Pretenders' Hynde Calls Lilith Fair 'A Marketing Gimmick'

06/22/1999 4:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

(6/22/99, 1 a.m. PDT) - One of the more surprising inclusions on this summer's Lilith Fair tour is the Pretenders. The group's outspoken frontwoman, Chrissie Hynde, has sneered at the "women in rock" tag in the past.

For example, the No. 1 item on "Chrissie Hynde's Advice To Chick Rockers" list, posted on the Warner Bros. Records website, is: "Don't moan about being a chick, refer to feminism, or complain about sexist discrimination. We've all been thrown down stairs and f--ked about, but no one wants to hear a whining female. Write a loosely disguised song about it instead and clean up ($$$)."

Hynde seemed to be changing her tune with a message that Sarah McLachlan read at the Lilith Fair press conference, which said, "...it just seems like it will be fun to play with a bunch of girls. The guys in my band seem to think that there will be a rich picking for them with a bunch of girls on the bill, what with all the babes hanging out. I told them it was more likely that they were gonna get their balls kicked. So, watch out. The only think I know for sure is that we will be excellent. P.S. This will also give me a chance to test my theory that girls can't play guitar. Anyone wanna prove me wrong?"

Nonetheless, Hynde recently told the Boston Globe that Lilith Fair is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. "It's show business, isn't it? Having all women is kind of a gimmick," she said. "It's entertainment. I don't know if it's supposed to be anything else, but for me, that's what it is."

In other Pretenders news, Viva El Amor!, the band's first studio album since 1995's Last Of The Independents, hits stores today.

Hynde says that she's always been braced for terrible reviews, since she wrote a number of them herself when she was a rock critic in the days before she formed the band.

"I was awful," she says. "I was scathing. I set a precedent that I lived to regret once I was in a band. I was shameless, and I even dumped on Al Green once, and if I don't go to heaven, I know exactly why. I'll never live it down to myself. I still burn with humiliation when I think about it. I don't know why I did that, but, you know, that's just the kind of guy I was."

Look for a Pretenders feature soon on LAUNCH.com. A Sarah McLachlan feature and a transcript of an exclusive LAUNCH.com chat with Al Green are available now.

-- Brian Ives, New York

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