I’ve been working on the guitar parts for “Kid” by the Pretenders. I’m what I’d call a “good shitty guitar player,” having stuck with it since fourteen. The song has an exceptionally pretty solo penned by James Honeyman-Scott. Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr incorporated it into his warmup routine prior to every show. The song has been embedded in my psyche since 1980. It’s hard to describe something like that once it takes hold. Chrissie Hynde wrote the tune as reflection of her musical tastes veering from punk to pop. It’s about a child who discovers that his mother is a prostitute. “Kid, what changed your mood? / You got all sad, so I feel sad too.” You don’t need the prostitute detail for the song to connect and I didn’t discover it until recently. It could be about any child sold short by the adult world. “You look so small, you’ve gone so quiet.” Simple heartbreak in any context. Disappoint a kid at your own peril; there’s no coming back. The act is as lasting as youth is fleeting.
Figuring out how to play a bit of music is like learning the secret behind a good parlor trick. Once your brain and fingers lock in to the motor-memory something strange happens. The whole of it disappears and it’s no longer magic but repetition and mastery. The spell fades as its parts are dissected. The same can be said about discovering the prostitution angle in the lyrics decades later. It’s unnecessary additional information. Mishearing lyrics can have this effect, too. Sometimes you like the ones you invented much better. Ultimately nothing fucks it up like the kind of pretense in this paragraph.
Honeyman-Scott didn’t stick around too long after laying down that solo in 1979. Three years later the band fired bass player Pete Farndon over his heroin habit. Two days later Honeyman-Scott died of heart failure attributed to cocaine intolerance. One year later Farndon himself overdosed. This, in the business, is what’s known as a “bad streak.” Despite losing two anchors Chrissie Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers have motored on all these years. And while he may not know it, posthumously or otherwise, James Honeyman-Scott’s tasteful arrangements have played on too, through the fingers of a thousand guitar players.
Post a Comment