Like her, I would have earned rent money as a rock journalist.

What if Chrissie Hynde had drawn me out of my bookish shell and lured me to London? Sharing a tiny Soho apartment, we’d have spent our days at the Tate Gallery and our nights playing in grungy basement clubs. Had we met, we might have started a band - and maybe even a rock ’n’ roll romance. Despite my bespectacled, somber appearance, I was a drummer. She was from a big city and I was from a small town, and an art major might have found an English and anthropology major boring company. I would have been totally smitten by her industrial bad-girl look, though we wouldn’t have had much in common. If only I had stayed 10 minutes longer in the library one day or gone through a cafeteria line a half-hour earlier, my life might have taken a completely different direction. That’s when Hynde was there, too - though we never met. This sort of afternoon always takes me back to my undergraduate days at Kent State in the late 1960s. Thirty years later, she is an internationally respected performer and The Pretenders is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I’m trying to grade midterms, but it’s hard to concentrate because I’m thinking about Chrissie Hynde.īorn in Akron, Hynde graduated from Firestone High and studied art at Kent State before moving to London and eventually forming The Pretenders. It’s a sunny afternoon, and I’m sitting in an outdoor plaza at the small Maryland college where I teach.

The pretenders back to ohio