Hijack my world at night

The Pretenders at Bimbo's, Oct. 6 2023

San Francisco is famously not so hot right now, and I mean that literally: As Mark Twain once said, the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco, and even now, in the middle of the hottest year on record, the temperature seldom rises above 80 degrees.

Sometimes in October, though, the weather will suddenly warm up, and on those nights this whole city gets softer and more beautiful, everyone spills out on the streets, and it's like we're on another planet. People hang out in bars or on their porches to watch the sky turn to flame as the sun goes down behind the Golden Gate…and in North Beach, which is already tilted downhill towards the Bay, a thick smell of garlic and coffee and fresh bread is painted over the atmosphere like butter on a baguette.

Honestly, to be in North Beach on nights like that is to be in a place that’s been blessed by a merciful God, and to be at Bimbo's, the nearly one hundred-year-old nightclub on the corner of Greenwich and Columbus, is to compound the blessing. 

Besides, nowhere on earth reminds me so much of my ecstatic punk rock youth as North Beach, and Bimbos, not to mention the music of the Pretenders, who were playing their last Friday.

The Pretenders, with its roots in the 1970s and its super poppy hits, may not quite clock as punk rock with the younger set, but for those of who remember them when they first came out in 1978, the connection is clear. Forget the impossibly gorgeous Debbie Harry, or the unattainably bohemian Patti Smith: if you were the kind of girl who spoke up in class and had the kind of face that just couldn't hide your contempt when people say stupid things; if boys thought you were intimidating and bitchy simply because you didn't wear a baby blue angora sweater to school and your hair wasn't blonde and fluffy -  if you were me, in other words - then Chrissie Hynde was the first and only female-identified person you might ever have seen in public whom you could relate to.  

And it's very possible she still is. I have a broken foot, but I was determined to go anyway, and Bimbos, being the old fashioned and chivalrous club that it is, made it easy for me. It's the kind of club where they have a lady in the bathroom handing out breath mints, a spritz of cologne, and tampons, and they have an ADA table, too, so there I was when the Pretenders took the stage.

You know how bands, like baseball players, now have walk-on music? The Pretenders came out to the song "Ace of Spades" by Motorhead, and it was a harbinger. The 90-minute set was made up almost entirely of newer Pretenders songs I wasn't familiar with, and they were all played in that Motorhead-mode, i.e. hard, fast, metallic, and about five times faster than anything you've heard on the radio lately. These songs stitched together some misconceptions one may have about the relationship between punk and metal (for instance, that the two genres have one), and also about classic rock: back in the day, they seemed like they had nothing in common, but from a distance they are more or less the same.

My daughter once called everything I listen to - R.E.M, the Afghan Whigs, the Replacements, you name it -- "Hippie Music" and when I asked her why she said, 'Because it has guitars in it." The Pretenders earlier songs all jangle like that, but they are disconnected from all of those genres because of Hynde's distinctive voice and because her songs are just so stellar. I hate to put it this way because I hate superlatives, but she may well be the best rock singer ever.  And the tunes, too: it occurred to me during the encore that "Back on the Chain Gang" was one of the just plain prettiest songs ever written.  

But let's not get carried away. And to be clear, this show was not even about reprising those amazing songs from the first two albums. It was a show about the present, and it represented whatever the fuck its leader wanted it to represent, and that was a band that shredded like the MC5. It’s probable that’s what she always wanted to represent, but unfortunately, her original band contained two junkies and a string of incredible songs that sounded like Dusty Springfield crossed with the Kinks. In fact, the only thing punk rock about Chrissie Hynde at that time was her extremely powerful qi – which is still very much intact, by the way. The first words out of her mouth at Bimbo’s? "Jesus, all those fucking phones. Why don't you all just stick them up your asses?”

Recently, I asked my students about how they experienced live music. I wanted to know what they were getting out of spending enormous amounts to see their favorite acts – Beyonce, Taylor, Drake and so on – in enormous arenas. They weren’t very informative, but one of them told me that she often felt, as she got ready to go see bands, that she was making for herself experience that she would look back on later with so much fondness, a kind of reverse nostalgia, if you will. Going to Bimbo’s to see the Pretenders was real nostalgia for me, it tapped on memory of the life that I used to lead, when going out was still fun and exciting and the artists I saw provided me with some kind of catharsis. Indeed, minus the i-phones held aloft throughout and the Ubers circling the club like sharks when we left, the whole experience reminded me of a kinder, gentler world: to a place in the past we’ve been cast out of, in fact.

She hijacked us, though. At least for a little while. My sister and I took a good old fashioned yellow cab home from Bimbo’s, and as it climbed the hill over Chinatown, we opened the windows and let the warm wind stream in. Now we’re back in the fight, I guess. Back on the chain gang.