Waxing Nostalgic: The Pretenders, “Tattooed Love Boys”

By Jeffery X Martin

We have to talk about sex. I know this makes some folks uncomfortable. I’ll try to be gentle. However, if you are, or plan on, becoming a regular reader of this column (and golly, I hope you do), please realize this is going to happen once in a while. I write about music from the late Seventies and all throughout the Eighties. Those were formative years for me. Music is intertwined with those emotions and those memories. I would be surprised if the same were not true for you (and golly, I hope it is).

For instance: in the year 1980, I was eleven. Sweet, innocent, a little on the chubby side and completely unprepared for what was going to happen when she walked into my life. This woman would both destroy me and make me feel alive. She made me feel things . . . all the things. I had to look up words and ask other people—older people—what her phrases meant.

I’m talking about Chrissie Hynde.

She was the first woman I ever saw that made me think, “Oh, she’s dirty.” By association, I was probably dirty, too. And I wasn’t even sure what all that dirtiness entailed. Chrissie didn’t sing pretty. She wasn’t singing nice words about nice things. She was not Debby Boone. Chrissie Hynde could shove Debby Boone into a campfire, cook her through, and eat her bones like tortilla strips. No, Chrissie was something new. Chrissie was something to be reckoned with.

“Brass in Pocket” quickly took over the airwaves, and MTV was running the video into the ground. That was okay with me. I sure liked the last shot of that clip, sad Chrissie with far too much black eye shadow, staring longingly into the distance. She was special, all right, so special. That tune didn’t hook me, though. Nope, I was secretly enamored with a song called “Tattooed Love Boys.”

Initially, I was drawn to that crazy, staggered stutter-step rhythm, the song defibrillating itself every few seconds. It was confusing, and exciting, like the first time you fully comprehend the feeling of warm underwear, straight from the dryer. The jangling guitars, so close to the heaven of Rickenbackers, the bass up loud in the mix and the cymbals, crisp and clear; it was the musical equivalent of a rough trade pulp novel from the Fifties. In a year full of The Captain & Tennille, “Tattooed Love Boys” was a leather fist enema.

And those things Chrissie said, those things I only understood on a basic level, a level I didn’t know I had! She sang, “I shot my mouth off and he showed me what that hole was for.” What hole? That hole? I couldn’t believe that meant what I thought it meant. Hell, I didn’t know you could actually do what I thought it meant without special permission from Jesus’s lawyer.

Thanks to my odd spiritual upbringing, I thought girls hated sex. Suddenly, here was Chrissie Hynde with her raccoon eyes and her leather and her electric guitar and things were never quite the same. The closest repression and inhibition got to Chrissie Hynde was under the heels of her big black boots.

Pat Benatar may have been the rock and roll cover girl in 1980, but she was too nice. She had too much range, her voice was too sweet. You could buy her a milkshake and get a peck on the cheek.

Chrissie seemed like hot whiskey and a rough handie with a studded glove in a sticky, cramped restroom stall.

It was at that point, and with this song, that I got a glimpse at the darker side of manhood. You know. The good stuff. The real stuff people want to grow up for. I had never really pondered it before. I understood getting a job and making money, maybe buying a house, all that Great American Dream shit. Chrissie, and “Tattooed Love Boys,” helped identify a serious hole in my thinking (namely that girls with lots of black eye makeup are incredibly hot) and they showed me what that hole was for.