The Pretenders – Get Close

Learning To Crawl was Chrissie Hynde with only Martin Chambers remaining from the original Pretenders – and two years later, Get Close was just Chrissie, three new band members and a boatload of session players. That’s usually a recipe for disastrous bland, but in this case, it actually turned up a pretty good record.

The sound is a little bit too echo-ey for my current tastes, but very much of its time, and for 1986, the album is still refreshingly rock and roll with some funk flavoring (especially “How Much Did You Get For Your Soul”) at a time when programmed synths had taken over everything. It’s noisy, energetic rock, eight songs by Chrissie, two by other writers and a Hendrix cover.

Of course, “Don’t Get Me Wrong” was a huge hit, and remains an incredible favorite for me. That the video invoked “The Avengers” did it no harm in my view – in fact, it remains a really sexy, fun video that strongly reminds me of those days – but it’s also a song that stands strongly alone.

(As I’m listening to it again here on vinyl, I realize that a lot of my experience of the sound of the album was from the tracks that were on my cassette mix tapes, one of which must have had a little bit of tape stretch because there are some audio artifacts I recall well that aren’t really there on the LP.)

God, 1986. Married for a couple of years, happily esconced in a two-story apartment in a lovely old Victorian house on the near north side of Syracuse, living a life filled with good work and a lot of good play. We would waste away our weekends reading comic books, hitting up record stores and vintage stores, going to the symphony (we had season tickets!). If we got up early on Saturday we’d go to the Regional Market. In the nights we’d laze about on the couch together, reading and listening to our growing CD collection, as well as all this vinyl. So young, so in love. Of course, your twenties are also a time of incredible stress as you have to try to figure it all out – how to be an adult, how to get it all done, what to do next. How to become what you think you should be. By 1986 I had already decided that I was going to graduate school, but had deferred it by a year both to save up more money and to accommodate a change in my boss’s life so she could later accommodate this change in mine. It worked out well.

So when this album came out, we knew the future was going to somehow be very different, but it would be the next year before I would start grad school and three years before I’d be done and change our lives forever. In my memory, this is just an incredibly sweet little time in our lives – just the two of us, super in love, making enough to enjoy life a little. I look at pictures from back then: we were so cute.

I can listen to this album in the now, but it will always take me back a little bit to then.