The Definitive 1000 Songs Of All Time 1955 to 2005: Number 466

Number 466

Pretenders

"Back On The Chain Gang"

(1982)

Genre:New Wave

Hey you .. number 4769846345 !

Listening to this song, reading these words ...
"THE POWERS THAT BE

THAT FORCE US TO LIVE LIKE WE DO

BRING ME TO MY KNEES

WHEN I SEE WHAT THEY'VE DONE TO YOU BUT I'LL DIE AS I STAND HERE TODAY KNOWING THAT DEEP IN MY HEART THEY'LL FALL TO RUIN ONE DAY FOR MAKING US PART"

Made my feel way to much, oh well that is life eh? What is life, if not to feel things we'd rather not, think of things we'd like to forget?
It would be a life without emotion? Unfortunately, life is full of shit we don't like.
World wars, People dying, Poverty, etc etc. We deal with things we have no control over, like death.

Anyways on with the real topic, music.

Pretenders have got to bed one of the best bands from the 80's, in my opinion anyway.
Chrissie Hynde has a voice that could sooth the soul with the right song. Without her the Pretenders would just be 'pretend'. ~ Enjoy ... Tez

Why me, Lord?

Chrissie Hynde took a long, hard road to rock & roll stardom, but when her band, the Pretenders, finally broke through in 1979, they wasted no time, growing from promising newcomers on the British music scene to major international stardom with a pair of smash albums to their credit in a mere three years. But the Pretenders' meteoric rise came to a crashing halt in 1982, when drug abuse claimed the life of guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and forced Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers to dump bassist Pete Farndon, who would also succumb to an OD in April 1983. Hynde was forced by circumstance to reinvent the Pretenders for their third album, 1984's Learning to Crawl, but if the new edition of the group lacked some of the spark of the band that made the first two LPs, through sheer force of will Hynde created a masterpiece. While Hynde hardly held back in her emotionally potent songwriting in the Pretenders' early work, on Learning to Crawl there's a gravity to her lyrics that blended with her tough but wiry melodic sense and streetwise intelligence to create a set of truly remarkable tunes.

what punks?

"Back on the Chain Gang" is a touching tribute to her fallen comrades that still sounds bitterly rueful, "Middle of the Road" is a furious rocker that explores the emotional and physical toll of a musician's life, "Time the Avenger" is a taut, literate examination of a businessman's adulterous relationship, "My City Was Gone" deals with the economic and cultural decay of the Midwest in a manner both pithy and genuinely heartfelt, and "2000 Miles" is a Christmas number that demonstrates Hynde can be warm without getting sappy. As a guitarist, Robbie McIntosh brought a simpler and more elemental style to the Pretenders than Pete Farndon, but his tough, muscular leads fit these songs well, and bassist Malcolm Foster's solid punch fits Chambers' drumming perfectly. Three albums into her recording career, Chrissie Hynde found herself having to put the past to bed and carve out a new beginning for herself with Learning to Crawl, but she pulled it off with a striking mixture of courage, strength, and great rock & roll; with the exception of the instant-classic debut album, it's the Pretenders' finest work. ~ [Mark Deming, All Music Guide]

Back in The Chain Gang

power to the the femes

"Back on the Chain Gang" is a song by The Pretenders from their third studio album Learning to Crawl (1984). It was released as the album's first single in 1982 (see 1982 in music), two years before the album was released, and reached number five on the U.S Billboard Hot 100 as the band's highest charting single, number four on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and number 17 in the United Kingdom.

The song was originally going to be about Ray Davies, leader of the band The Kinks. Hynde and Davies were a couple and had a daughter together, but the meaning of the song changed after James Honeyman-Scott, the Pretenders guitarist, died of a drug overdose at the age of 25 in 1982. The memorable chain-gang chant heard during the chorus of the song echoes a similar chant on Sam Cooke's song "Chain Gang." ~ [Source:Wikipedia]

For Sam Cooke see Number 481

What does Rolling Gnome think of Pretenders, hmmm?

This is an album about life and death and love and transcendence–subjects not much discussed on the brave new dance floor these days–and for Chrissie Hynde and her battered band, it is a triumph of art over adversity. To say that Learning to Crawl reconfirms Hynde as the most forceful female presence in rock already demeans her achievement: The matter of gender aside, she is the most unaffectedly personal of contemporary singer/songwriters, and surely the most astringently intimate lyricist working within a real rock & roll context. And if this third Pretenders album lacks the sense of revelation, of a new voice being heard, that so distinguished the group's first LP, the insights here are deeper, the wisdom harder won. ~ [Source:Rolling Stone - Kurt Loder, 1984]

Rolling Stone magazine deemed their '466th Song of all Time' was "Runaway" by Del Shannon. Del Shannon has appeared in The Definitive 1000 @ Number 813