Interview from WLIR Freeflight, Fall 1981, Vol. 2 No. 3

 

Denis: You’re about to do a couple of shows at The Pier and you’re in the midst of a rather extensive tour, isn’t it?

Pat: Well, yeah it ends in November, but this is actually our shortest tour so far. It’s only 3 ½ months instead of 7 ½ months.

 

Denis: Do you like touring?

Pat: Yeah, this one was fun. The first years were like, learning how to be away from home for a long time. But, this one is fun. We’re having a good time.

 

Denis: Good. I guess I should ask… there is an expression people get when someone becomes extremely popular and there is a phrase that’s put on it that says it all - "overnight sensation", and there really is no such thing, especially in the business of rock and roll. Could you tell us a little about the days before the glory, essentially?

Pat: I grew up on Long Island - Lindenhurst, right after Copiague. Then I got married and I left because my husband at the time got drafted and then we came back to New York in 1975 and I just started doing clubs around town, cabarets and stuff - different kinds of music. I worked at Catch A Rising Star and that’s pretty much what I did for a long time until I got original material together and pretty much close to what you see now, and got that whole character that you see on stage together. Then I just went and tried to get a record contract.

 

Denis: Was it easy to go and get a record deal?

Pat: I guess it seemed like it was easy. It took a long time getting to the point of getting it. Once we did our "debut" concert it was in about 3 weeks. It wasn’t very long compared to what other people go through. It was about 3 years working here without ever even getting in the door.

 

Denis: Let’s get right into the first album, "In the Heat of the Night." I’ve always wondered why there were two producers. Chapman, if I recall, was hot at the time (he produced the Knack) but it ended up that Peter Coleman essentially produced most of the album.

Pat: What happened was that we wanted Chapman really bad to do the record but he was right in between, I think it was the Blondie record and the Suzie Quatro record, and he only had like a real limited amount of time. Coleman is like his clone. They work together, they’re like an old married couple, they’re so funny. Coleman is essentially like working with Chapman, it’s the same thing. So what happened was that Chapman began it and Peter just finished it.

 

Denis: That would explain the consistencies to the record. Let’s get into some of the songs - side one, cut one "Heartbreaker" - that’s a great one.

Pat: This is like Frank Sinatra’s "My Way" - you could sing that song forever. It’s like your kindergarten song. It’s the thing you start out with and you just keep it forever.

 

Denis: There’s a part in it where you just have the vocal track. How did that happen?

Pat: When we were doing the arrangement of the song, we knew that it needed some kind of a breakdown and that’s what we did. We just pulled all of the instruments out of it and left the voice naked without any echo, reverb, without any delay at all and it just made it stand out more.

 

Denis: John Cougar is a singer - songwriter and has two albums out to date and you recorded one of his songs and had a great amount of success with is and that is "I Need A Lover". How did you get that?

Pat: It came on a publishing demo. Chapman and I both thought it would be a good twist to have a girl singing this song. I didn’t even know John. I never met him before I did the song. Finally we did meet face to face in Cincinnati and we did the song together on stage and it was really funny because he sings it about two keys lower than me and he was up there screaming away.

 

Denis: Why was "In the Heat of the Night" the title track? Did that have any significance?

Pat: I’m seriously into dramatics and that song was the most dramatic song on the record to me. It has the most atmosphere and it’s probably my favorite song that I’ve ever recorded except for maybe "Promises In the Dark" now. It’s definitely right up there in the top two. I just thought it really had that steamy atmosphere of living in the city and stuff like that, which I was doing at the time.

 

Denis: "My Clone Sleeps Alone" that’s sort of a bleak outlook for the future, isn’t it?

Pat: That song - I have to give Roger Capps credit for that song. Roger is sort of the resident maniac of the band. Everyone else is pretty normal and straight. Roger is out there in stratus somewhere. He takes the shuttle back in everyday to play in the band. He’s out of his mind. He just called me up about 7 o’clock one morning, I guess he’d stayed up all night and he said "I’ve got this song" and I said, "Roger, please, it’s seven o’clock in the morning" and he said, "no, no, it’s all about cloning." I went over there, but then a lot of it made sense to me. I tried to write it tongue and cheek, just getting the message across with it being still silly.

 

Denis: Do you look back at that time period as a very positive time period for you?

Pat: That time period was a time of blissful innocence. If you’re going to do a first record, Chapman was like the best one because he knows everything. He takes you by the little hand and just teaches you everything you could possibly have to know in a very short time.

 

Denis: Another track that is real popular is "Rated X" and that’s a Nick Gilder song. Is that another song you became aware of from a publishing record?

Pat: No, when we were finishing up the record, we had about two or three more tracks left to cut and Peter said he had, …at the time, Coleman had wanted to do a real sing - songy kind of song to get the real high voice sort of worked out and he knew that he had this Nick Gilder song which would do that and he thought that it was a real pop sort of AM kind of thing which as it turned out never really got any of the play except in France and stuff but he just really liked the song so we just basically did it for Coleman.

 

Denis: "We Live For Love" which Neil wrote is another very popular kind of tune and I guess we ought to talk about your vocal range because that certainly sort of does show it off. You have a very, I guess incredible sort of vocal range, for want of a better way of putting it.

Pat: I used to think it was incredible. Three and a half years ago three octaves would have been incredible, but it’s not so incredible now. It’s okay. A lot of people have a lot of great ranges now that they never had before. This song in particular, Neil was writing the song and disco songs in his car and I was listening to disco going "How can you play rock and roll and listen to this!" and it was going back and forth so he said he was going to write a song that I could sing that was going to be half rock and roll and half what he wanted to listen to at that time in his life so he wrote this song.

 

Denis: And it was a sort of spear - headed, dance - oriented kind of rock phase, as the industry so often puts terms on.

Denis: "Don’t Let It Show" was originally on the I Robot album, the Alan Parsons Project album. Was that how you discovered the song?

Pat: I had the album and it was a song I really loved and I wanted to do a ballad but it’s really hard for me to write and it’s real hard for me to pick ‘em, but this song - it seemed a song you could really rock up and still keep it - it had a real classical sound to it and everything so…

 

Denis: I was gonna say I thought the acoustic guitar worked out really well, it builds very nicely.

Pat: It had a lot of musical body to it and it was good.

 

Denis: "So Sincere" closes out the first album and it’s a pretty hot way to go out. Can you tell us a little bit about that one?

Pat: That’s the first song I ever wrote actually and if came from…. Roger and I were just talking about relationships and stuff like that, you know, observing people - it really went back to someone, but I can’t remember who at the time and we just started to write some lyrics to it and then the song just came about and I didn’t want to put it on the record ‘cause I’d never written anything before and you’re always real critical of the first song you ever wrote in your life, but Chapman liked it. He thought it had a good danceable beat and we put it on.

 

Denis: So that was a very important song for you as a writer?

Pat: Yeah, it was like the breakthrough kind of thing for me. I never thought I could write a song ever in my life, so to do it once… you’re still not very confident after you only do it once, but it’s a start.

 

Denis: What was it like, after the first album, looking back now? Was it a hectic time period? I would imagine that you had started sensing that there was something going on out there as far as Pat Benatar goes on a public level.

Pat: By the time the second record was ready to be done, it was after ten months of touring. It was after going Platinum. It was after all this craziness that you really didn’t have any time at all to think about what happened because you were still on the road. I don’t think that we knew that "Heartbreaker" was in the Top Twenty until it was almost ready to go back down there the other way. WE just knew something was up because we were selling out all the time. We just knew something was happening but by the time we had started Crimes of Passion everyone was pretty much fried from the tour. We had maybe two songs written for the next record and everyone was like nervous and hating each other’s guts and the last thing we wanted to do was go in and record another record but it just happened it was time to do it again and probably the worst thing that happened was that we switched producers. We went from someone who had such total control of everything to someone who let you do whatever you wanted and we weren’t ready to do whatever we wanted when it happened and Neil and I were just ripping our hair out of our heads for the first week. Keith is wonderful in the fact that he runs the board and says okay go ahead do what you want but meanwhile, we were still novice at what we were doing and we had no idea what we wanted. So Neil - everything - Neil really stepped up and took control over and really moved up his position in the band and stuff like that and I figured that if it wasn’t for he and I putting our heads together, the record would never have come off. I spent a lot of those days crying. I remember sitting on the floor of the studio crying. It was nuts.

 

Denis: Keith that we are referring to here is Keith Olson who I guess production credits range from the Grateful Dead to Fleetwood Mac and Pat Benatar of course. Despite all the craziness, you came out with a very successful record on a number of levels, don’t you think?

Pat: That’s why I figured we had such a great time doing this third record that I figured that this one probably wouldn’t do anything - no one would buy it, no one would like it because we liked it and the second one was a bad time for us - bad memories, I mean bad everything and we only liked certain cuts; we didn’t like the record as a whole. The second album syndrome that everyone goes through.

 

Denis: Well, let’s get into some of the songs that people like. "Treat Me Right" - can’t argue with that hook….

Pat: No, you’re right. We were going through all this - we have to do another record - we have to do this again - so this was probably the follow up to "Heartbreaker". I’m sure that was in everyone’s mind when that was done. That’s basically all I guess on that song.

 

Denis: You’ve got another example again of vocal range on that one. Did you double your voice?

Pat: Yeah, I do that a lot to sort of fatten it up ‘cause sometimes it gets real thin if I do the high parts.

 

Denis: That’s interesting. Is it weird singing with yourself?

Pat: Well, you can do it that way but we don’t do it that way. We take the other voice out and we sing it again. People pretty much tend to sing the same way consistently so I take the other voice out and I don’t match it to it. I just sing it again until it matches and this way - sometimes it’s hard because you have these two voices and sometimes you can’t tell which one is happening. It’s harder I think. Chapman taught me to do it the other way that you mentioned.

 

Denis: Who are your influences? Who are the rock bands that you admired as you grew up and became a musician?

Pat: It was a time of the English thing that was happening over here as I grew up and we all - it was the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones. I basically listened to that and I also listened to a lot of our Pop artists like the Rascals and a little bit of Black music - the girl bands - The Supremes - stuff like that and different things.

 

Denis: You do a great version of a Rascals tune - "You Better Run".

Pat: I did it because I remember spending many days sitting on the front stoop of my house in Lindenhurst with my friends listening to that tune and I think they played at a dance at my junior high school when they were the Young Rascals and I always remembered that stuff and I liked a lot of their songs.

 

Denis: What were you like growing up on Long Island if you had to summarize it?

Pat: I was probably very straight and a real ‘jockette’.

 

Denis: Do you ever get back on the Island?

Pat: Once in a while. I live out in California now so I don’t get back, and I moved my family out and stuff. I go out there once in a while because I still have friends and relatives out there and it’s so different. It’s so built up. I like it though. The place that I live in. California is - everyone tells me - is a lot like Long Island. It’s a real suburb - shopping malls and things like that.

 

Denis: "Never Want To Leave You" I always found it a sort of intriguing vocal on that. The whole song has an interesting feel on it. Can you talk about that one?

Pat: We just started writing that song during the first record and finished it while we were on the tour. It was on of the songs we had finished while we were on the road. We did a demo of it that came out so much better than the way it came out on this record and that was true for the whole album. That was what made me so crazy is that we’d do things that would be almost there but none of us could sort of clear our minds enough to the point of being brilliant. It was okay. I love that song but I wish someday we could put that demo out because it was really unbelievable.

 

Denis: A retrospective album somewhere down the line.

Pat: Yeah, right, songs we should have cut.

 

Denis: I guess if we had to talk about hits of the last few years, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" would be way up there on a lot of lists. Did you get a lot of flack about that one? I wondered about that because I read in some of the critical reviews that it was such a violent song and things like that.

Pat: People are nuts. I think people stay up late and make these things up in their minds. I don’t understand how you can sing a song like that that is so tongue in cheek and meant to be sarcastic and silly and people just take these little lives so seriously when they write these things. Anything that anyone ever said I just said - yeah, right, you know. No, we did the song it’s one of those songs that when you hear it for the first time you go this a great song but when you do it as much as I have you start saying to yourself - why did I ever do this song? I love the song - it’s great to do live. I love to do that song live. It’s much better live than recorded because it’s a lot rougher on stage, but it’s a fun song and I just did it for the same reason I did "I Need A Lover" because I felt it was a good point of view to sing from for a woman.

 

Denis: "Hell Is For Children" –earlier in this interview you talked about dramatic songs. I would have to put that in kind of a dramatic category.

Pat: That was probably the first time that I ever decided to write a song that was not gonna be kind of evading the issue. This was like right to the point kind of thing. I didn’t really know, once I had written it. I wrote it with Roger and Neil - once I wrote it I didn’t know whether I had started something that I didn’t want to finish or what. I just thought it was such a huge problem. I just didn’t know if it had any place in rock and roll but I really didn’t care, I just wanted to write about it. I told Neil if we did it, that we had to make it a real credible song musically so that it would hold up, it wouldn’t just be like an issue song that wasn’t a good musical song. I think that we pretty much got it together. It’s probably, out of all the songs we do every night - it’s the one that gets the most response, it’s huge. I mean every night, and it’s the same every time we play it. I guess it did what it was supposed to do.

 

Denis: Do the reviews mean very much to you?

Pat: At first when you first start out and you read a bad one and you’re like in the bathroom slitting your wrists. Then it’s just someone’s opinion. You can’t please everyone all the time. It’s just what everyone tells you - you just have to do it for yourself and hope that other people like it. You just get to the point where you just have to be just confident within your little circle and that’s just what’s really important and hopefully people will go with you.

 

Denis: That’s good so that you can kind of rise above it.

Pat: It’s such a personal attack sometimes, maybe you look like the girl that he dumped or something like that. I don’t know why they write what they write sometimes.

 

Denis: How do you feel, because there’s no denying, that you’ve had an effect on fashion in the country?

Pat: Not to look at me right now.

 

Denis: You know what I mean, right? You seem to meet a lot of people who seem to imitating you in their dressing style.

Pat: Out where I live, they don’t do that. I haven’t been here in so long that - out there everything is white clothes and little sandals and all that. I guess that the girls that come out to the concerts - they all wear little Spandex pants - I keep going, Spandex is out this year you know - and they come with their little shirts and haircuts. The only place that I really did see it is in like lounge bands at Holiday Inns and stuff. You see the girl and she’s got her little leotard on and stuff like this and you go - oh no….

 

Denis: You did a Kate Bush tune. Kate is a very popular artist in England but in this country she has yet to really achieve much success.

Pat: It’s the kind of thing like - we don’t do really well in England - Europe - and she doesn’t do really well here. I just think that she’s such an oddity. You either love her or you don’t and I just really like her for the sake of the craziness and silly things she does with her voice and the great things she does. And her lyrics - I think she’s a woman’s writer. I don’t think she’s really for the male population kind of thing. She’s really a very female oriented kind of artist. When I heard the song - I heard it in Paris when we were on tour and I loved the story of Wuthering Heights so much that once I heard the song I knew I had to do it. I didn’t even know if I could sing it because it was such an unbelievably hard song to sing and I just took a shot and did it. It’s one of the songs that I’ve ever done that I’m the least happy with of my performance on it.

 

Denis: "Out of Touch" - I didn’t want to leave this record without talking about this song.

Pat: Neil was totally crazed over people that are normal one day and snap and go over the edge and start doing things like killing people or burning buildings. He’s totally fascinated how one day you can be so straight and then lose it and all the things that lead up to that so he writes a lot of songs about that kind of thing. That song was originally his idea, he started it. It’s loosely based on probably some kind of experience he’s been through I think and it was just to illustrate that kind of mania that happens.

 

Denis: We kind of come up to present in history of your music now because there is a new album out - it’s called Precious Time - as we speak - and it’s funny - earlier on in the interview you were talking about how you had so much fun making this album that you weren’t sure it was going to be successful and now it’s the number one album in the country. This has got to be much faster than the other two from just watching the charts over the years. If you don’t mind, let’s talk about that. Is the whole fame thing - is it weird? Or is it something you can work around and still be pretty normal about?

Pat: It’s just the kind of thing that if you don’t think about it, you’re alright. It’s like really think about it - I try - it’s something I don’t think you realize until later. When the tour is over and you’re back home and you’re sitting there, then you realize it and you reflect back, but while it’s actually happening to you - it’s like anything else - it’s just really going by. Everytime someone says that we’re number one, I get nauseous. It just makes my stomach get…I mean, I’m real happy but, you’re so happy that you just get a stomach ache or something.

 

Denis: Well, let’s talk about the record. Precious Time is the name of it. Earlier, you talked about "Promises in the Dark" and it’s funny and you said dramatic because it is –there’s no denying that that is a dramatic song. It builds in intensity and it ahs this theme of almost like her I go again, out of control, but here I go. Can you talk about it?

Pat: The last two records anything that I had written was like I said from an observation point of view. This is the first record that I’ve written anything that is personal. This song is just a song about what Spider and I were kind of going through during those first few months of meeting and all that kind of stuff not wanting to get involved because we’d both been through terrible relationships and stuff like that and I started writing it so long ago. I was writing it on an airplane and then I finished it and I was so embarrassed to give it to him because I didn’t want him to know what I thought.

 

Denis: This time the album was co - produced by Keith Olson and Neil. The first single, and of course, singles are an important thing if you look on the music business side of all this is "Fire and Ice" and boy, that seems like such a natural - almost instant hit.

Pat: As you go along, you stop - like on the second record - I don’t know what we were trying to do but we were trying to follow up what we had done - this record, even though we had the pressure of selling 4 million and that kind of thing, but once we began the album, we were so engrossed in what we were doing that everyone just forgot about Crimes Of Passion. WE didn’t even think of it when we cut the record that we had any singles on it at all because the only one that we thought was probably "Take It Anyway You Want It" and I didn’t want it released under any circumstances at all because it’s too obvious - I just wanted something with more depth to it so we couldn’t release "Promises In the Dark" first because it was too much of rock and roll song and so we found a song which was in the middle which was "Fire and Ice". It was a song that had a kind of a commercial feel but was still a good rock and roll song. It was closer to what "Heartbreaker" was than say "Hit Me With Your Best Shot".

 

Denis: From the mid sixties comes a song that Paul Revere and the Raiders had a hit with. A great song - it was also very big on the high school band circuit for a long time. Also you did - "Just Like Me" is the song we’re talking about. You did it with just a three man back up I noticed that that was used a couple of times on the album. It worked very well. It’s simple yet effective.

Pat: See sometimes, Scott - our rhythm guitarist - he basically plays most of the rhythm and fill parts and sometimes it just works better if we just cut it out. Sometimes you just don’t need two guitars all the time and then Neil took care of that.

 

Denis: "Precious Time" is written by a songwriter, Billy Steinberg and it’s a rather profound tune. I gather, is that why it was turned into the title track?

Pat: Yeah, it’s like the same thing with "Heat of the Night" - it really had the most - even though "Promises In the Dark" – had so much atmosphere to it this song is so entrancing - everything is so mystical - it reminds you of the old – like when the Beatles were doing those mystical songs. It was so hypnotic and the lyrics were great. And at the time we did it - we began cutting it last year - it really didn’t have anything to do with our lives but then things started to happen and it had more and more to do with us personally and then I really wanted it on the record for sure.

 

Denis: "It’s A Tough Life" - I like that - there’s obviously some reggae influence in that - I like the feel of that – it just seems to be very natural.

Pat: It’s probably my favorite listening song on the album. I like to play it every day - I love that song. When we went out to California - living on the East - Neil’s from Cleveland and I’m from here….It’s not the real world out there - it’s real pretty and the weather’s great and it’s very strange. The people are strange. Everyone out there has so much. It’s not like here where you have to get it - everyone has it. We saw a lot of odd things - Neil saw one kid driving around in a Firebird with his mother - he was like a twelve year old kid and he had a vintage telecaster and he was playing it in his convertible and Neil just flipped out and he wrote this song.

 

Denis: I like that little thing that you do with your voice at the end where it’s almost speaking.

Pat: Oh yeah, it gets the point across.

 

Denis: "Take It Anyway You Want It" in listening to the record I was going to ask you - was that the second single?

Pat: No, that’s just one of those songs that you know is a great song to do. It probably is a hit and I’m probably holding back a hit but I don’t want it to represent what we do. It’s not what we do. It’s only a part of what we do and sometimes for the sake of promotional radio they tend to release those kind of things but Chrysalis is pretty cool about it and if we really don’t want it and really want something to represent what you do - the next single I think is "Promises In the Dark" and even though they know that that’s a risk because of the AOR and that’s still a little to heavy for AM they’re still going to do it because it’s a better representation of what we are than say "Anyway You Want It".

 

Denis: That’s great too. You seem very hip to the business side of this which is important.

Pat: All I know is what I like. I only know things that probably sound like hit records. I wouldn’t know one if I saw one.

 

Denis: I’ve listened to the albums a number of times and last night, listening to it to prepare for this interview and doing the research, it occurred to me that the lst three songs on side Two have a connection or am I reading that in? Is there a connection between "Evil Genius", "Hard To Believe" and "Helter Skelter"?

Pat: "Evil Genius" and "Helter Skelter" together are an implied thing just like "Hit Me With Your Best Shot". See it’s really funny, last year when we put "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" before "Hell Is For Children" and they absolutely went for the wrong reasons. I couldn’t believe it. It’s an implied thing. It’s not meant to say this leads to this.

 

Denis: "Hard To Believe" I love the guitar thing on that - real punchy guitar thing on that.

Pat: It’s one of those catchy little songs that you just like to sing. Mary wrote it with Neil so I don’t know where it came from exactly.

 

Denis: "Evil Genius" if it is what I thought it was about is something that affected all of us - a very unfortunate tragedy…..

Pat: It’s not probably what you thought it was about - it’s not about John Lennon.

 

Denis: That’s what I thought it was about.

Pat: It was written before it happened. It was odd enough that it did happen and it was odd enough that "Helter Skelter" was also being put on the record at the same time so it - a lot of people ask "Did you pick ‘Helter Skelter’ as a tribute?" and I say no, but that is obviously a tribute to both of them but that’s not why we chose and that’s not why we wrote "Evil Genius" either. "Evil Genius" is based loosely on an incident that happened about two years ago in I think, New Jersey, who killed someone and they went to court and they said it was because he had watched a television show and that’s what it’s really based on even though it’s very timely I guess because of what happened to John Lennon.

 

Denis: What are the future plans you have?

Pat: I don’t know. We’re probably going to do a live album in the next year or so and I’m going to take some time off I know that. We’re just trying to get through all this. It’s not that far projected. I don’t know if I’m going to do any films or anything. I don’t know. Right not we’re just trying to do this.

 

Denis: You’ve worked real hard and you’re still working had and I wish you success and happiness and thank you for spending this time with us.

Pat: Thank you.