Pat Benatar:  Lady Sings the Rock and Roll!
-text and photos Don Gilliland
Freebird, March 1980

“I'd like to dedicate this next one to the Ayatollah,” yelled Pat Benatar to the Sunday night crowd at Rock World, a tiny club on the south side of Orlando. As the crowd yelled their approval, Benatar smiled and stepped back up to the microphone to add to her dedication, “And to anyone else who ever treated you like shit.” With that, the feisty little woman and her band launched into “No You Don't,” the early seventies anthem that super-producer Mike Chapman had written for the English group Sweet.

 Benatar is in the middle of her first national tour, a never-ending series of one-nighters in small clubs and concert halls around the country, to promote her debut album, “In the Heat of the Night,” on Chrysalis Records.  The album, released last September, is finally starting to make some noises around the country.  Radio stations are adding it to their playlists and record stores are reporting brisk sales of the album.  A song from it, “Heartbreaker” is starting to create some action of it's own on the nation's singles charts.  All of a sudden, Pat Benatar has become a name in the music world.  A woman who doesn't sing sugary ballads, bu one who actually rock and rolls.

 In her hotel room, before her Saturday night show at Rock World, Benatar talked about the success she's experiencing. “Yeah, it's been great,” she said.  Benatar corrected herself and knocked her fist gently on a wooden table, “No, it's been tremendous.  I'm very thankful.   I didn't expect this first record to move as fast as it did.  You never expect   your first album to do this good.  Everybody figured that because it came out so late in the year, and because all the established artists were releasing their albums, that after that, I don't think anybody expected it to really do as well as it has.”

 Pat Benatar is not your basic reserved female vocalist.  She doesn't fit the mold.  She shatters it.   She can belt out hard-edged rock tunes better than a lot of her male counterparts.  A Chrysalis ad for her album proclaimed:  “She's got an album with enough sizzle to fry your imagination.  At last, a woman who can rock.”  Another magazine called her “The brightest hope yet of becoming THE rock and roll woman of the 80's.”

 Being a woman in the male dominated world of rock would seem to be an awkward position, but Benatar has easily adjusted. “It's no different,” she strongly assured.  “It's not different with the audience.  The only people that it's different with are the people with the media and the promotion people.  That's all.   That's the only time that I ever feel any kind of weirdness at all, you know, because the people don't care.  They don't care if you're a guy or a girl.  You're just singing.”

 “The only thing I've found so far that's been a problem at all,” she continued Benatar, “is that a lot of people try to sex-ploit you.  You know what I mean?  Which is is a logical thing, I guess.  That's the only problem, but it's not a very big problem, because it doesn't happen very often.”  “Sometimes, though, you get to towns and you hear your ads and they're so lewd.   You just want to die.  It's like, weird!  But they're gonna do it.  You KNOW they're gonna do it.  That's what all those people were talking about when I first started, about how you couldn't possibly stay androgynous, or anything like that, and get away with it.”

 Benatar, however, has gotten away with it and has proved her early critics wrong.  When she first started doing rock and roll, she was understandably met with some resistance, but not for long.   “It used to piss me off at first,” recalled Benatar of the negative reaction she first encountered.  “But I knew I could do it, so I figured if I just kept doing it, it would be fine.  I remember going home so many nights, crying, saying 'there's got to be a way that this can be done.'”

 “Everyone said that I couldn't do it.  Don't even try to do it, you're gonna e sorry.  Try it, they won't accept it.  But that didn't happen.  Everybody seemed to be real accepting to it.  There hasn't been one bit of, you know, discrimination, at all.  It's been great.  I don't think anyone thinks about it anymore.  I have a ten man crew and they don't treat me any differently.”

 Pat Benatar has been around.   She's no naive young girl, bursting suddenly upon the music scene.  Now in her “late mid-twenties,” she's paid her dues and is ready for the success that is steamrolling towards her.  Born in Brooklyn, she grew up in Long Island and then left to live in Virginia for four years.  Along the way, she sang in clubs and colleges for a few years, even going to college, herself, for awhile.   She attended both Stony Brook University and VCU, but quit both times because she “hated it so bad!”

“I had a real mixed background in music,” said Benatar.  “I was trained classically and I studied opera and things like that.  That's what I sang when I was younger.  But I always listened to like English rock and roll and pop stuff like the Young Rascals.  That's all I listened to was male vocalists, and things like Led Zepplin, The Who, the Stones.  Joplin was about the only female that I listened to, besides Judy Garland, when I was younger.

 Benatar made the switch to rock and roll about three years ago.  Before that she was playing “kind of cabaret stuff, real soft, MOR, things.”  It was at her club debut in New York City that Benatar landed her recording contract.  She was courted by several major record companies, but chose Chrysalis the first night because she liked them so well.

 Benatar is a small woman, barely over five feet tall, and thin as a rail.  But she's tough and hasn't let the grind of her present tour get to her.  “It's real tiring,” admitted Benatar of tour life, “But I like it. The best part about it is that you get to play every night.  The shit part about it is that you have to travel every day.  That's the only thing.  You get real tired.  But other than that, it's great.  It's great to go to all the cities when the record's doing well and play for all those people.”

 “I could use a vacation, but I imagine I would go nuts after a month or so of not playing.  At eleven o'clock you start going crazy, you don't know what to do with yourself.”

 “It would be good to tour with a larger act,” continued Benatar, on the subject of being an opener.   “But on the same token, when you open for somebody, it's a whole different thing.”

 “I would prefer not to do that.  Once you get used to headlining, you don't want to open for somebody again.  It's a real tough spot.  “The audience could care less when you come out, and that's a hard thing to take when you're used to people coming to see you.”

 One of the important factors that contributed to the success of Benatar's album was Mike Chapman's production.  But, the man who helped make Bondie a household word in 19779, almost didn't get to produce Benatar's album.

 When she first signed with Chrysalis, Benatar was asked who she wanted to produce her album, and her first choice was Chapman.  Chapman heard a tape of Benatar and was impressed, but he had other commitments to take care of at the time, so Benatar chose Roger Coleman to produce the record.  Coleman started the job, but problems soon developed and work was halted on the album.  Chapman finally got some time free, so he stepped in and finished the album in July.

 “He's a nut,” laughed Benatar of Chapman.  “He's real unorthodox, and he's out of his mind, and he's a nazi, and he's a slavedriver.  But he's great.  Coleman, too.  They're both crazy and they both really work you to death and it's great.  But they're fun.  I mean, you're killing yourself, but you're having such a good time, you don't care.”

 “Recording and live are like real opposite ends,” said Benatar.  “Recording is a self-indulgent thing that's really great because you get to hear everything so clearly.  You just spend hours doing it until it's right.  Then live is real exciting because it's just for the moment.  And the give and take that happens doesn't happen in the studio.  The unknown factor of whether or not you're gonna do good also makes it exciting.”

 After her present tour is over, Benatar and her band will head to Europe (a trip planned just the week before her Orlando shows) where they will play in places like England, France, Germany and Sweden.  Then it's back to the states where, in March, she will record her second album.  For the new one Benatar has plans on writing more original material.  “In the Heat of the Night” contained only two songs she co-wrote with bass player Roger Capps.  Other members of Benatar's touring band included Neil Geraldo (lead guitar and keyboards), Scott St. Clair Sheets (guitar) and Myron Grombacher (drums), who was formerly with Derringer.

 In the short time she's been in the record business, Pat Benatar has learned a lot.  And her education continues each week.

 “I've learned a lot of stuff, but I couldn't tell you what it was,” laughed Benatar.  “You just get a better sense of things.  I couldn't pinpoint any one thing.”

 “It's made me relax a lot on stage, seeing all the different people.  You realize that they really just want to see what your are really like, instead of some kind of fabrication.  I mean, the more real you get, the better they like it.  That's what I've learned most of all.  They don't want you to be be “showbiz,” they want realness.  As soon as you put that out, they go nuts.  They can tell when you're faking it immediately!  It comes across so quickly.  When you start being real to them, they start being real back.  And it's like, poof!  You just get hit.  And it's great.”