Turn Out THE Light

British rock star Chrissie Hynde is best known for her dark contralto, a captivating tone which maintains its haunt even as the octaves rise. 

Lead singer and guitarist for the band the Pretenders, Hynde played the University of Maryland’s Ritchie Coliseum in 1981 where I was a freshman working concert security. Just a short walk from my room in the fraternity house, the gig ensured a front row seat for the best campus events, while putting enough cash in my pocket to cover incidentals. “Weed and women” according to my father, who at the time was paying for the rest with long days behind the counter. 

Assigned to the security pit in the front of the stage we were briefed pre-concert on the band’s insistence that no pictures or recordings be taken, a common request before Kyocera put a camera in every pocket nearly 20 years later.  Further we were instructed to interdict any such attempts, which at that time would have only been made by bootleggers and paparazzi.

As the concert progressed, I spied a woman taking pictures with a telephoto lens.  Moving towards her through the pit I extended my arm and waved my index finger, a gesture she replied to using a different finger.  Waving both hands I tried to interdict, until a dull stabbing to my back shoulder caused me to turn around.  Turning towards the stage I met Chrissie, face-to-face and leaning into the pit still jabbing her guitar’s headstock towards me.  Twice she shouted to “leave the girl alone” as if the words were lyrics to the song she was singing, which otherwise went on without disruption.   

Two years later I would meet Ozzy Osbourne behind that same stage, but that’s another story.    

Chrissie’s voice contains a unique timbre which allows a range at depth few others create, leaving her able to inspire conflicting emotions with one sound: optimism and despair, pleasure and pain all contained in the bounds of one of her notes.

The band’s magnum opus was their 1994 album Last of the Independents, music even a Sherwinite can appreciate even though I know independents are not otherwise their thing. Written mostly by Hynde, the album is rock and roll’s sexiest with lyrics to make a Paradise by the Dashboard Lights enthusiast blush.  A Night in My Veins says it all in the title before going on to describe her lust in more vivid detail. And she’s no more virtuous through the album’s remaining cuts. 

But listening last week it was the song Revolution, which rose above the prurient to connect with my current mood. More than just a call for change like the Beatles song of that same name, Hynde’s Revolution is a manifesto pledging allegiance to the cause of change, lest we “die for nothing.”  An outcome I also cannot abide.

Let there be Light

Netflix’s “Cover-Up” is all you need to know about the work of Seymour Hersh, who with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein silhouette the Mount Rushmore of American investigative journalists. His reporting on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam exposed one of our nation's great shames, earning Hersh the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970. The first of more than a dozen awards Hersh would win for exposing somebody's secret.

In March of 1968 American soldiers from Task Force Barker marched into Sơn Mỹ village and murdered an estimated 500 Vietnamese, mostly women and children all of whom were unarmed.  At least 20 of the females were gang raped by the Americans, some of those victims as young as 10.  Eyewitness accounts shared with Hersh told of one woman who was forced to watch her children murdered, before being gang raped and then murdered herself.  Crimes the US Army was forced to admit to after Hersh’s reporting into the three-day-long massacre, which the Army already knew about.

They just didn’t want you to know.      

Most of the victims were killed by gunfire though many died on the edge of a blade, with eyewitnesses claiming some died at its tip. One eyewitness claimed to have watched an American soldier toss an infant in the air before “catching” the child on his bayonet, an atrocity Hersh speaks to in the movie.  The reporting made Hersh the pariah of the Pentagon press, a belligerence he protests early in the documentary pleading, “Don’t hate the messenger” early in the film before later bemoaning the truth that everybody does.

Because even in the darkest corners, not everyone appreciates THE light.    

Happy New Year!