Backstage at the 23rd annual Farm Aid concert, the sound of Kenny Chesney’s voice filled the air. Chrissie Hynde cursed at her cellphone, pulled off her boots and curled up on a couch, following a sundown set by the latest configuration of her band, the Pretenders.
In typically ornery fashion, the majority of songs they performed came from an album that was weeks away from reaching stores: Break Up the Concrete, the first Pretenders album in six years (which will be released tomorrow on Shangri-La Music; that night, the band will perform at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan).
“Ambition is not my middle name,” Hynde said. “But I don’t care — I’m up to my eyeballs most of the time goofing off. I’m kind of a hippie, so the idea was not to have goals or anything. Just moving around and observing and living life; that’s necessary before you can make a record anyway.”
Sipping a nonalcoholic beer and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, Hynde, 57, remains as rail thin as she was almost three decades ago, when the Pretenders’ self-titled debut album perfectly melded punk energy with British Invasion style and hooks. She now allows some gray streaks to show through her trademark black bangs, but with her makeup smeared from the heat of the late-afternoon stage, she still looked every bit the rock legend.
Discussing Concrete, though, it becomes clear that Hynde’s recent thoughts have largely been shaped by a traditional factor: spending more time in her hometown, Akron, Ohio. Like the rest of the Rust Belt, Akron (also the birthplace of eccentrics like the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, the country outlaw David Allen Coe and the garage rockers the Black Keys) has been hit hard for decades; unemployment hovers well above the national average, and only one rubber manufacturer remains in the former Rubber Capital of the World.
Hynde might seem an unlikely cheerleader. She moved to London, her primary residence, in the early 1970s and only recently took an apartment in Akron. But she has written about her hometown in songs like My City Was Gone, and it offers an opportunity to champion causes like mass transit and urban renewal.
“My parents are really old now, and I want to be around more,” she said. “I’m trying to discover my own relationship to Akron — there’s a resonance you get when you go back to the place you were born.”
Most notably, last year she opened a vegan restaurant in Akron called the VegiTerranean. Hynde is an animal rights activist and has been arrested several times in protests (once for slashing leather products in a Gap store in Manhattan). At Farm Aid, she wore a T-shirt reading “Tax Meat” and called for a day when “all McDonald’s and slaughterhouses are burned to the ground” — presumably not a sentiment shared by the cattle farmers present.
“There wasn’t one vegetarian restaurant in Akron, so I said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and it’s just been a phenomenon,” she said. She described its “international flavor, right down to the tea bag in the pot”; at its opening, she personally served veggie burgers to police officers.
“Everybody told me, ‘Don’t do it, it will not work,’” she said of the restaurant. “But I had to do it anyway, because I had to have somewhere I could eat. And more than the music, it’s what I’m about. To me, the music is a vehicle so I can have a voice.
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