By Stuart Mitchner

Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless: My Life as a Pretender (Doubleday $26.99), which entered the N.Y. Times non-fiction best-seller list in 7th place this week, is a gutsy rock and roll memoir whose sales have undoubtedly been boosted by online chatter surrounding the author’s account of a sexual attack and her repeated refusal to blame her attackers. Now she finds herself, as she slyly puts it in a recent Washington Post interview, “a leading authority on rape.”

In the same interview, she says, “I wouldn’t expect most people to do some of the stuff I did. But then again, most people don’t get to be a rock star, either. We have to walk the plank.” In her case, walking the plank meant going to a biker “party” with a shipload of sexist pirates and suffering the consequences. 

The Most Important Word

In “Brass in Pocket,” her first big hit with the Pretenders, Hynde defines herself as a performer and a lyricist much as she defines her career in Reckless. On her way to telling the world “I’m special, so special, I gotta have some of your attention,” she gives a crash course in body English, singing “Gonna use my arms, gonna use my legs, gonna use my style, gonna use my side-step, gonna use my fin-gers,” saving the most important word for last, “my, my, my, imag-i-nation.”

She serves up the story of her life no less boldly, nonchalantly, take it or leave it, in Reckless. Like the waitress she plays from experience in the “Brass Pocket” video, having done some real-life waitressing at an Ohio diner, she saunters from table to anecdotal table, her side-stepping style in play, just enough to keep you guessing. In the end it’s imagination talking, book and song, “I feel inventive, gonna make you, make you, make you notice … gonna make you see there’s nobody else here, no one like me.”

In Ray’s Cafe

What drew me to Chrissie Hynde’s book in the first place was a song by her ex-partner Ray Davies of the Kinks. As Hynde did when she formed the Pretenders on the rebound from walking the bikers’ plank, Davies made music out of a misadventure in New Orleans (shot while pursuing a thief, he landed in the trauma ward of Charity Hospital). The song, “Imaginary Man,” is an existential variation on “Brass in Pocket.” With her, it’s “I celebrate myself.” With him, it’s “I deconstruct myself.” While she moves sensually around in, savors, and sells her “imagination,” he becomes “the imaginary man” in the aftermath of a near-death experience where he saw his “reflection in the glass, watched as the world went flashing past,” and “couldn’t recognize” himself. No wonder these two hooked up in the 1980s and produced a child. No wonder they couldn’t live together. Among the numerous photos in Reckless is a shot of the smiling lovers captioned “Me and Ray. Always laughing.” Except that “we were not suited to each other. We’d always laugh about the absurdity of our fights, but there was nothing funny about them.”

Loving London

Reckless contains one of the freshest, most vivid and engaging accounts of a rock-and-roll-besotted American falling in love with London and all things British you’ll ever read. Besides putting an ocean between herself and the bikers who brutalized her, Hynde was escaping from Akron, Ohio (“Boredsville, U.S.A.”) and the nearby college town of Kent (she was at Kent State during the shootings). It’s easy to share her delight in the “first sightings of Victorian and Edwardian buildings, cobbled streets, red pillar postboxes and phone booths and the double-decker buses driving on the wrong side of the road” that were “more beautiful than all my schoolgirl imaginings.” When she sees the destination Muswell Hill on a bus, she jumps on and rides to the end of the line, where she walks around “knowing that Ray and Dave Davies must have walked there, too.” This is London in the early seventies where the sound of a bus conductor’s ticket machine recalls punk rocker Shane MacGowan’s laugh and “former dolly birds in miniskirts now looked like tired versions of the teenage daughters they were with.” She seals the “kid in a toy store” experience with an epiphany: “I saw St. Paul’s Cathedral as I emerged from a station one afternoon and, although I’d never heard of it and so didn’t know it was famous, when I saw the office buildings slammed up against it, it made me cry. I had fallen in love with London ….”

Again, it’s no wonder she ends up with the composer of London’s sixties anthem “Waterloo Sunset.” In the Ohio chapters of Reckless, even as she expresses her Ray-Davies-like frustration with “a world where everything old was cast aside,” she mentions walking “through sleet and rain to hear Kinks records.” Later, she drives “a hundred miles through a terrible blizzard to see the Kinks.” Which leads to a significant moment: “After the show we were sitting on the curb outside the venue … when Ray Davies himself walked right past. He dropped a towel, bent over to pick it up and saw me sitting there. Eye contact.”

Although the rockers Hynde gets truly passionate about are Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop, she picked the Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing” for the A side of the Pretenders’ first single and for the group’s fifth single, she covered another song of Ray’s, “I Go to Sleep,” having been “enthralled” by the early demo sung by Davies when he was 19. Her emotional performance and the close-ups of her face in the video (not to mention that seductive turn as a waitress) no doubt helped precipitate a romance that took them to the brink of marriage in 1982 (“The guy at the registry office took one look at us and suggested we come back another time”). To see a blending of Ray and Chrissie, check out the online images of their daughter, Natalie Ray Hynde.

Gretel’s Breadcrumbs 

Chrissie Hynde, who turned 64 earlier this month, has come a long way from the 22-year-old expatriate whose reaction when approached to write reviews for New Musical Express is recorded in Reckless. “The idea of me writing anything at all was ludicrous … I wasn’t a poet. I wasn’t a writer. To begin a paragraph and find my way to the conclusion — Gretel tracking a breadcrumb trail would fare better.”

Gretel finds her share of tasty breadcrumbs. A car driving up a hill “made a distinctive sound like a Spaniard rolling his Rs.” Working as a waitress in a diner called Jerry’s, she was “coasting on apathy” and popping pills from “a miniature chest of drawers like something from a doll’s house.” She was also getting a taste for older guys who between them had “a BSA and a Corvette, which they’d park next to the curb outside the diner where I could admire them. In Ohio that was known as ‘foreplay.’” Being on the “city streets” of Toronto with a strung-out boyfriend she met in Mexico “felt all wrong, like salamanders dodging buses.” Referring to the almost-marriage, it was an event “that should have been enacted onstage in the theater of the absurd.” The almost-bride 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.” As for being told to 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.”

Her Comeuppance

The most conspicuous example of how Hynde fares as a writer is her account of the incident that went viral in the twittering instababble of the Net. She calls it her “comeuppance,” pointing out in typically quirky-savvy Chrissie Hynde style that she was high on Quaaludes (which “tend to make you do and say things you might later regret”), and already prone to “chaos and disorder” thanks to “a mouth that flapped like a rag nailed to a post in a windstorm.” As she goes to her fate “in a white slum that had ‘Jeffrey Dahmer’ written all over it,” she recalls fondly telling her “tall and regal” companions” she “must have died and gone to heaven,” a gushing, drugged-out reference to “their winged insignias.” She conveys an impression of what happened in their lair by using capital letters for the shouted threats and commands, such as “SHUT UP OR YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE SOME PLASTIC SURGEON RICH!” But the closest her account comes to actually getting physical is when she describes the “volley of lit matches” that bounced off her “rib rack … before dropping to the forensically soiled carpet, leaving little trails of blue smoke to struggle briefly and disappear — like I wished I could.”

At this point, she flings another Molotov cocktail into the blogosphere: “Like I said, I’d never blame others for my transgressions. That would just be bad form. Painting oneself into a corner could pass as an art installation by any other name.”

True to that metaphor, the corner she painted herself into — the trauma of the attack and the brute force of the attackers — gave her the material for “Tattooed Love Boys,” one of the best-known tracks on the first Pretenders album: you can hear the roaring of a hundred Harleys in the headbanging guitar jams. Imagine the same bikers watching the video of “Tattooed Love Boys” on MTV asking themselves “Hey, is she the skinny chick with the attitude?” as the song throws her story in their faces with a laugh, about how “the time came to explore,” “little tease” that she was, but “you don’t mess with the goods doll, honey you gotta pay,” and so she does in an abuse-set-to-music guitars-gone-wild frenzy she emerges from, sassy and triumphant, singing, “Well ha ha, too bad, but you know what they say, ‘Stop snivellin’, you’re gonna make some plastic surgeon a rich man!’”

Whatever the chatter about the “rape scene” may do for sales, and whether or not Reckless equals the success of Keith Richards’s Life or Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Hynde makes sure we know she did all her own writing. “I don’t understand this thing with autobiographies,” she says in the Washington Post interview. “If you haven’t written it, I don’t see how it’s autobiographical. I’m just saying, in general, not pointing any fingers at anyone.” While her writing isn’t on the same level with Smith’s, she holds her own with Richards, who had professional help from James Fox. Can she get the job done? As she herself might put it, “C’mon! Are you kidding me?”