It’s 1973. Twenty-two year old Chrissie Hynde is restless. Like so many of us in her age range, she’s looking to move out her childhood hometown. She takes her move to another level, moving from Akron, Ohio to London, England. Hynde wants to get into the music business so she gets a job at NME music magazine. Eventually, she tried to form a band. After a few failures, she met bassist Pete Farndon. They found guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and drummer Martin Chambers. The Pretenders were born.

Their influences included the punk band Sex Pistols and the British Invasion band The Kinks. Their sound was a combination of punk, rock and pop music. By 1980, they had released their first self-titled album which included classic hits, “Stop Your Sobbing” “Kid” and “Brass in Pocket.” The album is still considered one of the all-time great first records. The Pretenders were off and running.

By 1983, both Honeyman-Scott and Farndon were dead of drug overdoses. If it wasn’t already, The Pretenders were now Chrissie Hynde’s band.

It’s now forty years since that first album. The band has gone through many personnel changes. Hynde has become a major star in the world of music. She’s continued with the group as well as working on solo projects and tours. In 2020, it’s time for The Pretenders to release an new album. “Hate For Sale” is the eleventh of their career and features original drummer Martin Chambers. The other band personnel are bassist Nick Wilkinson and guitarist James Walbourne, who has writing credits along with Hynde on all ten tunes.

From the first song on the album, the title track of “Hate For Sale”, you’re hit with the familiar Pretenders sound. You hear the guitar that you remember from their earliest records. The vocals from Hynde haven’t changed at all. Her voice, at age 68, is still strong and powerful. If you didn’t know better, you’d think you were hearing a record from 1980 instead 2020. The same formula that worked so well four decades ago, still works today.

The ten songs on the album takes up a total of thirty-one minutes. None of them lasting as long as four minutes. It’s almost like the old days of the British Invasion when all the singles were made to play on AM radio.

In a year when everything in life has changed, one constant that has stayed the same is the music of The Pretenders. There’s nothing wrong with that….nothing at all.

Related Post: Who is the biggest bad ass chick in music?

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Fourteen years after The West Wing ended its seven-season run on NBC-TV, the hit series looks especially inviting now as we endure its antithesis in real life.

I recently watched all 156 episodes on Netflix. I’m not sure why I didn’t catch The West Wing the first time around but was glad to be watching its idealistic take on Washington now. A dose of optimism is welcome these days.

We have become so jaded under Donald Trump, we’ve nearly stopped expecting a chief executive like Jed Bartlet, The West Wing’s fictional president. He is competent, kind, moral, smart, and trying to do his best for all citizens — the opposite of Trump on every count.

Watching The West Wing, I decided it is an ideal program to stream now. During these last few months, as we’re battling a virus that the president either denies or suggests ingesting a poison to cure, we need something to restore hope in our leaders. Yeah, The West Wing is fiction, but I don’t want to think that we’re so far gone that competent, principled government is impossible.

Democrats and Republicans talk and work together on The West Wing. Republicans, who have control of Congress, are mostly honorable. Coping with his daughter’s kidnapping, Bartlet, a Democrat, even invokes the 25th amendment so that he can temporarily turn over the Oval Office to the Speaker of the House, a Republican. After Bartlet’s daughter is rescued, the Speaker gives back control.

Bills are passed. Sometimes Democrats win, sometimes not, but there isn’t continuous gridlock.

The West Wing isn’t impeccable, especially by 2020 standards. Its main Black character, Charlie Young, is in a helping role as the president’s personal aide for most of the series. Except for press secretary C. J. Cregg, female characters are on the periphery in the early seasons, and Margaret and Donna, the assistants to the chief of staff and the deputy chief of staff, are portrayed as flaky.

Maybe The West Wing’s encouraging view of what our national politics could be is not realistic, maybe we’re too polarized to climb out of the mess, but it sure is fun to watch and to wish for a federal government like that.

Part of The West Wing’s vision materialized in real life. The show went off the air in 2006, two years before Barack Obama’s first victory, with the election of a young, charismatic president of color. Matthew Santos was a Latino who resisted pandering to Latino voters. He would be a president of all the people.

We don’t know how much Santos succeeded. Maybe the country wasn’t ready for a uniter like Matthew Santos or Barack Obama. Obama’s election resulted in greater gridlock as Republicans opposed his every move. Look what followed Obama.

Joe Biden is not a transformative politician like Santos and Obama, nor an intellect like Jed Bartlet. But like them, he has decency. The American people are entitled to ask for more, but I’ll take decency for now and hope that we will see leadership, vision, caring, and courage again.

*****

ANTI-TRUMP COMMENTS: 124TH IN AN ONGOING SERIES

“Trump remains the first president in modern polling never to achieve majority approval for his work in office, with the lowest career average on record.”

— Yahoo News

Here’s another sample from “The *More or Less* Definitive Guide to Self-Care,” which I’ve featured in several recent posts. Appropriately for a little Sunday writing session, I found “The Ten Commandments for Having a Body.” Slightly condensed from Anna Borges’ book, they are:

“1. All bodies are good, including yours.

2. You’re not required to always like your body, but you should never punish it.

3. Don’t say anything about your body that you wouldn’t say about your best friend’s.”

“4. Take care of your health out of self-respect, not obligation, and do it in a way you actually enjoy.”

“5. Don’t feel pressured to subscribe to any single body ideology or social ‘movement.'” (Hmm… even this one, I suppose. It goes on here, but let’s not bother.)

“6. Tend to aches and pains…. Don’t deny yourself relief.”

“7. Do what you need to stop body-checking and scrutinizing. You don’t have to keep track of numbers.” (Oh, that sort of body-checking… my mind is back on the hockey sense, one player knocking into another. Sometimes following all the numbers can feel like that.)

“8. Don’t put off life until your body looks a certain way — take that vacation, make that move, buy that outfit.” (Well, this book was published in 2019, but still! Don’t put off what isn’t canceled.)

“9. Forgive yourself for the times you’re not immune to the pressures society places on your body.”

“10. Your body will change, so the respect you cultivate for it can’t be conditional.”

There they are, edited for length to rest my eyes and make sure I have time to take my afternoon walk. Look after yourselves, bodies and all, readers.

Margaret Serious has a page on Facebook. 

About a month and a half ago the producer of my radio show BONNIE’S EYE on 95.1 FM Chicago, Drewsean Williams called me excited about a documentary he had heard about called A Most Beautiful Thing: The True Story of America’s First All-Black High School Rowing Team.  He wanted me to interview the author of the book Arshay Cooper and the director and producer of the documentary Mary Mazzio.  My first response was okay that sounds interesting but what is the real hook?  He said the team is from the west side of Chicago and went to Manley high school in the ’90s.  That is a hook if I ever heard one.  We were sent a link to view the documentary and a copy of the book.  Both are powerful pieces of work that gives you an up-close and personal side to these young men who had to cross several gang lines to get to school, who didn’t really like each other but grew to become family and find hope where there may not have been any.

Arshay Cooper, the team captain described his life before rowing growing up on the west side and when Michael Jordan was God. His mother was a drug addict and he did not have a relationship with his dad.  School was rough and food was short in supply. “There were four liquor stores that locked down the corner of my block and it was painful. And I had a teacher that told me I was not going to live to see eighteen because I missed so many days of school, but the teachers didn’t know how life was for me at home. My brothers were in gangs.  I knew I didn’t want to do that. You know, and I thought about it every day because I wanted the protection, but I just decided not to.  And so that was every day in the city of Chicago until my mother came home (from rehab) and I joined this amazing sport.”

The book by Arshay Cooper and documentary, narrated by the Academy-Award/Grammy-winning artist, Common; executive-produced by NBA Stars Grant Hill and Dwyane Wade along with Grammy-award winning producer 9th Wonder; and directed by award-winning filmmaker (and Olympic rower) Mary Mazzio, takes you on the journey of these young men, Arshay, Preston, Alvin, Elliot, Pookie G, Malcolm, and Josh, some of them sons of drug dealers, drug addicts, and prostitutes, but all sons of the west side, who had never seen a rowboat let alone knew how to swim, but chose to try something different.  We grow to know them, root for them, be proud of them, and even shed a tear for them. 

Where are they now?  You will find out when you watch the documentary and/or read the book.  The documentary was scheduled to be released in theaters in March, but COVID-19 changed that, however, one COVID won’t stop this film. It will be released for streaming on July 31^st on Comcast Xfinity, September 1^st on NBC Peacock and Amazon later in the year.

Sit down with your children and watch this film and give them the book.  They will be able to relate to it and the events of today and it is a great conversation starter.  For more information visit https://www.amostbeautifulthing.com/

I give the book and the documentary, A Most Beautiful Thing 5 winks of the EYE!

 Until next time, keep your EYE to the sky!