CHRISSIE HYNDE : ROEKELOOS

Chrissie Hynde, zangeres en songwriter, werd in 1951 geboren in Akron, Ohio. Ze is vooral bekend geworden als frontvrouw van The Pretenders. Tegen de tijd dat ze veertien was, wist Chrissie Hynde dat ze weg moest uit Akron, Ohio. Haar keurige Amerikaanse jaren-vijftigjeugd was op zijn kop gezet door haar opkomende voorkeur voor rock-'n-roll, motoren en de 'get-down boys' die ze zag bij concerten in Cleveland en omgeving - Mitch Ryder, The Jeff Beck Group, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie en vele anderen. Nadat ze de rellen op Kent State University had doorstaan, vluchtte ze naar Mexico, Canada, Parijs en uiteindelijk Londen. Daar belandde ze precies op tijd in de beginnende punkscene waar ze niet alleen overal ooggetuige van was, maar waar ze vooral ook de kans wist te grijpen haar eigen band, The Pretenders, te vormen. Iggy Pop, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Vivienne & Malcolm, Ray Davies. Van slaapkamer tot bikerhoofdkwartier; van kraakpand tot repetitieruimte en van kroegoptredens tot Top of the Pops: Roekeloos neemt ons mee over het lange, kronkelende pad naar de roem, het succes en de tragiek van The Pretenders. Dat Chrissie Hynde het allemaal kan navertellen is, zo zegt ze zelf, een klein wonder. In Roekeloos is ze genadeloos eerlijk, laconiek geestig en altijd onderhoudend. Hiermee heeft ze een van de indringendste en kleurrijkste autobiografieën van de laatste jaren afgeleverd.

Recensie (The Guardian) : There's provocative directness and then there's Chrissie Hynde. "Now, let me assure you that, technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing and I take full responsibility." Or, rather, there's room for interpretation in date rape accounts, then there are sentences like that. "You can't fuck around with people, especially people who wear 'I Heart Rape' and 'On Your Knees' badges... I considered their demand[s] while sustaining a volley of lit matches, which bounced off my rib rack." Here begins the pre-Christmas rock memoir surge, in "a dark and noticeably empty house" in Cleveland, Ohio, where the state's most famous export, and future Pretenders singer and songwriter, marks her spot as one of punk and new wave's most atypical voices. These remarks about the assault on her 21-year-old self, by a biker gang, have recently melted the internet, Hynde's feminism not being that tolerant of the concept of victimhood. "The good thing about Quaaludes: I wasn't duly perturbed," she continues. "I was getting experience." Chrissie Hynde is a heroine to me, but she is so wrong on victim blaming Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Read more This uncompromising whatever-ness fits with the figure staring out from the cover of Reckless: a rocker sitting in a bath, denims and gold chelsea boots hanging over the side, fringe, eyeliner and vest as black as night. But from the very beginning of her autobiography, Hynde is a much more complicated character. She admits in the prologue that she didn't publish this book until her straitlaced, aspirational parents died: "I would have had to leave out the bad language and tell a lot of lies about what I'd been doing all that time I was gone." That suggests someone highly affected by certain people's emotions. But not everyone's, granted. She says later, on becoming vegetarian: "I got used to having this disregard for 97% of the population." Then follows everyone else, like the old friend of future Rough Trade Records boss, Jeannette Lee, who helped Hynde get a house share ("Jeannette's friend, Janice, had committed suicide there and I got her room"). Or Nancy Spungen, whose boyfriend, Sid Vicious, once nearly married Hynde for her green card ("It seemed that Sidney had stuck Nancy in the stomach with a knife and killed her. Oh dear."). Oh dear, indeed, and oof. The Pretenders' Brass in Pocket. Even before we approach Hynde's stellar career with the Pretenders, there are enough eyebrow-raising anecdotes here to give a publisher multiple orgasms. To wit: Hynde's first kiss was with soul singer Jackie Wilson (slobbered on to her from the stage). She once drove David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust to lunch (when she was merely a passing fan). There's a brilliant page about her disastrous relationship with Ray Davies (he asked her not to mention him, but her editors refused - lucky us) and a full account of her first meeting with Motörhead's Lemmy. Seeing her for the first time in a shop, without speaking, he stuck a tube of powder up her nose. "I was up for three days," Hynde drawls. She can write. Her language is concise, as you might expect from a proto-punk-era NME writer, although she says she was awful, in one of many examples of self-deprecation ("The more dismissive and poorly written my reviews, the more the NME applauded me"). She's good at one-liners, like this one about her girl gang's adventurous, albeit virginal, teens: "We had no sexual experience, but we had Robert Plant." She's interesting on sex, not seeing it as particularly liberating (there may be a reason for that). On the pill: "Women weren't in control of their bodies; the drug was. Taking procreation out of the equation was turning women into sex toys. No one seemed to mind." Hynde's first kiss was with Jackie Wilson, and she once drove David Bowie to lunch Occasionally, however, over-ripeness takes hold. "We were born to be wild. We were stone free. We were stoned" - how very Spinal Tap a sentence. Hynde also "Wordsworths" with the best of them when talking about home: "Autumn, hesitant at first, slate-coloured skies and leaves of scarlet and gold that dropped off the trees and covered the ground like an Indian blanket." She gets away with it, though, painting revealing pictures of her bingo-playing grandma, tomato-growing uncle and puppet-making aunt. Her pre-punk recollections also involve a sensationalism-free account of the shootings at Kent State University, where she was a student. Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter Read more The pace of the book is erratic, though, lagging tediously at times, accelerating wildly at others. It feels like it needed a tougher editor, although who would be tough enough? Hynde's self-analysis, when she allows it to emerge, is compelling, with the final pages on the dying days of the Pretenders, when two of her bandmates actually died, being especially moving. One sentence on the rock star persona, however, lingers long after Hynde's drastically short, post-early 1980s epilogue: "Nobody needs to know you shat your pants 10 minutes before going on... this is not the ticket they paid for." But in books, unlike music, this is often the ticket readers pay for. And when Hynde forgets herself, and obliges, she's golden.

Titel : Roekeloos

Auteur : Chrissie Hynde

Taal : Nederlands

Vertaling : Petra van der Eerden, Astrid Huisman

Uitgeverij : Nijgh & Van Ditmar

Publicatiedatum : October 27, 2015

Pagina's : 336