Hynde can't pretend: Band doesn't snap until playing early punky hits

"I'm not the cat I used to be," confessed Chrissie Hynde on the Pretenders' propulsive 1984 hit "Middle of the Road." "I've got a kid, I'm thirty-three." It's one of Hynde's best lines, and one of rock 'n' roll's rare acknowledgments of the aging process, but she didn't sing it or the song Sunday night at a packed Riviera. Maybe the mood was wrong. Or maybe Hynde, nearly 25 years after "Middle of the Road" and creeping toward 60, realizes that 33 is nothing, and that middle age is less a number ...

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