HYNDE-SIGHT FROM ROCK’S TOP SPITFIRE

Chrissie Hynde was trying gamely to get through the interview. But she was so tired as she sat in a hotel room after a concert at the Summit Arena here that she had to apologize a couple of times for letting her attention wander. It was already past 1 a.m. and there was still a six-hour bus ride to New Orleans before she could really get some rest.

But Hynde snapped to attention when asked about her letter in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. It’s a biting reply to the magazine’s grouchy review of the Pretenders’ recent “Get Close” album.

“I’m curious to read it because it must have even been hard for them to (decipher) the words,” said Hynde, who was a rock journalist briefly before starting the Pretenders in 1979 and now is widely regarded as the most compelling female singer in rock. “I wrote it real quickly on the back of hotel stationery, then folded it all up and jammed it into this envelope.

“Later, I thought to myself that there was no way they could take the letter seriously. It looked like a crank, because nobody with any self-esteem would send this thing that looked like it had gotten caught in the garbage disposal.”

Hynde drafted the letter because she was upset by the reviewer’s suggestion that she was solely responsible for the band’s music and direction. Her letter ended with the declaration, “. . . I thought it was unfair to the others who made the record with me that you turned the thing into the Chrissie Hynde show.”

But it may be hard to convince a few former Pretenders that Hynde isn’t the whole show.

This is a group that has gone through an unusual number of personnel shifts. Co-founder James Honeyman-Scott died of a drug overdose in 1982 and a second member, bassist Pete Farndon, was kicked out of the group shortly before he, too, overdosed.

When the Pretenders resumed touring in 1984, only drummer Martin Chambers of the original members was by her side. They were augmented by guitarist Robbie McIntosh and bassist Malcolm Foster. A keyboardist, Rupert Black, was subsequently added.

When the band launched its current U.S. tour last month, however, only McIntosh remained. The others had been replaced by three Americans: drummer Blair Cunningham, bassist T. M. Stevens and keyboardist Bernie Worrell.

Less than a week into the tour (which includes stops Thursday at the San Diego Sports Arena and Saturday at the Los Angeles Sports Arena), more changes were made. Worrell and Stevens were out, and Foster and Black were back in.

Hynde took a deep breath when the point of the “Chrissie Hynde Show” came up.

“All right,” she began. “The undeniable fact is I am, in most people’s eyes, the indispensable one, but that doesn’t mean only my thoughts go into the music. Whoever steps in the studio or on stage with me contributes to a different feel. . . . They add or subtract a flavoring. And I do respond to the people around me. For instance, I still consult Jimmy (Honeyman-Scott) all the time.

“I don’t mean like I have a seance or something, but I do feel he created the band with me and I think back to the goals (we had) when problems come up. I just think, ‘Now, what would Jimmy have thought in this situation?’ and the answer becomes real clear to me. And I follow through. It might be awkward, it might cause me some sleepless nights. But it’s even worse to go through with something you know is wrong.”

Hynde has a reputation as a spitfire. An Ohio native who moved to England in the early ‘70s to pursue her rock dreams, she gained a reputation on the scene there as a tough, no-nonsense and ambitious person.

Part of her strength as a singer is the tension between her sweet seductiveness on romantic tunes and her biting, sarcastic edge on harsher ones. That style has won her both critical and popular support. “Get Close,” the group’s fourth album, is gold--the band’s fourth to reach at least the 500,000 sales plateau.

In her early days with the band, she was known to kick at photographers if they got too close to her and yell at security guards if they were rude to fans. Her lyrics, too, frequently reflect extreme relationships.

Asked during a 1980 interview about the line “Lust turns to anger / A kiss to a slug,” she replied:

“That attitude--’lust turns to anger’--is real common. Well, maybe it’s not common to other people, but it has been damn common in my life, among the people I’ve known and seen.”

But Hynde is 35 now and married (to singer Jim Kerr, leader of the Scottish band Simple Minds). She has two daughters, 4 and 2, and there is an increasing tenderness in her lyrics.

Still, on stage the wildcat can resurface. Midway through the concert here, Hynde was angered when security guards refused to let fans crowd about the front edge of the stage. She finally snapped at the guards to leave the fans alone, vowing that she would accept responsibility. “If anyone gets hurt, they can sue me,” she said.

When one of the guards shouted to her that some of the fans in the front row were complaining about their view being blocked, she declared into the microphone, “Well, I’ll just give the people sitting down their money back--if that’s what they want.”

About the incident, Hynde later explained: “I don’t see that big a change in my feelings. I think it just took a while for people to catch on to that (softer) side of the music. On the first album, for instance, we had some softer material . . . songs like ‘Lovers of Today’ and ‘Stop Your Sobbing.’

“I might try to be a little more sensitive now, but I’m not going to take crap from somebody just because I am 35. If someone gets out of line, they are going to hear about it.”

Hynde applied that same resolve to the band membership.

After a brief pause, she said, “I don’t really want to go into it, but I guess I owe people some sort of explanation because I don’t want it to look like I am just sorta flaky.

“Martin’s (Chambers, the original drummer) great strength is his showmanship and I miss him like crazy on stage because he had this great Keith Moon-like manner and I had a horrible time when we did decide to replace him.

“But I wanted a new feel in the band, to move it slightly in a more (soulful, R&B; direction) and we started working in New York with some other musicians. Things worked great in the studio and when it was time to go on the road, we said, ‘OK, let’s all go.’ ”

The exhilaration didn’t last long.

After the first night of the tour, she realized things weren’t right. “I came off stage in the worst depression I have ever been in after a show. The problem, basically, was the Pretenders didn’t feel like my English rock ‘n’ roll band anymore. It was a subtle thing, musically, culturally, an attitude that flavors the whole evening. A lot of it has to do with humor . . . a very idiosyncratic thing that is hard to define.”

After a couple more nights, she sat down with her manager, Dave Hill, and other close friends and decided to make the move.

“The whole thing blew my mind,” she said. “We had changed the band and here we were doing it again. This is no criticism against them as musicians. They are brilliant. We had already made a video with the band, done photo sessions. There are now $30,000 worth of tour programs sitting in a warehouse because we can’t use them.”

Hynde comes across as thoughtful, opinionated and honest--someone who works hard against being swallowed up by an image. Much like John Lennon during the final years of his life, she strives to protect her normalcy.

Leaning back on a sofa, she said: “One way I try to keep a balance is not to think about how other people see me. I will never watch one of my (television) interviews and I rarely read interviews I’ve done. I try to, but after about a paragraph I just can’t handle it.

“I think a lot of people (in this business) become self-conscious because they do read their press and watch themselves on television and they begin to play down the things that embarrass them or don’t seem cool. That’s where they get hung up in a sort of image.

“If I watched or read every interview I had done, I would walk out of this hotel . . . a changed person. I would be walking differently. I would be talking differently. I would try to knock out all the things I didn’t like about the way I acted. So I just avoid seeing me from those eyes.”

One way she tries to protect her normalcy is to take her daughters on the road with her.

“When I had (the first baby) a lot of people said, ‘You are going to ruin your career,’ which is funny because the whole reason I got into rock ‘n’ roll was so that I didn’t have to have a ‘career.’ The idea of having a career was something associated with the straight world, which I didn’t want to enter. Rock ‘n’ roll was just fun. I never thought of it as a career.

“But as soon as the band got successful, I sort of became a career girl unwittingly. All of a sudden people were patting me on the back, saying, ‘Hey, we love you . . . where is the next album?’ Stuff like that. It was all too smooth. It wasn’t like there was any of the old outlaw or renegade spirit of rock any more.

“So, I think there was a subconscious thing like, ‘Let me throw this thing off the rail (by having a baby) and then I will have to struggle again to get it back on track. I had never even held a baby before I had one. But it was a perfectly natural transition. After all, you have nine months to prepare for it.”

Hynde leaned forward on the sofa and paused.

“You know, there used to be a lot of rules about rock ‘n’ roll. . . . You had to be a certain age, a certain sex, lead a certain kind of life style. But a lot of that has changed.

“I think one of the people who showed that you could do things your own way was Lennon. . . . That was something when he took five years off and then came back with a song like ‘Woman,’ which I think was one of the best things he ever wrote.

“He was someone in particular who impressed me because the Beatles were the first band I loved. I can remember when they first came along. He was probably 22 and I was 14 or something. We sort of grew up with him and he matured. He remained an artist. He showed that a lot of those old rules were out of date. He showed that you don’t have to stop being a person to be a rock star.”