three lines to quote – either because they are particularly clever or poignant, or because they are well-known and iconic.

Occasionally, I find it hard to choose because there are two or even three quotable passages in a song’s lyrics.

But rarely are the lyrics to a song so artfully written that almost any two or three lines from that song  would do. 

“The Adultress” is an example of such a song, which is one reason I've chosen it for the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME.  Click here to listen to it.

At the same time, click here so you can follow the lyrics as you listen.

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Pretenders – "Day After Day" (1981)

'Round and 'round and 'round we go

Just like yesterday

The Pretenders’ eponymous debut album was widely praised as one of the very best of its era.  It’s certainly one of the few albums I owned that I was happy to listen to straight through.  

Actually, I always skipped “Stop Your Sobbing” – the one song on that record that Chrissie Hynde didn’t write.  That song was written by the Kinks’ Ray Davies, the father of Hynde’s only child.  (He wrote a lot of great songs, but “Stop Your Sobbing” isn’t one of them.)  

Every other song on that first album was pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.  But in the course of deciding which Pretenders’ songs deserved to be in the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME, I discovered that the band’s second album – which was titled Pretenders II – was even better: 

I would go so far as to say that Pretenders II is pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty f*ckin’ awesome.

*     *     *     *     *

Chrissie Hynde wrote a lot of great songs, most of which are about what happens when males and females couple.  

“Day After Day” is an exception.  It doesn’t tell the story of un homme et une femme – it’s a song about what it’s like to be a successful rock ’n’ roll band.

A lot of groups have released records about the head-spinning experience of life on the road – “Travelin’ Band” by Creedence, “We’re An American Band” by Grand Funk Railroad, and “Torn and Frayed” by the Stones are just a few examples – but I think “Day After Day” is one of the best.

The promotional video that was made for it shows the group deplaning from a commuter turboprop in Santa Barbara and climbing into limousines for a drive to an outdoor concert venue, where they pretend to rehearse as the cameras roll.  (Hynde is one of the more convincing lip-synchers I’ve ever seen.)

The second half of the video shows them returning to the same venue later that night and taking the stage to perform.  

I don’t know why drummer Martin Chambers is playing while wearing long underwear.  But I do know that his sideburns were m-o-n-e-y!

Click here to watch the “Day After Day” video.  (I don’t know about you, but it looks to me like the band is having a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good time.)

*     *     *     *     *

I thought I would be able to stop with three Pretenders tracks, but it looks like I’m going to have to feature at least five Chrissie Hynde-penned songs before I can move on.  

No promises that I’ll be able to stop after five – every time I hit Youtube and start listening to Pretenders tracks, my list of potential hall of fame songs grows longer.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to the album version of “Day After Day.”  (The promotional video mentioned above uses the single version of the song, which ends differently.)

And click below to buy the record from Amazon:

Pretenders – "Up the Neck" (1980)

 

I remember the way he groaned

And moved with an animal skill

I rubbed my face in the sweat

That ran down his chest

It was all very run of the mill

Several of the artists whose records were chosen for the inaugural class of the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME wrote so many great songs that it was difficult for me to choose just one.

That is true – in spades – of Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders.  And since there’s no rule saying that I can only choose one of her songs for that hall of fame, I’m choosing three.

*     *     *     *     *

I’ve been listening to the Pretenders’ first two albums for 40 years, and they are just as powerful today as they were when they were brand new.  Not every song on those albums is great, but enough of them are to put them head and shoulders above nearly every other album from that era.

The Pretenders' eponymous debut album

Of all the great rock songwriters of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, I think Chrissie Hynde is the one I would pick as most likely to have succeeded as an author of fiction or screenwriter.

*     *     *     *     *

You could say Ms. Hynde’s best songs are about couples, but it’s probably more accurate to say they are about couplings.  

The intersections between men and women that she writes about rarely end well – usually because the man is a disappointment in some way.  Hynde can be quite scornful of the males in her songs – she is a master (mistress?) of cutting vain men down to size.

Her description of the male-in-heat in “Up the Neck” – let’s be honest: when is the typical male not in heat? – deftly captures the contrast between how a man in the throes of passion appears to himself and how he appears to his female partner:

I remember the way he groaned

And moved with an animal skill

I rubbed my face in the sweat

That ran down his chest

It was all very run of the mill

The post-coital tristesse that is typically experienced by couples is depicted in very concrete terms in these lines from “Up the Neck”:

Something was sticky

On your shag rug

If that image isn’t enough to burst anyone’s romantic bubble, I don’t know what is.

*     *     *     *     *

While the male in “Up the Neck” may be deserving of scorn, the singer’s not disappointed in him so much as she’s disappointed by the way things turned out.

She acknowledges that she wasn’t entirely in her right mind when she and her partner came together:

Anger and lust

My senses running amok

Bewildered and deluded

Have I been hit by a truck?

When they first kissed, she had a feeling of innocent bliss comparable to “the time in the womb.”  

But the morning after was a different story.  She “woke up with a headache that split [her] skull,” and “alone in the room.”

It’s sad that things turned out that way because she went into things with the best of intentions – and to be fair to the man, so did he.  But good intentions usually aren’t enough:

I was sure his intentions were sweet

And that mine was as well

But a wish is a shot in the dark

When your coin's down the well

**********************

Click here to watch a live performance of “Up the Neck” from March 1980 – just a few months after the song was released on the Pretenders’ eponymous debut album, which the noted novelist Michael Chabon has called “one of the most astonishing debut albums in the history of music.”  (You can say that again.)

I’ve watched this video several dozen times.  Chrissie Hynde is utterly compelling in it – she has me in the palm of her hand from the beginning to the end.  I have never seen a rock performer who is more naturally charismatic.

Chrissie Hynde in 1980

Actually, I’m not sure “performer” is the correct term for Hynde.  She’s not “performing” in the usual sense of the word.  No one is better than Mick Jagger, but you never forget that he’s performing.  By contrast, Chrissie Hynde doesn’t appear to have planned or rehearsed what she does on stage – she just comes out and is herself.

That may be an incredibly naive statement, but I’m sticking with it.  Whatever it is that makes Chrissie Hynde what she is, I think it’s something that comes wholly from within.  

Do me a favor.  Start watching that “Up the Neck” video at the five-minute mark – which is the beginning of a long instrumental break that leads up to the big finish of the song.  Watch Hynde pace back and forth behind guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Famdon as they do their thing – she doesn’t engage in any kind of histrionics that takes attention away from them or drummer Martin Chambers.  

(Sadly, Honeyman-Scott died in 1982, and Famdon died in 1983 – both deaths were drug-related.) 

At 5:55, she takes a step toward her microphone, turns to the right until her back is to the crowd, and then does a three-quarter turn to the left so her body is perpendicular to her audience when she ends the instrumental break by singing – moaning? – “ooooohhhhh, oohh, oohh, ooooohhhhh.”  (Whoever edited the video cut in the middle of her move – I wish I could see the raw footage without that edit.)

That seems to have spurred the group to shift into a higher gear for thirty seconds or some before ending the song – and the concert.  (I’m assuming that “Up the Neck” was their encore.  If so, it was certainly a good choice.)

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to hear the studio version of “Up the Neck.”

Click below to buy that record from Amazon:

Pretenders – "Pack It Up" (1981)

 

I don't like your trousers

And your appalling taste in women

And what about your mind?

And your insipid record collection

That dumb home video center

The usual pornography

That all you scum lap up

YOU'RE THE PITS OF THE WORLD!

They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  

You best believe I would never, ever scorn Chrissie Hynde – the lead singer and chief songwriter of the Pretenders, who she founded in 1978.  You would have to be out of your f*cking mind to scorn her.

I have no doubt that Ms. Hynde is the one who does the scorning, not the one who is scorned – in other words, she’s the scorner, not the scornee.

Chrissie Hynde

I doubt that I will ever meet Chrissie Hynde, and that’s probably just as well.  She intimidates the hell out of me.  I’m quite sure that if I ever had to opportunity to interview her or even have a casual conversation – say we were seated next to each other on an airplane – I would be so scared that I would make a fool of myself.

You may have noticed that I quoted eight lines from today's featured song at the beginning of this post.  That's because I'm not man enough to tell Hynde that she only gets two or three.

*     *     *     *     *

If you can find a more scornful song than “Pack It Up,” I’d like to hear it.  (Or maybe I wouldn’t.  I’m a pretty sensitive dude.)

Hynde’s scorn is directed at the vanity of men.  Her target in “Pack It Up” no doubt thinks that he has good taste in clothes and music – but she sets him straight.  (She even dismisses the prosaic pornography he favors.) 

*     *     *     *     *

Speaking of male vanity, do you remember Tom Wolfe’s brilliant novel, Bonfire of the Vanities?  One of the major characters in that book is a thirty-something assistant district attorney who is extremely proud of his muscular physique – in particular, his "massive sternocleidomastoid muscles" (i.e., neck muscles), which he constantly flexes for the benefit of every comely young female he encounters. 

He laters sees a videotape of the very comeliest of those females making fun of his weird neck moves – he’s mortified, of course.

I guarantee you that if Chrissie Hynde had seen this preening prosecutor flexing his sternocleidomastoids. she wouldn’t have made fun of him behind his back like the woman in the Wolfe book – she would have cut him down to size by saying something snarky to his face.

*     *     *     *     *

I had planned to induct twelve songs into the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME this year, but I’m afraid there’s going to have to be a change in those plans.

I simply can’t pick one and only one Pretenders song for that honor – Chrissie Hynde deserves better than that.

The Pretenders in 1980

I’ve got my eye on three tracks from the first two Pretenders albums.  But it’s possible I won’t be able to stop there.  (Stay tuned . . . )

Click here to listen to “Pack It Up,” which was released in 1981 on the Pretenders II album.

Click on the link below to buy “Pack It Up” from Amazon:

Pretenders – "Back on the Chain Gang" (1982)

I found a picture of you

Those were the happiest days of my life

The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

That quoted language provided the legal justification for convict leasing by state governments.

After the Civil War, the governments of the Southern states desperately needed revenue, so they began to lease their prison inmates to plantation owners, railroads, coal mines, and others who needed cheap labor.  

Many convict laborers worked on railroads

The practice was very lucrative for the states.  In 1898, 73% of Alabama’s revenues came from convict leasing.  And because the businesses who leased convict labor were responsible for the cost of feeding, clothing, and housing the prisoners who worked for them, the states saved a great deal of money.

Reformers exposed the abuses of the convict labor system, and the practice was eventually outlawed.  Instead of working for private companies, prisoners were put to work on public works projects – like building roads.  

Chain gangs were once a common sight, especially in the South, but most states abolished them many decades ago.  Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona – which includes Phoenix – still sends out chain gangs to pick up trash and do other menial work.  

Female convicts being chained together

Arpaio, who calls himself “an equal opportunity incarcerator,” has both male and female chain gangs.

“It’s the only female chain gang in the world,” he told one interviewer.  “Started it with men and thought, ‘Why discriminate against women?’ . . . The pilot who flew my plane in today was a woman. We have them in the army fighting.  And in the police. Why should women be treated different in prison?”

Why indeed?

After the female Maricopa County chain gang members are chained together, the chant in unison as they march to the bus that will transport them to their worksite:

5 a.m. is when we rise

Where we’ll go is a surprise

No more drink and no more drugs

No more boyfriends who are thugs

Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders wrote “Back on the Chain Gang” to pay tribute to the group’s lead guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, who died from heart failure caused by cocaine abuse in 1982.  He was only 25 years old.  

James Honeyman-Scott

Honeyman-Scott died only two days after bass guitarist Pete Farndon was kicked out of the Pretenders because his drug use was out of control.  

Less than a year after Honeyman-Scott’s death, Farndon overdosed on heroin and drowned in his bathtub.  He was only 30.

Here’s “Back on the Chain Gang”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: