Chrissie Hynde is on the phone from a tour stop in Nashville, and when I ask her whether she still has a taste for the rock-and-roll life after 25 years of hotels, highways, and slugging out songs on stage, she shoots back, "I love it. I fucking love it."

That's exactly what I want to hear, and I don't think she's bullshitting, because Hynde seems to have no patience for bullshit. Her lyrics -- whether about sex or politics -- have always been direct, and when she speaks, she's blunt. If a question is vague, she politely but firmly demands clarification. And if she thinks she's rambling, she calls herself on it.

I'm pleased to find that Hynde's so direct, because she's been one of my rock-and-roll heroes since the first time I saw her perform. That was back in 1980 at Toad's Place in New Haven. Me and a carload of fellow music snobs had made the drive up from our college in Bridgeport to hear English guitarist Chris Spedding, who was playing with a band called the Necessaries. We were outraged that the Necessaries and Spedding were opening for some group we'd barely heard of called the Pretenders. Granted, the Pretenders' first single, "Brass in Pocket (I'm Special)," had hit radio a day or two earlier and sounded okay, but this was CHRIS SPEDDING, goddammit. We figured we'd catch the Necessaries and split.

We changed our minds when Spedding invited a blond-haired guitarist we didn't recognize to jam during the Necessaries' final number and the guy kicked Spedding's ass hard. Figuring he was with the next band, we stayed for the Pretenders and were enlightened. Hynde and her bandmates killed. The sounds of punk, pop, reggae, and major-league rock all collided like red-hot atoms in their set, and I'd be surprised if the big blast of energy they gave off didn't make life-long fans of everyone in the club.

That energy level has fluctuated over the years. Especially just after the firing of original bassist Pete Farndon and the drug-related death of that brilliant guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, in 1982. (Farndon died the next year, still estranged from the Pretenders and struggling with his own drug issues.) But Hynde has remained a slashing rhythm guitarist, a commanding stage presence, and a bright, artful songwriter with a rock-and-roll soul. Mix in her human- and animal-rights activism and she's been the kind of rock star who makes that brand seem honorable.

Hynde has made nine Pretenders albums, including the new Loose Screw (Artemis), which has sparked a tour that will bring the band to the Orpheum this Saturday. Unless you consider rock inherently anachronistic -- and it's still got too much potential for that -- Loose Screw and the Pretenders' other more recent studio albums, 1999's Viva El Amor! (Warner Bros.) and '94's The Last of the Independents (Sire/Warner Bros.), sound thoroughly vital. That's partly because the band's core of Hynde, guitarist Adam Seymour, bassist Andy Hobson, and drummer Martin Chambers (who's an original Pretender) has been intact for 10 years. And though some of the Pretenders' finest songs -- "Brass in Pocket," "Back on the Chain Gang," "Middle of the Road," "2000 Miles," "My City Was Gone," "Show Me," "Time the Avenger" -- are the stuff of classic-rock radio, that's not Hynde's fault. In fact, it pisses her off to be labeled a "classic" artist, because that amounts to a kind of music-biz apartheid. Which in fact is what got the Pretenders dumped by their long-time label, Warner Bros. (which owns the Sire imprint), as they began to make Loose Screw.

"As we were recording demos, my manager would send them to whoever the head of the record company was to get some feedback, and we weren't getting any," she explains. "So one day she said, `Look, if you're not really into this, why don't you let us go.' So they did.

"It was a gift. With all the major-label, multinational companies, it's all about sales now. The good news is that independents are springing up. The bad news is that people like Morrissey don't have record deals. And I'm not gonna get airplay because of the way radio's gone. There are songs on my album that would sound great on the radio if I do say so myself. `Nothing Breaks like a Heart' is a pure single, but people'll never hear it, which frustrates me. I don't want to sound `sour grapes,' because I'm not ungrateful that I got in when I did and that I've had singles on the radio. But deregulation happened, so now one company can own and program 10,000 radio stations. So there's no such thing as regional radio anymore, and disc jockeys can't play what they want to play, unless they want to be standing outside 20 minutes later with their caps in their hands begging for change.

"Disc jockeys used to be like gurus. You looked to them to turn you on to good music that was happening. Now it's like driving from coast to coast and seeing all those green signs on the turnpike -- all the same."

Hynde feels that mainstream radio's collusion with big record labels, a kind of conspiracy to hard-sell market-driven music from Britney Spears to Mudvayne, even put a damper on the Pretenders' dates with the Rolling Stones this fall. That tour should have been nirvana for Hynde. After all, she spent her teen years as an Anglophile rock fan in Ohio and decided to become a musician after meeting Ron Wood in Cleveland while Woody was touring with the Jeff Beck Group.

"Opening for the Stones . . . how could it suck?" she says. "The only thing is, doing these support shows we have to do our greatest-hits package because we're only out there for 40 or 45 minutes playing for an audience who've probably just heard us on the radio. Because they don't play new Pretenders music on the radio, we're forced to play the hits, which can actually get pretty demoralizing after a while.

"I've got nothing to do with this world of selling records now. If I was 28 again and starting out today, I wouldn't stand a chance. I have no capacity to play the game the way you have to do it today. I'm not into pornography. Pornography has destroyed all the arts and the music business. The idea that it degrades women? These assholes . . . these girls are the ones that brought that into rock and roll, so fuck 'em. They're the ones who saw they could sell records with it, and then they always say the record companies made them do it. Who are these wimps?" Anyone who's seen the covers of People, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly knows.

Certainly the determined Hynde has nobody but herself and her bandmates to blame for Loose Screw, an album that's something of a departure for the Pretenders. Sure, it has modernist signatures like looped guitars and beats, but they're used as very subtle elements in the mix. Loose Screw is primarily a vocal album, and it's driven by the most consistent singing of Hynde's career. From the catchy, fast rocker "Lie to Me" to the story of sexual infatuation "Kinda Nice, I Like It" and the ballads "The Losing" and "Saving Grace," her voice cuts through with power and authority. She purrs and pushes her way along the album's dozen songs, employing vibrato and her low range to give her voice a soft-felt edge, or rising to the crystalline highs of her upper register. Actually, Hynde uses her high voice more than ever, and she's thoroughly in command of it, weaving delicate curlicues into her phrasing, gliding through lyrics more sweetly and stylishly.

"I've always sung in a low register, because I thought it sounded better," she points out. "Naturally I have quite a high voice, or at least a wider range. I'm not that much of a musician. I've never trained, so I don't know what the technical jargon is. But in the early days, I used to sit at home with a guitar writing songs. When you're singing very quietly to an unamplified electric guitar, you sing in a lower register. When you're belting out something forcefully, your voice naturally finds a higher register. I hadn't explored that top range before, I guess."

The other quality that defines Loose Screw's tunes is the concentration on rhythmic drive, which is a consequence of the Pretenders' longstanding reggae influence. "I wanted more of a groove record," Hynde explains. "I'm very traditional in what I do. The Pretenders usually do three kinds of songs: rock songs, mid-tempo poppy songs, and ballads. My secret shame is that I felt we've never established a groove, and I like to dance and enjoy music that's really danceable. Which is not to be confused with what's considered dance music today, which is just a soundtrack for pornography. So I like reggae, and I've always tried to be true to my punk roots, which have a lot of reggae in them.

"At the same time, I never want to venture too far from the original Pretenders sound. I like to stay true to the sound of the James Honeyman-Scott/Pete Farndon band. That was a damn good band, and it took me a long time to find those guys. Having a band is really important to me. Even today, it's everything. Through all the different producers and different line-ups, it's one of the reasons all the records have managed to sound like Pretenders albums."

Issue Date: February 7 -13, 2003