(2 of 3)
Learning to Crawl fixes on birth, innocence and endurance as subjects for its ten anthems of independence. All the songs but one were written by Hynde, 32, a woman who has no patience with sermons and no time for homilies. Besides the rueful and gritty Back on the Chain Gang, the album also includes a ravishing love song, 2000 Miles; a corrosive paean to suburban gentrification, My City Was Gone; a sharp bit of blue-collar feminism, Watching the Clothes; and, perhaps best of all, Thumbelina, one of the most hard-boiled lullabies ever written. Set to a kind of choogling Nashville beat, the song manages to combine love for the innocence of a young child ("shuffled about like a pawned wedding ring") and rage over a broken love affair into a song of bitter pride: "What's important in this life?/ Ask the man who's lost his wife."
Most rockers, male or female, play a coy game of footsie under the table with fate. Hynde stomps right on its toes. When she gets kicked back, she writes a song that is part taunt, part testament and part a perpetual reappraisal of the price paid for defiance. This keen balancing act between distance and immediacy is probably what saved Hynde when the going got tough a few years back.
"Pete Farndon was strung out and couldn't admit he was a junkie," Hynde says, reflecting on her old colleague and former lover. Eventually, he had to be dismissed from the band, and Hynde last saw him at Honeyman-Scott's funeral. "He was terribly bitter and resentful. He felt like 'You fired me, but Jim's the one who died from drugs.' Ten months later," she adds, "Pete had drowned in the bath-tub with a needle sticking out of his arm." No stranger to indulgence herself ("I used to take any kind of drug, whatever was going on, but I always kept it in check"), Hynde had begun to pull back by then. "I started drinking less, and I started to look less and less like a rock-'n'-roll personality," she explains. "I didn't want to be recognized."
By this time too, Hynde had met Ray Davies, the sardonic main spring of the Kinks, and become pregnant. Daughter Natalie, currently on tour with her mother and a nimble au pair, also forced Hynde to "tame down. Suddenly, you can't imagine sitting down and smoking a pack of fags or drinking whisky. Being a mother's a real awakening." Hynde is still far from being the sort of model of civic rectitude that the folks back in her home town of Akron might approve. After a low-key, Midwestern small-town childhood, she took off for England, wild and a little desperate, at the age of 22, and plunged into the sort of bohemian life that, with suitable adjustments for advanced age and encroaching gentility, still obtains today. She and Davies live without benefit of paper or clergy in a London apartment, and Hynde still takes a showwoman's pride in turning on an audience. She is a current front runner in all those fan-mag polls about "sexiest woman in rock."