Middle of the Road

You are locked in with The Zoo, the listener-supported, commercial-free stream that still treats a record like it matters. Park it at thezoorocks.com and stay for the deep cuts. Right now the needle drops on “Middle of the Road,” the opening shot from The Pretenders’ third album, Learning to Crawl, and if that riff does not straighten your spine, check your pulse.

Christine Ellen Hynde came out of Akron, Ohio, on September 7, 1951, and grew up over in Cuyahoga Falls, the daughter of a Yellow Pages man and a part-time secretary. She picked up a baritone ukulele at sixteen, sang in a closet so the neighbors would not call the cops, and got hooked on the British Invasion the way some kids got hooked on cars. Kent State took her as an art student. She was on campus in May 1970 when the National Guard opened fire. She left school, waited tables until the meat on the menu argued with her, and by 1973 she was in London with a suitcase and a bad attitude. She wrote for NME, folded shirts at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop Sex, and tried to start bands with half the future of punk, including a young Mick Jones. Nothing stuck until 1978 in Hereford, when she locked in with guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, bassist Pete Farndon, and drummer Martin Chambers. They took the name from a Platters song. The 1980 debut, Pretenders, and the single “Brass in Pocket” made her the coolest voice on either side of the Atlantic. Pretenders II followed in 1981. Then the floor gave way.

Honeyman-Scott, the melodic genius who made those first records shimmer, died of a drug overdose on June 16, 1982. Farndon, already fired for the same trouble, died the same way on April 14, 1983. Hynde and Chambers were what was left. She was also a new mother. Daughter Natalie Rae, with Ray Davies of The Kinks, arrived in January 1983. The album title is not a metaphor somebody in the art department dreamed up. It is what that kid was doing while the band learned how to stand up again. Session hands Billy Bremner and Tony Butler helped cut “Back on the Chain Gang” and “My City Was Gone.” The rebuilt lineup that finished the record added Robbie McIntosh on lead guitar and Malcolm Foster on bass. Producer Chris Thomas, the same man who had steered the first two albums and who knew his way around Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols, took them into AIR Studios in London across 1982 and 1983. Sire released Learning to Crawl on January 11, 1984. It is the sound of a band that refused to become a memorial.

“Middle of the Road” hit American radio first, November 1983, with “2000 Miles” on the flip. Britain got it in February 1984, backed with the older “Watching the Clothes.” It climbed to number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and parked at number 2 on the mainstream rock chart for four weeks in January 1984. In the UK it stalled at 81, which tells you something about how a record can be a radio animal in one country and a shrug in another. Hynde has said the title points at the Tao Te Ching, the middle way, the discipline of not flying off either edge. She told one writer she buys the medium jacket on purpose. The lyric is less Zen and more brick. She clocks the gap between people who have everything and people who have nothing, tells the press to get out of her business, and drops the line that still stops a room: “I got a kid, I’m thirty-three.” She had just turned 32 when the single came out. Close enough for rock and roll, and the point landed anyway. She was not the cat she used to be. She was something harder.

Musically she has been plain about the chassis. Same chords as the Rolling Stones’ “Empty Heart,” not much melody, a regular R&B frame with new words bolted on, the way somebody once took the blues and wrote a fresh set of verses. Engineer Steve Churchyard later said it was one of the hardest tracks on the album precisely because it sounds simple. Chris Thomas stacked guitar on guitar, high parts and low parts, each one doubled, each one left ringing into the next, something like six guitars to get that thick, mean grind. McIntosh’s solo is what Hynde herself called nifty, a short bright argument in the middle of the stomp. Down near the end somebody cuts loose on harmonica. The sleeve does not say who. Most fingers point at Hynde, and she usually plays it herself when the song hits a stage. Then comes the yowl, that feline scrape right after the line about not being the cat she used to be. One magazine heard the whole build and thought of Dobie Gray’s “The ‘In’ Crowd.” Fair. It moves like a dance record that learned to snarl.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame called the band in during 2005, with Hynde the only continuous member across a long shelf of records: Get Close, Packed!, Last of the Independents, ¡Viva El Amor!, Loose Screw, Break Up the Concrete, Alone, Hate for Sale, Relentless. Chambers has come and gone and come back. Hynde stayed in London, kept a place in Akron, went vegetarian in 1969 and never blinked, and took up a serious study of Vaishnavism. She has sung with UB40, cut a Sinatra duet, painted, written a memoir, and still walks onstage like the shop girl who decided the shop was not big enough. The official home is thepretenders.com. The band keeps a verified page at facebook.com/pretenders, posts as @thepretendershq on Instagram, and runs @ThePretendersHQ on X. Longtime listeners still gather at the fan-run pretenders.org.uk.

Put “Middle of the Road” back on and listen for the layers. That riff is not one guitar. It is a small army, left to ring, stacked until the track feels wider than the speakers. Hynde is not asking permission and she is not picking a side. She is standing in the lane, kid on her hip in the lyric, dead friends in the rearview, new players at her shoulders, and daring anybody in a suit to tell her she has gone soft. Learning to Crawl is the record where The Pretenders proved the name still meant something after the worst year a band can have. This song is the handshake. Turn it up. The Zoo is not going anywhere.