Time the Avenger, Time the Revelator
Recently I went to see The Pretenders play. Well, more like Chrissy Hynde and three guys who are now her band. No offense to the three guys, they are all good musicians and the lead guitar player, James Walbourne, has been with her for years now so you can tell there’s a good relationship between the two of them. The band were working hard for her and the songs.
But they aren’t Martin Chambers, Pete Farndon, or James Honeyman-Scott, the original line-up of a band that was very important to me. Nor are they Malcom Foster and Robbie Macintosh (the line-up I first saw live). Still, it was a good show, they played well, Chrissie Hynde was fairly spry for a 73-year old person, and her voice was as powerful as ever. They leaned into mid-tempo and slower things at the start but the last few songs, encores especially, cooked, bringing out the bangers from the first two records…extra-special set-list vibes doing “Bad Boys Get Spanked” right into “Tattooed Love Boys”.
They finished with “Mystery Achievement”, which legit brought tears to my eyes, as it is by far my favorite Pretenders song (that bass-line! so simple yet so perfect), and I’d made it to the front, right by the stage. I watched it knowing it was likely the last time I’d see her play…regardless of whether she tours again or not, this was a good show to go out on, in terms of seeing a band called The Pretenders live.
I write this in the context of thinking about time, memories, and emotion. I have lots of days behind me, so lots of memories of people, places, and things that interest me. A recent-ish development has been an intensifying connection between memories and emotion.
Music has long been my foremost interest, and most of the musical heroes of my teens and young adulthood, the ones that have stuck most closely and dearly, are now mostly dead, retired, or nearing retirement (or frankly, should retire). Some are still vital and working, like Chrissy Hynde and Robert Smith.
Lately, when I hear songs like Mystery Achievement, I have been getting emotional. I’ve started to connect those songs either to specific moments, or to feelings and general memories of time and place. I remember Mystery Achievement as a song I heard on Philly rock radio, and as soon as I got a tape player (before I got a record player), the 1st two Pretenders albums were among the first things I bought. When I got the record player they were among the first vinyl that I bought. Hearing Mystery Achievement I can still remember being in my childhood bedroom, playing the tape over and over, then the record over and over. I vividly remember seeing them at the Tower Theater, taking my then-girlfriend, who I don’t think like the show very much.
Back maybe 15 years ago I was on a bit of a Pretenders kick (that happens every so often), listening to them a bunch. I have a strong and lasting memory of playing that song driving home from a band rehearsal in Oakland, the quiet 10:30pm traffic in San Francisco on the I80 to US101 interchange getting off at Duboce. I can so clearly see the stretch of road and hear the music playing in my car, wondering If I should extend the drive just so I could repeat the song a couple of more times.
I’ve often wondered if, when they were making that 1st album, if they knew they had a masterpiece on their hands. If when they listened to and approved the final mixes, did they get how they’d made a record that would hold up 50 years later. I’ve made records, and I’ve loved what we produced. But I’ve never made a hit record, a classic. Do you know it when you’re doing it? Did Pete Farndon know when he came up with the Mystery Achievement bass line that as simple as it was that it was an all-time bass riff, destined to be learned by aspiring bassists like me, as we were learning the instrument?
But I’ve digressed.
What I’m mainly on about here is the emotions that have hit me recently when I’ve heard songs that were so important to me long ago, or have watched films that were so resonant with me at certain points. Perhaps that’s a general thing about getting older, especially if you’re in general very sensitive to how art affects you?
I do worry that I mostly seem to get emotional about art from my past, but that’s not entirely the case. I have on occasion gotten emotional watching newer films. The first time it happened was at the end of my first watch of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood in early 2015. He spent about 12 years filming the same cast every few years, to see in real time how kids grow up and how adults age. The best description I heard of the film was Marc Maron saying it’s not so much about how we move through time but about how time moves through us.
By the end, when the boy, now teenager, is just arrived at college, having a great night hanging out with new friends, watching the sunrise, I lost it. Was watching an 18-year old seeing the possibilities of life ahead in the form of a sunrise a melancholy statement for me that I was now mostly past that point, that life was no longer really about possibilities but about managing to stay afloat, stay relevant, stay vital? Since then I’ve radically altered my life in a number of ways…got married, changed jobs a few times, moved country twice.
There are other reasons I think may have in that moment (and since) allowed me to be better able to let my emotions really run with me when art moves me. It’s nothing I want to get too deeply into here, but it has to do with losing three parents, a formative mentor, and a cat all within a few years, then bottling up the emotion over that until it came to a head. After the release, something opened up.
So in moments like getting misty-eyed hearing Mystery Achievement live for likely the last time, I don’t think I’m specifically mourning the song or the band in a nostalgic way. Rather what I think is happening is that I’ve gotten better with connecting the seemingly disparate elements of my life, now that I’ve lived so much of it. Realizing that what happened didn’t just happened, but it happened and it mattered.
Time moves through all of us. Sometimes we can see it and feel it, but mostly I think we just experience it without really dealing with it. Then something triggers a memory or a feeling and there’s an emotion that’s connecting the present to the past, which if you’re lucky you can harness so that you can keep tapping into your mojo and creativity, so whatever future remains can be vital in whatever terms you want to set.
