Chrissie Hynde Responds To Critics Of Her Rape Comments, Chrissie Hynde makes no secret of her sordid past: Sex — lots of it. Drugs — smoked, snorted, swallowed. Rock and roll — she’s still out there playing.
But mostly, she confesses in her raw memoir “Reckless,” everything revolved around the dope.
“In the end, this story is a story of drug abuse,” writes the brutally honest Hynde, now 63 and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with her band The Pretenders.
Scattered throughout the book are tales of bold-faced pals turned drug casualties: John Belushi. Sid Vicious. And her two Pretenders bandmates, Pete Farndon and James Honeyman-Scott.
The autobiography caused a huge furor with Hynde’s insistence that she takes “full responsibility” for a brutal gang rape that she survived at the age of 21.
Hynde writes that she was “off my face” on Quaaludes when she hooked up with a biker gang in the elevator of the Cleveland municipal jail after visiting an inmate.Back at the gang’s slum house, the “hairy horde” ordered her to “get your f-----’ clothes off . . . or we’ll tie you up in the attic and get to you later.”
Other threats included “Shut up or you’re going to make some plastic surgeon rich,” shouted while the men in heavy chains tossed blazing matches at her naked body.
“Technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing and I take full responsibility,” the Ohio native writes. “You can’t f--- around with people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’ badges.”
Or, as she told a Sunday Times of London reporter, “If I’m walking about and I’m very modestly dressed and I’m keeping to myself and someone attacks me, then I’d say that’s (the attacker’s) fault.
“But, if I’m being very lairy and putting it about and being provocative, then you are enticing someone who is already unhinged — don’t do that. Come on! That’s only common sense.”Hynde doubles down on her position by relating another terrifying sexual assault in Cleveland — and taking the blame for what happened there, too.
Hynde was squatting in a rancid tenement, playing a regular gig at a dive bar, when she solicited an afternoon ride from a man she thought was a college student. As they drove around, he slipped mescaline into her rotgut wine.
The rocker awoke naked inside an inner city flophouse, trapped and “tripping my brains out.” Her recollection was that “something naked” happened in the shower and the bed.
The stranger threatened to electrocute Hynde and toss her body from a window into an adjacent alley before driving her home — and robbing her.
Two days later he reappeared and tried to return the stolen $5.It was grim, but, still, it was my own damn fault,” she writes. “What kind of idiot jumps into a car with a stranger in Cleveland? This kind.”
Hynde, who gained punk rock immortality as front woman for The Pretenders, is nothing if not forthright.
She’s always been that way.
The Akron-born rocker was the daughter of two Nixon-loving working-class parents who seemed permanently puzzled by their daughter as Hynde derailed early and often.
“Dropping out was something I took seriously,” she writes. Hynde only landed at Kent State University in 1969 because she was a 17-year-old still under her parents’ thumb.She pretty much planned on flunking out but was still in school on May 4, 1970, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a student protest. Four died and nine were wounded.
Hynde was pushing her way through the crowd when a 67-shot salvo roared. She sat down cross-legged and had to be hauled away. One of the dead, Jeff Miller, was the boyfriend of a close friend.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning photo captured 14-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio wailing over his lifeless body.
Hynde proudly continued her hard-partying, low-life ways, ingesting any drug within reach and as much alcohol as she could hold. Too many men were just enough.
At concerts and after parties, she came face to face with her own rock gods, including David Bowie and Iggy Pop.Years later, after she gained fame, Hynde came out of her slumber in a hotel room bed with Pop.
Hynde was still in her panties, so it seemed nothing had happened. But she felt she’d hit the “Big Daddy Jackpot” to have a naked Iggy Pop sharing a mattress with her.
“I’d been in love with this Class A piece of tail for my entire band life,” she crows.
The high life followed the hard times of scuffling — first in London, then Paris, then back to Akron, then Cleveland, and finally circling back to London.
At one point, she rejected an offer from Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren to join a band with Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine — co-founders of the seminal punk group Television.Hynde, unable to find a band of her own, now needed a work visa to stay in London. Marriage to a resident would help her secure the vital papers.
And so it was that a pair of punk rock icons offered their services as grooms.
First, Sex Pistols front man Johnny Rotten reneged on his marriage “proposal” — but not until Pistols bassist Sid Vicious sneered at the plan.
“You want to marry him ’cause now he’s a rock star you can have his baby and get his money,” he told Hynde.
A contrite Vicious then offered to stand in for Rotten, though he brought a girl he’d just met into Hynde’s bed the night before the ceremony.Hynde reports the night was like sleeping next to a “sack of ferrets.”
The following day the registry office was closed and the scam was scuttled.
The Pretenders self-titled debut album came out at the end of 1979 and was almost perfect in every way. Hynde’s snarling, androgynous beauty and untamed contralto was unleashed on the world.
But the band in its original incarnation was as short-lived as two of its founding members. Even Hynde was finding fame hard to take. Once in Los Angeles, she confided in John Belushi about the perils of stardom.
He advised her to wear sunglasses. The press wouldn’t use photos if she were wearing shades, he insisted — and presented her with a pair.The two went on to a club on Sunset Strip where they met up with Jack Nicholson.
Then Belushi insisted she had to meet “Tim.” At a house in the Hollywood Hills, acid king Tim Leary opened the door nude. It was that kind of night.
The Pretenders had moved onto Japan when Hynde got word that Belushi was dead of a drug overdose. That night, she wore the glasses he gave her onstage.
Soon, she would bury a pair of bandmates as The Pretenders fell into chaos.
Guitarist James Honeyman-Scott made it clear that unless bassist Peter Farndon went, he was gone. Drummer Martin Chambers felt the same.Farndon and Hynde had a romance that turned ugly before she ended it. But it was his heroin-fueled, out-of-control behavior that was causing problems.
“Peter’s junkie persona had taken over and was inhabiting him like demonic possession,” Hynde writes. “Pete had got too caught up in the myth of the rock star he was trying to be.”
Farndon hated to see his ex with her new beau, Ray Davies of the Kinks. The feeling was mutual: Davies didn’t get along with anyone in the band — even Hynde.
The two shared a hugely volatile relationship.
Around this time, the two showed up at a registry — Hynde in a white suit she had made in Bangkok — to marry. But the clerk took one look at her tear-streaked, mascara-smeared face and turned them away.
Band manager Dave Hill finally fired Farndon. Two days later, on June 16, 1982, Honeyman-Scott overdosed. Farndon drowned in his bathtub after shooting up a speedball the next year.
Hynde and the Pretenders, with an ever-changing line up, play on.
A follower of the Bhagavad Gita, she’s had two daughters, one with Davies and another with her then-husband Jim Kerr of Simple Minds.
But mostly, she confesses in her raw memoir “Reckless,” everything revolved around the dope.
“In the end, this story is a story of drug abuse,” writes the brutally honest Hynde, now 63 and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with her band The Pretenders.Scattered throughout the book are tales of bold-faced pals turned drug casualties: John Belushi. Sid Vicious. And her two Pretenders bandmates, Pete Farndon and James Honeyman-Scott.
The autobiography caused a huge furor with Hynde’s insistence that she takes “full responsibility” for a brutal gang rape that she survived at the age of 21.
Hynde writes that she was “off my face” on Quaaludes when she hooked up with a biker gang in the elevator of the Cleveland municipal jail after visiting an inmate.Back at the gang’s slum house, the “hairy horde” ordered her to “get your f-----’ clothes off . . . or we’ll tie you up in the attic and get to you later.”
Other threats included “Shut up or you’re going to make some plastic surgeon rich,” shouted while the men in heavy chains tossed blazing matches at her naked body.
“Technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing and I take full responsibility,” the Ohio native writes. “You can’t f--- around with people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’ badges.”
Or, as she told a Sunday Times of London reporter, “If I’m walking about and I’m very modestly dressed and I’m keeping to myself and someone attacks me, then I’d say that’s (the attacker’s) fault.
“But, if I’m being very lairy and putting it about and being provocative, then you are enticing someone who is already unhinged — don’t do that. Come on! That’s only common sense.”Hynde doubles down on her position by relating another terrifying sexual assault in Cleveland — and taking the blame for what happened there, too.
Hynde was squatting in a rancid tenement, playing a regular gig at a dive bar, when she solicited an afternoon ride from a man she thought was a college student. As they drove around, he slipped mescaline into her rotgut wine.
The rocker awoke naked inside an inner city flophouse, trapped and “tripping my brains out.” Her recollection was that “something naked” happened in the shower and the bed.
The stranger threatened to electrocute Hynde and toss her body from a window into an adjacent alley before driving her home — and robbing her.
Two days later he reappeared and tried to return the stolen $5.It was grim, but, still, it was my own damn fault,” she writes. “What kind of idiot jumps into a car with a stranger in Cleveland? This kind.”
Hynde, who gained punk rock immortality as front woman for The Pretenders, is nothing if not forthright.
She’s always been that way.
The Akron-born rocker was the daughter of two Nixon-loving working-class parents who seemed permanently puzzled by their daughter as Hynde derailed early and often.
“Dropping out was something I took seriously,” she writes. Hynde only landed at Kent State University in 1969 because she was a 17-year-old still under her parents’ thumb.She pretty much planned on flunking out but was still in school on May 4, 1970, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a student protest. Four died and nine were wounded.
Hynde was pushing her way through the crowd when a 67-shot salvo roared. She sat down cross-legged and had to be hauled away. One of the dead, Jeff Miller, was the boyfriend of a close friend.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning photo captured 14-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio wailing over his lifeless body.
Hynde proudly continued her hard-partying, low-life ways, ingesting any drug within reach and as much alcohol as she could hold. Too many men were just enough.
At concerts and after parties, she came face to face with her own rock gods, including David Bowie and Iggy Pop.Years later, after she gained fame, Hynde came out of her slumber in a hotel room bed with Pop.
Hynde was still in her panties, so it seemed nothing had happened. But she felt she’d hit the “Big Daddy Jackpot” to have a naked Iggy Pop sharing a mattress with her.
“I’d been in love with this Class A piece of tail for my entire band life,” she crows.
The high life followed the hard times of scuffling — first in London, then Paris, then back to Akron, then Cleveland, and finally circling back to London.
At one point, she rejected an offer from Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren to join a band with Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine — co-founders of the seminal punk group Television.Hynde, unable to find a band of her own, now needed a work visa to stay in London. Marriage to a resident would help her secure the vital papers.
And so it was that a pair of punk rock icons offered their services as grooms.
First, Sex Pistols front man Johnny Rotten reneged on his marriage “proposal” — but not until Pistols bassist Sid Vicious sneered at the plan.
“You want to marry him ’cause now he’s a rock star you can have his baby and get his money,” he told Hynde.
A contrite Vicious then offered to stand in for Rotten, though he brought a girl he’d just met into Hynde’s bed the night before the ceremony.Hynde reports the night was like sleeping next to a “sack of ferrets.”
The following day the registry office was closed and the scam was scuttled.
The Pretenders self-titled debut album came out at the end of 1979 and was almost perfect in every way. Hynde’s snarling, androgynous beauty and untamed contralto was unleashed on the world.
But the band in its original incarnation was as short-lived as two of its founding members. Even Hynde was finding fame hard to take. Once in Los Angeles, she confided in John Belushi about the perils of stardom.
He advised her to wear sunglasses. The press wouldn’t use photos if she were wearing shades, he insisted — and presented her with a pair.The two went on to a club on Sunset Strip where they met up with Jack Nicholson.
Then Belushi insisted she had to meet “Tim.” At a house in the Hollywood Hills, acid king Tim Leary opened the door nude. It was that kind of night.
The Pretenders had moved onto Japan when Hynde got word that Belushi was dead of a drug overdose. That night, she wore the glasses he gave her onstage.
Soon, she would bury a pair of bandmates as The Pretenders fell into chaos.
Guitarist James Honeyman-Scott made it clear that unless bassist Peter Farndon went, he was gone. Drummer Martin Chambers felt the same.Farndon and Hynde had a romance that turned ugly before she ended it. But it was his heroin-fueled, out-of-control behavior that was causing problems.
“Peter’s junkie persona had taken over and was inhabiting him like demonic possession,” Hynde writes. “Pete had got too caught up in the myth of the rock star he was trying to be.”
Farndon hated to see his ex with her new beau, Ray Davies of the Kinks. The feeling was mutual: Davies didn’t get along with anyone in the band — even Hynde.
The two shared a hugely volatile relationship.
Around this time, the two showed up at a registry — Hynde in a white suit she had made in Bangkok — to marry. But the clerk took one look at her tear-streaked, mascara-smeared face and turned them away.
Band manager Dave Hill finally fired Farndon. Two days later, on June 16, 1982, Honeyman-Scott overdosed. Farndon drowned in his bathtub after shooting up a speedball the next year.
Hynde and the Pretenders, with an ever-changing line up, play on.
A follower of the Bhagavad Gita, she’s had two daughters, one with Davies and another with her then-husband Jim Kerr of Simple Minds.
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