Ellen Melon and I,
and Chrissie Hynde
by Live Music Head
Ellen and I needed to escape
the confines of her parent's home in soul-sucking suburbia,
so we psychedelicized.
And then we got into her car
and drove to the neighbourhood cemetery to smoke.
I was 19.
And it was a cold, dark
wintery night
as we slowly drove by those who forever slept,
on slippery
twisting roads
with snow banks piled twice as high as I,
along the sides.
Suddenly we were in a fit of giggles
when Ellen
(who had
dreams of forming her own band
and calling it Ellen Melon and The Seeds)
hit
the gas instead of the break,
and plowed head first into the snow bank.
Unharmed,
I got out of the car
and fell to the ground laughing hysterically,
as Ellen
went and knocked on the gravekeeper's door
and asked, "could you please come help dig us out?"
And he did!
This was as exciting as it got in my hometown in 1982.
But the
eventful night didn't end there.
It was about to get a lot more exciting.
As soon as the car was free,
we left the
gravekeeper, the cemetery, and the ‘burbs behind
and headed straight for the big
ol’ city of Toronto.
You see, we had tickets to see The Pretenders.
And within hours
we found
ourselves standing directly in front of the stage,
with our jaws dropped to our
knees.
The ever-cool Chrissie Hynde had tore off her jacket
and threatened to jump into the
audience
and beat the guy up who kept taking her picture.
Chrissie Hynde: "Now look at the people in the streets, in the bars. We
are, all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Look
round the room, life is unkind. We fall, but we keep gettin' up, over and over
and over and over and over and over."
