I love The Pretenders!

I love The Pretenders!  So much energy.  I can’t believe that I didn’t really notice this group until just recently.  My wife was playing “The Last of the Independents” CD on the boom box in the kitchen. That’s how I recently (re?) discovered them.  Does anyone think that this group sounds a little bit like The Smithereens?  I think that their sounds are similar.  But, I don’t know of any connection between these two groups.

It’s funny.  My wife and I are only six years apart in age.  But, it is like we are from different musical generations.  I am sort of a classic rock kind of a guy.  I grew up with  Jimi Hendrix “Are You  Experienced?”, The Doors “Strange Days” , and Cream “Disraeli Gears” albums.   These are the albums that were popular in my freshman year at college.  I had led sort of a musically sheltered life up until then.  I think that I had one album, the Bob Dylan “Bob Dylan” album (which may have been his first album).

Going to college was a real eye-opener for me musically.  A group of us went to see a Hendrix concert at Bowdoin College one time.  He had some equipment problems that night.  But, it was a great concert anyway, as far as I was concerned.  At the end, he did his usual act of destroying his equipment, and lighting his guitar on fire.  He was quite the showman, as well as being one of the greatest guitar players that has ever lived.

But, my wife is into a whole different cohort of rock ‘n roll music.  Bruce Springsteen is her main rock star.  And, she was into “punk rock,” The Clash, etc., which I never really caught onto.  I was going through her CD collection a while back, cherry picking some of the interesting looking CDs.  There are some interesting CDs like Lou Reed.  Stevie Ray Vaughan, another great blues artist, is another one that I missed.

So, I have been grooving on The Pretenders, lately, and enjoying their music.  I like to listen in the car while commuting to and from work, and crank the volume.  Or I listen at other times, when I have appointments or errands to run.  It looks like this group has withstood the test of time, too, unlike a lot of other rock groups that have broken up along the way and fallen by the wayside.

Break up the concrete!