My City Was Gone

You know that bass line the second it walks in. Four notes, maybe five, bouncing like a rubber ball on a factory floor, and then the whole band locks in behind it and Chrissie Hynde starts talking like she just stepped off a bus and found the map in her pocket doesn't match the street. That is "My City Was Gone," the Pretenders cut that began life as the flip side of "Back on the Chain Gang" in 1982 and then settled into the middle of Learning to Crawl when that album landed in January 1984. On THE ZOO we treat it like the freeform record it is: a postcard from Akron that never got a happy ending, played loud enough that the parking lot outside the studio window feels a little too familiar.

Chrissie Hynde wrote it after she went home. She was born Christine Ellen Hynde in Akron, Ohio, on September 7, 1951, the daughter of a part-time secretary and a Yellow Pages manager, and she grew up in a town that called itself the Rubber Capital of the World. Goodyear, Firestone, Goodrich. The air smelled like hot tires and the radio pulled in Detroit soul and the rock stations that carried the Stones and Lou Reed. She left for Kent State, left for London in 1973, wrote for NME, worked the floor at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's shop, and spent years almost joining other people's bands before she built her own. The Pretenders formed in Hereford and London in 1978 with James Honeyman-Scott on lead guitar, Pete Farndon on bass, and Martin Chambers on drums. Real Records, Sire in the States, and a debut album in 1980 that put "Brass in Pocket" and "Kid" on every AOR turntable that still had a needle. She was the only continuous member after that, and she still is.

Learning to Crawl is the record that came after the floor dropped out. Honeyman-Scott died in June 1982. Farndon was fired and then died in April 1983. Hynde had a daughter, Natalie, with Ray Davies. The album title is the joke she made about learning how to be a mother and how to keep a band standing at the same time. Chris Thomas produced. Billy Bremner of Rockpile came in on guitar. The bass on "My City Was Gone" is Tony Butler, the Big Country player, and the engineer Steve Churchyard later said that famous line was something Butler used to run as a warm-up before the tape rolled. Chambers keeps the drums almost plain, a march with a little swing, which is exactly why the track feels so wide open. Hynde sings it more like a letter than a hook. "I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone." South Howard Street, the old downtown, the train station, the farms at the edge of town, all of it paved into shopping centers and parking decks. She has called the new blocks huge masses of granite that look fine on a drawing and have nothing to do with human life. The refrain "hey ho, way to go Ohio" lands like a cheer that curdled.

The song never needed a chart number to stick. It was the B-side that radio people kept flipping, then an album track that freeform jocks refused to bury under the singles. Ultimate Classic Rock later ranked it among the band's best, and Chambers' beat among his best, for the simple reason that nothing on it is showing off. The politics in it are local: a government with no pride, a countryside traded for asphalt, a hometown that smelled like industry and still felt like a place. Hynde has never dressed that up as a party platform. She has spent the decades since as a vegetarian and an animal-rights campaigner, and the band kept moving. "Middle of the Road," "2000 Miles," "Don't Get Me Wrong," "I'll Stand by You." The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame called them in in 2005. Hynde has kept the name alive through lineups that changed around her, right up through recent live sets and the 2025 live album Kick 'Em Where It Hurts.

Then there is the weirdest second life any Pretenders track ever had. Rush Limbaugh started using the instrumental open as the theme of his Sacramento show at KFBK in 1984, and he carried that riff onto national syndication. He said he liked the bass line and liked the irony of a conservative host riding an anti-sprawl song. For years the use was unlicensed. Hynde, living in England, has said she had not even heard the show. When the paperwork caught up, the deal that stuck sent the royalties to PETA. Her parents were fans of the program. She has said she had no interest in yanking the song as long as the money went where she wanted it. So the same four-note walk that opens a lament for Akron's rubber plants also opened the biggest talk-radio franchise in the country, and the writer of the lament banked the checks for the animals. If you want a piece of rock trivia that still makes a control-room crew laugh, that is the one.

Play it next to "Back on the Chain Gang" and you hear the same season of the band: grief, work, and a refusal to quit. Play it after an old Devo record or a Pere Ubu side and you hear the Akron that Hynde actually left, the one with a scene sharp enough to export weirdos to the world. The Pretenders were never a nostalgia act, even when the lyric was pure memory. Hynde's voice stays dry, a little sarcastic, a little heartbroken, the way a great album-rock singer can be both without turning the record into a speech. That is why it still belongs on a station that plays deep cuts for people who actually listen. Stream the rest of the story with the Zoo Freaks at THE ZOO, then go dig the band's own trail: the official site at thepretenders.com, the verified Facebook page at Pretenders on Facebook, Instagram at @thepretendershq, and X at @ThePretendersHQ. For the liner-note nerds, the song file at Songfacts still holds the Akron details and the PETA punchline in one place. Cue it up, let Butler's warm-up become the song, and remember the town that used to be there.