Pretenders' Hynde is still a hippie at heart

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In 1984, at the peak of her fame, Chrissie Hynde hinted that she wanted out of the music-biz rat race.

"I'm going home, I'm tired as hell/I'm not the cat I used to be/ I got a kid, I'm 33," she sang in "Middle of the Road."

Twenty-two years later, the Pretenders queenpin still hasn't quite retired, but she keeps retreating farther and farther from the spotlight. She has released only two albums in the last 10 years, the last in 2002, and she has no plans to make another.

"I'm gonna be 55 this year. I don't have that much time left to worry about (expletive) ... like that," she says. "I'd rather hang out and dig walking while I can still walk. To be a driven, ambitious artist would be like going to work and punching the clock, you know?"

Sitting in an empty restaurant at the Doubletree Guest Suites, she's polite but aloof. She fields questions about the recently released five-disc retrospective "Pirate Radio" with some variation of "I don't know" or "I don't care" and then shoots a glare that implies, "Next question."

But gradually, she opens up, especially when the topic turns to her longtime devotion to vegetarianism.

She's even more talkative about the Pretenders' induction last year into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She calls it a "bogus" honor, a sentiment that covers all awards, she says.

"I didn't want to go, and I felt kind of hypocritical going. But it meant a lot to my parents. It wasn't worth it to me to say, 'I'm not going,' and upset them, because I haven't been able to do a lot for them since I moved out of Ohio more than 30 years ago," she says.

"It's a validation from the straight, industry world. But to the rock world, it doesn't mean anything. I got in a band so I wouldn't have to do (expletive) ... like that. I'm an old hippie. I still see things as the straights versus the 'heads.' "

Hippie Chrissie grew up in Akron, Ohio, and attended Kent State University, where she witnessed the 1970 National Guard shootings of four students, a subject she declines to talk about today.

She moved to London in 1973 and stumbled into a job as a music writer at the influential weekly New Musical Express. For her first article, she dressed as a dominatrix and hung upside down while being photographed by Roxy Music keyboardist Brian Eno.

"That was my idea, because I had no idea how to interview him. I wasn't really a journalist. Somebody offered me a job at this far- out paper, and I took it to pay the rent. I was just trying to get by."

Within a few years, she'd quit NME and formed the Pretenders, whose self-titled 1979 album stands as one of the greatest debuts in rock history. The punk movement influenced her tough, unorthodox songs, and she hung out with the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Yet she was never beholden to the punk party line.

"The punk scene in London hated the hippies and railed against them," she says. "But they didn't have the days I did in Akron, Ohio, when the hippie thing was so anti-establishment and so great. And to me, that's what punk was, too. There was a common thread between the two: the idea of let's take from the rich and give to the poor."

By 1983, the Pretenders were reeling from the back-to-back heroin- related deaths of guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon. Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers hired new members and racked up more hits: "Middle of the Road," "Back on the Chain Gang" and "Don't Get Me Wrong."

But their albums slowed to a trickle in the late '80s, as Hynde focused on raising two daughters from her relationships with the Kinks' Ray Davies and Simple Minds' Jim Kerr.

Along the way, she found a happy work-life balance, performing when she felt like it but mostly staying out of the public eye and refusing to read her own press.

"I don't want to worry about what people think of me, because I don't want to give myself cancer, you know?" she says. "When I hear words like 'icon' and 'legend,' I squirm. Those words just mean you've been in the game for 30 years and haven't conked it yet. You haven't died."