There was no opener, and not much waiting around: at 20 past 8:00 on Sunday evening, Chrissie Hynde walked onstage at the Fillmore alongside the current Pretenders lineup and lifted her guitar from its stand. It came off as very humble, sans any fanfare expected from or accorded to a star of her stature.
Hynde is arguably one of the most deserving, genuinely self-made heroes of rock-n-roll myth. Her origin story is proffered as almost interdependent with that of the Sex Pistols in Pistol, a mini-series based on Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones’ memoir Lonely Boy (even though you can almost hear the echoes of Lester Bangs’ dismissive scoffing once you realize you have to watch the fairy tale of Johnny Rotten’s anarchist rock revolution on the Disney app). Sure, Hynde is rock-and-roll royalty now – but part of what the series gets right is its spotlight on the sweat equity the hardscrabble Ohioan invested in what was clearly a dream she ran down from an early age. While the series just briefly hints in one scene of its last episode at Hynde’s initial success when she finally does assemble the Pretenders (spoiler alert: she manages to score some hits in the late 70s with songs like “Kid,” and “Brass In Pocket”), so much of the rest of Hynde’s story is incredibly inspiring and worth telling too: her devotion to her craft and honing her songwriting skills, her success as a frontwoman in a very male-oriented industry, and the resilience she demonstrated in her commitment to continue on after the devastating loss of guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon – two close friends of Hynde’s – just a couple years after they began recording together.
Pretenders | photo by Josh Pelta-Heller for WXPN
As a band — which, at the Fillmore, featured recent collaborator James Walbourne on guitar, with David Antony Page on bass, and Kris Sonne on drums — the Pretenders have been able to achieve in their twelve records and forty-plus years a kind of alchemy, turning a grab-bag of rock tricks and tropes and influences – including the fashion and snarl of the nascent punk rock that reared them, and the musical stylings of the blues, R&B and soul that informed their childhoods (their band’s name itself deriving from the famous Platters’ song) – into something that still sounds new and relevant all these decades later. Opening on Sunday with a volley of relatively new material including two from last year’s release Relentless, Hynde and co. steered course toward old favorites for an ecstatic crowd of 2500 strong, including rocker “Boots Of Chinese Plastic,” and “My City Was Gone,” with its pointed political message feeling as relevant now as it ever did. Hynde’s home-state lamentation was originally released as the B-side to “Back On The Chain Gang” – one of their encores that evening, along with a rendition of “Stop Your Sobbing,” the Kinks’ cover that launched their recording career, all those years ago.