Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629)

by Hynde, Chrissie

  I woke up the next morning in my room back in the Sunset Marquis with no recollection of how I got there. I remembered seeing Leary’s bare ass but that was all.

  The American tour over, we were playing Japan when we heard the very sad news that John Belushi was found dead in his bungalow at the Chateau Marmont: drugs.

  Just before we went onstage to do a show in Osaka, I was rummaging through my bag and I found a pair of sunglasses—Belushi must have popped them in there to help me ward off unwanted attention. I walked onstage wearing them as I greeted the Japanese audience and, as far as I know, nobody ever used the picture.

  —

  The concerts in Japan and Australia were bad. The shows were good, but the vibe wasn’t. We were going through the motions—the worst possible thing for a band.

  Pete confronted me at the soundcheck in Tokyo: “What are you doing Tuesday?”

  “What do you mean, what am I doing?” I asked. “We’re doing a show—what do you think I’m doing?”

  “Well, I’m getting married.”

  He said it as if it was a threat, or a cloaked appeal for me to change things, turn back the clock. A few days earlier I had told him that I was planning on doing the same thing.

  Pete’s girlfriend, Katy, had been on the phone from London to everyone in the band and crew, worried because she hadn’t heard from him for days. Why had he not phoned? Nobody knew what to tell her. Who wanted to say he was getting married to a model he’d met in a club the night before? Oh, Pete.

  Jimmy was increasingly unamused. I could see that he’d reached his limit with Pete’s exaggerated swagger, louche affectations—the Japanese fighter pilot, the kamikaze schtick—skulking onstage for encores, fag dangling from his mouth—the look he had been cultivating. Jimmy hated it. We all did. It was as if Pete was rubbing our noses in his addiction and how separate from the rest of us he was.

  I knew that Jimmy had made a decision during the last night in Australia, when some old-timer, a janitor, told Pete, “You can’t smoke onstage here, mate.” What did Pete do? Did he flick the offending dog-end to the floor, crushing it underfoot, apologizing like the Pete of days gone by? No. He punched the old guy in the face.

  Jimmy watched this pathetic display, incandescent with rage, but said nothing. He looked at me, though; he shook his head and I knew.

  Martin, too. He didn’t acknowledge it, preferring to have a few moments to recover, get back out there and finish the show. But when he looked up and I managed to catch his eye, yes, Martin too. It was just a matter of time.

  Pete’s junkie persona had taken over and was inhabiting him, like a demonic possession. His best friends couldn’t find him behind the sallow mask; where was the old laughing, joking, fun Pete they’d knocked around Hereford with? Pete was gone.

  Jimmy and I had been playing around with some new tunes: quieter stuff, more melodic. It didn’t suit Pete’s new self-image of junkie hard-ass. As always, Jimmy only had one agenda, the music. The rest was of no use to him. That never changed. Pete was testing the waters, trying to throw his weight around, making a show of his uninterest in our ideas, distancing himself in too obvious a way.

  Maybe it was because we didn’t big him up enough. Maybe because he thought we didn’t rate him. Maybe because of our strained relationship. Maybe because not once did I go over to him and say, “Nice playing tonight—you sounded great.” Not once. But he didn’t sound great; he sounded like someone who had a problem.

  Pete wanted something but none of us cared what anymore. He was vying for attention and it was standing between us and the music. Whatever his problem was, Jimmy was not having it. The tour was almost over. Soon we could go home.

  I recalled a day back in Tufnell Park, the house on Dalmeny Road. Pete said to me, “No one will ever love you more than I do.”

  Maybe it was true. We’d gone our separate ways, all right—the drugs, the alcohol doing their job. And me, I was like a shipwrecked captain trying to direct the crew back to shore. I just couldn’t do it.

  Pete was burrowing further into his rut, becoming more and more uncommunicative: smack. It’s true that some people can’t handle success. With fame, even if a person doesn’t change, everybody around them does. It becomes a case of mistaken identity; some people just don’t know who they are anymore. Pete had got too caught up in the myth of the rock star he was trying to be.

  That show at Barbarella’s with Johansen’s band. He had been too impressed with the New Yorkers—the tailored suits, style and attitude. But Pete was a middle-class public-school boy (private school, in American parlance), not an old-style gang member from the mean streets.

  Then when Thunders came over to Dalmeny Road and left blood on the tea towels, Pete was more than impressed: he was hooked.

  —

  The last show of the tour was in Bangkok. We didn’t know it was the last show we would ever play together.

  Ray was coming out for it, and Pete suffered to see me with anyone. Martin and Jimmy dreaded it too, especially after Ray and Jimmy had a boisterous dispute after a show in Brighton that no one really recovered from, when Ray wouldn’t let him into my dressing room.

  Our last show together: enthusiastic Thai punters stormed the stage, the police moved in, broke it up and ended it. It wasn’t pretty. Kids got thrown out, people were hurt and I didn’t care. The ending wasn’t fun.

  We were burned out. Another world tour and the fissures had become cracks. We just wanted it to be over. It wasn’t the celebratory end-of-tour gig it should have been. How wrong it all was. It’s always sad when you start to hate what you love.

  —

  The Herefordians, Pete, Jimmy and Martin, led by Stan Tippins, their mentor. Night after night at the side of the stage, waiting to go on, a last encore, looking to Stan to give the command.

  “Wait. Wait for the build…” Stan held us back like terriers trying to get through a hole in a fence.

  “Not yet.” Only when Stan said so was it time.

  Stan had to watch helplessly as his protégés sank into a murky pool of drugs. There was nothing he could do to stop it.

  How much did I hate those leeches who would show up backstage with their calling cards—packets of cocaine—wanting to get close to the band. The one thing I hated about drugs was the assholes you had to hang out with to get them.

  I always knew I didn’t have the guts for the fame game.

  We’d got to know each other pretty well by now, two albums under our belts—success. We had futures now. People wanted us. But the incident in Australia with the old duffer at the side of the stage was the last straw for Jimmy. We limped home from the tour and agreed to take some time off from each other.

  —

  A month passed. My own wedding plan was another event that should have been enacted only onstage in the theater of the absurd. I was wearing a white silk suit I’d had made in Bangkok, with a skirt (so, you see, I really was serious), and white button-up ankle boots custom-made by Anello & Davide for me. We argued all morning about whether to invite anyone as witnesses, with me finally backing down and agreeing to have no one. He wanted to have the ceremony in Guildford, and I wanted to get a cab there—you know, a little bit of luxury on the day, with me all decked out in my suit under a raincoat and all—but he wanted to take a train so we got the train.

  The guy in the registry office took one look at us and suggested we come back another time. I guess mascara smeared over my face was the giveaway. Even a total stranger could tell we were making a mistake, but I’d never heard of anyone getting turned away before. Still, there’s always the first time.

  We got separate trains back to London. I thought I’d never see him again, but when I walked into the flat on Luxborough Street, there he was, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  —

  Jimmy, Martin and I agreed to have a meeting to figure out what we were going to do about Pete.

  When the appointed day arrived they came ove
r to my flat, and I suggested the possibility that we could warn him, give him a chance to clean up his act. Jimmy was impatient; this was taking up his time.

  “If he stays—I go,” he stated flatly.

  Martin, the peacemaker, nodded in agreement. Pete was out. They didn’t even want to talk to him—let Dave Hill tell him.

  Jimmy seemed more inconvenienced than bothered. It was a done deal and now we could get on with more important things. We just needed to find a bass player and go back into the studio to record a new song I had that we’d been messing around with, “Back on the Chain Gang.”

  I also had a bomb to drop: I was pregnant. I thought this wouldn’t go down well, but Martin said, “Congratulations,” and Jimmy didn’t seem to think it was a problem. He was more excited to tell us about a kid guitar player he’d met, saying that when the time came, he wanted to get him up onstage with us. His name was Robbie McIntosh.

  I called Dave Hill and told him to call Pete.

  34

  THE END

  I needed time. I couldn’t think about auditions—not yet. Not when I knew that Pete was sitting in his flat in Oxford Gardens, feeling betrayed. I didn’t know how to handle this. Maybe in a few days we could meet up and talk. No, that probably wouldn’t happen. Maybe Martin and I could go together. No, it wasn’t going to work. I’d have to let it sink in. Maybe next week. There was too much to think about; I couldn’t bear to imagine how Pete was feeling.

  He must have thought it was all coming from me. Did he know how angry Jimmy had become with him? Probably not. Jimmy had just stopped talking to him and let him get on with his junkie bullshit. No, he probably hadn’t even noticed the effect he was having on the others. Pete had become so insular; he wanted us to notice him but how much could he see himself? That fucking drug destroyed everything.

  Those were the thoughts sloshing around my head after Martin and Jimmy left. There was too much to think about. We all had our own problems now, never mind the band: Jimmy had got married and in my opinion, from the way he was talking, it sounded like divorce was already on the cards. I was knocked up. Martin was married now, too. We all had domestic stuff to attend to. Well, I’d see Pete eventually and we’d have it out.

  —

  I paced around my flat on my own for the next two days, unable to stop thinking about it. I’d see Jimmy and Mart soon, and maybe we could all meet up with Pete next month. It just needed time.

  It was morning, about ten o’clock. The phone rang. It was Dave Hill. His voice quiet.

  “Something strange has happened: Jimmy died.”

  —

  Jimmy’s body was still lying on the sofa in the girl’s flat where he’d spent his last night. Dave and Mart were getting a cab over so they could confirm it was our Jimmy.

  They’d shared many a room and Martin recognized his sleeping position, so that was one good thing: it looked like he’d died in his sleep.

  He’d been at a charity gig to raise money for Ronnie Lane, a big hero of his. He died of “heart failure due to cocaine intolerance.” He was twenty-five.

  A day later, I called Dave and asked him to get me on the next flight to New York. A Sun reporter had called my apartment for a quote. How on earth did he get my number? I had to get out of town. I’d go see Ray, who was on tour.

  The next flight going to NYC was on Concorde. “Get me on it, never mind the cost,” I said. I grabbed a small bag and ran out the door.

  When I arrived at JFK I had to share a cab with a guy into the city, as I only had a few dollars on me. He saw the Concorde tag on my bag and kept looking at it, then at my stony face. Why would someone who could fly Concorde want to share a cab? Oh, never mind. There was no explaining any of this.

  The Kinks were playing a huge stadium in Philadelphia. My pal Joan Jett, who was supporting, walked over to say hi. Nobody knew Jimmy had died. I resented anybody talking to me. How dare they? Grief is like that—there is no rationale. I looked at the scaffolding and flight cases in the aircraft-hangar-sized backstage area. Jimmy would never see that again. That was the thing that brought it all home: he would never play guitar again.

  They say you always feel better after a good cry, but when does the feeling better start?

  —

  That was a long trip, the drive to Hereford: the parish church, the little cemetery, the rain, the pretty Hereford countryside—the hole in the ground.

  Jimmy’s sister got legless with us after the service, and we badly recounted his favorite jokes. We tried hard to laugh—for Jimmy, always irreverent. Lynn was inconsolable, her little brother now in the ground.

  That was the last time I saw Pete. He looked over at me and Martin during the service, and his eyes did the talking; Martin heard it too.

  “If I’m so fucked up, why is he up there in the box?”

  I noticed Pete’s fiancée (who I’d still never met), wearing four-inch-high heels. I wondered how that was working out for her on the sodden grass. She looked glamorous, as a model should, I guess. The rain pelted down. No, Pete wasn’t going to come over and talk to us.

  —

  Eight months passed. I had a darling baby girl now and was on my own with her when the phone rang. It was Dave. He only had to say one word: “Farndon.”

  He’d nodded off after shooting a speedball. His head went under and he drowned in the bathtub, needle in his arm. There’s your rock-and-roll ending.

  Oh, Pete.

  His mum told us to stay away from the funeral. She blamed us—of course she did. She thought we fired him and then he turned to drugs. I met her a few months later, had her come round to see me in London at my flat.

  “But why did you do that?” She wanted me to explain why we sacked her son; after all, we were his best friends. So I told her.

  “He didn’t start taking drugs because we fired him, we fired him because he started taking drugs.”

  “But why did no one tell me?” she pleaded with me to make it make sense.

  “Because he adored you. It would have destroyed him if he thought you knew. I just couldn’t do that.”

  There. Now, does it make sense?

  EPILOGUE

  And so I continued.

  I kept the band going, loosely speaking. Different lineups and producers have seen me through and it’s always a pleasure to do the old songs.

  So be it.

  I went on to have a lovely little family and found out that children really are the most joyful thing.

  I still live in London, and go to Paris when I can.

  I think it’s easy to see that the moral of my story is that drugs, including tobacco and alcohol, only cause suffering. I read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop books and I stopped.

  Philosophically, I’ve kept an ongoing relationship with the Bhagavad Gita, the glory I bask in, always finding answers for everything and solace.

  I’ve had a few more romantic “dalliances,” but for the most part have remained single. I enjoy my little meditations and find that humor is everywhere once you strip away the grief.

  —

  I always said that if one of us left it wouldn’t be the Pretenders anymore. But when we ousted Pete, Jimmy and Mart and I never talked about changing our name.

  I never got over losing Pete, never talking to him again. I’d taken him into my reckless world and lost him there.

  When Jimmy died I was faced with things I hadn’t thought about. His love of playing and meeting me and having a direction. And what he did for me. Making me more than I could have ever been on my own. Or with anybody else.

  And I thought if I let it all go it would be as if the music died. No, he wouldn’t want the music to die with him.

  I found that any musical question I had could easily be answered. I just had to imagine what Jimmy would do. I had come to understand him so well that it was as if he was standing next to me talking to me.

  So I listened to Jimmy and he always had the answer. That lasted another fifteen years or so, Jimmy
in my ear telling me what to do, and then slowly, he seemed to fade away.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to everyone who encouraged me to write this book, and to those who helped make it happen.

  For their advice and encouragement, I’d particularly like to thank Claire Reihill, James Lever and Imogen Parker.

  Thank you to Liz Marvin and Jake Lingwood from Ebury in London, and to Gerry Howard from Doubleday in New York.

  PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS

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  pai1.61 © Simon Fowler

  pai1.62 © Tony Mottram

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chrissie Hynde is a singer, songwriter and guitarist, best known as the lead singer and songwriter of the enduring rock band the Pretenders. Hynde released nine studio albums with the Pretenders, beginning with 1980’s Pretenders, which Rolling Stone called the #13 Best Debut Album of All Time. Most recently, she released her first solo album, Stockholm, in 2014. She lives in London.