by Pat Benatar
Chrysalis was ecstatic when “Heartbreaker” hit big. But that excitement died when they found out that Spyder and I were involved. They were horrified. Each of us got a phone call.
“This is going to ruin your whole career. Don’t you remember what happened with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham? They almost broke up Fleetwood Mac!”
We both had the same reaction: “What? Who the hell are you?”
They tortured us about it, convinced that we were on the road to ruin. We explained that we were making music that they liked and doing our job. Our personal life was not their business. They looked at our situation and saw the worst-case scenario: a rocky relationship that ruins the band. While I understood that there were other bands that had fallen into that trap, the truth was, band tension was always a variable—not just in male/female circumstances. A lot of all-male bands split up because of friction between members. It was ridiculous and intrusive.
Awkwardness in the band was just their cover story. What they really cared about was my image. It’s an old tale in the entertainment business that record labels—whether they’re dealing with men or women—want solo stars unattached and seemingly available. I’ve always found that train of thought insulting and sexist. I wasn’t a boy toy. My image was for my pleasure alone. I didn’t think my fans cared about any of this, and I certainly didn’t. This was 1979, not 1950. Women weren’t objects anymore. I wanted to make music, but I wanted to do it on my terms. I wasn’t in this to fit some male fantasy of what I was supposed to be. That meant living my life however the hell I wanted to live it.
This drama over our relationship was part of my introduction to fame that began following that first tour. It wasn’t overwhelming at first—nothing like later on and definitely nothing like today’s celebrities have to deal with—but I started noticing people looking at me or whispering to each other when I was in the market. I wasn’t sure what was going on for a while. I thought maybe they were looking at someone else, or maybe I just looked weird. Finally someone came up and said my name as if they knew me personally. It’s an unsettling feeling. You’re thrilled that people know you, because that means you’re being accepted. But I’m basically a private person, and it was difficult to comprehend.
We still didn’t really understand the magnitude of our career—not surprising, considering we lived in a vacuum. Traveling around on a bus was especially isolating in the early eighties, without cell phones or laptops. Billboard’s charts were not calculated electronically through SoundScan. If an album was taking off, it took longer for everyone to get the message. We were among the last to understand the impact of both “Heartbreaker” and the album. The world was a different place: no Internet, no daily glut of information.
By the time our tour reached Virginia Beach, we finally saw the scope of what was happening around us. As we pulled up to the club, we saw that it was surrounded with a police barrier, and there appeared to be a massive riot going on. We didn’t know what the hell had happened. An armed robbery? An explosion? Not quite. The club had oversold the show, and people who’d paid to see us couldn’t get in. It’s common practice for some clubs to oversell a show, counting on no-shows. But that night, the no-shows showed up en masse. They ended up cramming more inside than there probably should have been, and I’m sure the local fire marshal would have been pissed if he’d been there to see it. Still, I’m sure some ticket holders went home mad.
What made this sight all the more shocking was that back then there were few outlets for artist exposure. The television shows newer acts could get on were few and far between—Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, The Midnight Special. There was no video exposure, no cable entertainment shows. You had radio play and your live show. The only way we knew something was happening was that with each performance, the crowds got bigger and wilder. You could feel the excitement building, escalating even more after the release of the next single, Spyder’s song “We Live for Love.”
That night in Virginia Beach, our hotel room faced the ocean and had a small balcony. After the show, we were standing on the balcony, admiring the view and looking at the cluster of bars down on the beach. The beach was covered in the gauzy haze of the various marquees, and one of them said spyder’s in black and yellow lights. At that point, we were really into giving everyone nicknames, partially because Spyder had always been a nickname guy. I thought he should have one of his own, so because yellow and black were his favorite colors, I started calling him Spyder James. It just had a way of sticking.
A few weeks later we were playing a club in Florida, and again the place was oversold and teeming with people. We’d just begun our set when our tour manager rushed up to the stage yelling something inaudible. Because we were extremely loud, I could barely make out his words beneath all the noise, but he seemed to be saying, “You have to get off!”
I looked at him in disbelief. What the hell was he doing? We were in the middle of performing. Get out of my face. But he was panicked.
Finally I heard him say, “You’ve got to stop, get off…” which was followed by something unintelligible that sounded a lot like “you’re bombing.” I shot him a look like he was a mental patient. The audience was going nuts. They were hanging on every note.
“What!? Are you nuts?” I shouted back. “These people are going crazy!”
And that was when he grabbed me by my jacket lapels and screamed, “There’s a bomb!” There was no mistaking those words.
It turned out that someone had called in a bomb threat and everyone had to vacate. Needless to say everyone filed out of the theater and stood in the street until the bomb squad gave the all-clear. Then everybody went back inside and we continued our show like nothing had ever happened.
That tour was all about having fun and enjoying the fact that we were actually getting paid money to do this every night. We couldn’t believe our good fortune that we were getting to live out our dream and we pretty much celebrated that every day. Zel sometimes celebrated more than he should have.
Zel was definitely the colorful member of the band. At over six feet tall, he was a huge Southern boy who loved women and drinking. He was a sweet soul, but he liked to get crazy from time to time. One night in particular, he partied a little too much, and as we were all going our separate ways for the night, he said he was going to take a shower and go to bed because we had a show the next day. The motel we were staying in was nothing fancy, and we all retired to our rooms ready to wake up and do it all over again.
In the morning, we were all going to have breakfast together before we got on the bus to go to the venue for sound check. We went to Zel’s room and knocked on his door—no answer. We called out to him and knocked again—still nothing. But we knew he was in there because we heard the shower running. We called our tour manager, Chris Pollan, and told him we couldn’t get Zel to answer the door, so he sent someone to us with a spare room key.
The instant the door opened a blast of steamy air smacked us in the face. The entire room looked and felt like a steam bath, and there was Zel, in bed, snoring away. He’d passed out and left the shower running the entire night. Everything was soaking wet, and because this wasn’t the classiest joint in the world, he’d even managed to steam all the wallpaper off the walls. It was lying in colored piles all over the room.
The longer we played on the road the tighter our show became. By the time our tour made its way to New York, my family members were beside themselves. Everyone showed up at the Bottom Line in the Village for a big show in November of ’79, and I can safely say that they were among the most enthusiastic members of the audience—no one more so than my mom. Both she and my father were ecstatic and proud, though he was so shy, he didn’t show it as much. I was the first person in my family who had a job that didn’t involve punching a time clock. And my cousins? They were roughly my age, so they were right there, screaming along with the other fans, jumping up and down, and yelling, “That’s my cousin Patti!” The aunts and uncles shoo
k their heads and said, “We knew she sang good, but…”
Of course having my mother at a show meant she’d get to see my act firsthand. Not surprisingly, she didn’t really care about my outfit (after all, inside her conservative exterior beat the heart of the same wild woman who’d let my brother and me get a monkey). But she was horrified at my language onstage. She never swore, and saying the “F-word” was sacrilegious. For me it was like saying “the.”
Georgia Ruel got a kick out of it all—the success, the image, everything. She was as proud as my parents. At one point, someone asked her, “I thought Patti was going to be a sex ed teacher?”
“She is,” Georgia answered with a wry smile.
Truthfully, though it had only been a few weeks, I was already getting tired of the image. It was already becoming one-dimensional, a boring distraction and the focus of what we were doing. That was never my intention. The girl who’d hiked up her school skirt as high as possible and pissed off the Matron was long gone. In her place was a fiercely confident young woman who was only interested in making music on her terms. The image was mine; I made it up. Now I was done with it. It had served its purpose. I was ready to move on. The label was pushing the look so much that it was getting in the way of the music. The artist in me didn’t like that at all. Neither did the woman who was in a loving relationship.
Phrases such as “seductive vamp” have legs, especially when they are included in press releases that get picked up by radio and by print journalists. But every time I talked to management or the record label and said I wanted the sex-kitten rhetoric toned down, my words fell on deaf ears. I was being sold as much for my image as for my music, and I was not happy about it.
WE TOURED ALMOST NONSTOP during that time and even took the show to Europe, where the crowds were just as big and just as passionate. I’d never traveled outside of America, and I was like a kid seeing Disneyland for the first time. We didn’t have a moment to enjoy the success or rest on our laurels, though. The clock was ticking, and thanks to Chrysalis more recording sessions were just around the corner.
My contract had what’s called a suspension clause in it, meaning that I had to do my next album in a certain time frame or they else could hold back royalties and delay payments. Any royalties or payments I was due would be frozen. That is a terrifying concept to a band just starting a big tour and dependant on any and all monies they can put together. Our recording schedule was at Chrysalis’s discretion, and they wanted a record every nine months no matter what. It was unfathomable.
So while we were breaking our backs on tour promoting In the Heat of the Night, the label was already talking about a second album. Being the front woman for the band, I found this especially distressing. All the radio and print interviews fell to me. If we had two days off, it seemed like I was scheduled round the clock for publicity photo shoots and in-store events. I understood that press and publicity helped keep the buzz alive. But to even think about making another record in the middle of the craziness seemed impossible. No thought was given to my physical or mental well-being. I was treated like a machine built to serve the record company’s whims.
Touring and promoting an album are counterproductive to creating new material, and I’ve never been able to write when I’m in performance mode. Complicating matters was the fact that Spyder and I were just starting to seriously write together. It worked fine when we were off the road and had our heads clear. But writing wasn’t something we could do on the fly. Because I wasn’t a seasoned writer at the time, I didn’t care as much about having a lot of my own songs on the next album. However, that didn’t mean I wanted to rush the writing process. From what I’d learned so far, I loved the process of writing, and I wanted more time to hone that skill. Meanwhile Spyder was already an accomplished songwriter, but what he needed was to have his work heard.
I wanted this second record to be better than In the Heat of the Night. I wanted it to be more personal, more representative of us as a band and as individuals. We were determined that our next work would not suffer from sophomore syndrome. We would not be a band with a smashing debut album that can’t follow it up. Neither of us thought in terms of writing a hit song. We wanted to write songs that had relevance to where we were in our lives. If a hit emerged, that was great, but we wouldn’t focus on that. Back then, we looked to outside writers to provide the hits. It was my job to sift through the box-loads of song demos submitted by songwriters, since that wasn’t something that Spyder enjoyed doing. He always insisted that we were capable of writing commercial songs without compromising our integrity as songwriters. He was right, of course.
While we were on a short break from touring and getting ready to record in Los Angeles again, Spyder and I decided to move to California. I’d dreamed of beautiful beaches and tropical climates ever since the days I was on the grade school slide, making up stories about what my life would be like. So in February of 1980 we rented a small house in Tarzana. Our next album would be recorded at Sound City, which is located in Van Nuys. (It was not exactly a tropical paradise, but it was California!)
As far as Chrysalis was concerned, Mike Chapman was the obvious choice for producer. It didn’t matter to them that he hadn’t actually produced much of the first album. Because his name had been on it, he was tied to its success. But although Chapman had a huge impact on the first record, I didn’t think he would be the right choice for the next one. I hoped we’d record with Peter Coleman. After all, Chapman had turned the first record over to him when he’d left. Peter was never heavy-handed with us, providing the freedom we needed. Chrysalis didn’t want Peter to produce the new album, and instead they hired Keith Olsen. It seemed like a smart choice, because Olsen had an impressive background. He was an award-winning, platinum-record-selling, big-name producer who’d worked with bands like Fleetwood Mac and the Grateful Dead.
Despite the tight schedule, I was excited to get started and looking forward to working with Olsen. I was starting to write more, collaborating with Spyder and Zel, our bassist. Together, the three of us wrote one song I felt strongly about: “Hell Is for Children.” The idea came from an article in the New York Times. Until I read that article, I knew very little about violence against children. My childhood might have been a little crazy once in a while, but my parents were nonviolent. They barely raised their voices at us. Growing up, Andy and I seldom got spanked, and if we did it was just a little swat on the butt. I didn’t know any kids who got knocked around either. I’d never known anyone who had to hide bruises or slap marks. Kids at school would have suspected if something bad was going on with one of our friends. At least I hope we would have, even as sheltered as we were. Reading that story, however, opened my eyes.
That morning, sitting at the kitchen table, it suddenly dawned on me that I’d been asleep for too long about this. Where had I been? How could I have been totally unaware that all this ugliness had been going on? I was crushed that anyone could harm children like that. Writing had become cathartic to me, so I started working on some thoughts, putting them down free-form. I wrote and wrote. When I started turning the thoughts into lyrics, Spyder was busy preparing the recording schedule, so I went to Zel, who by that point was the only person left who had been with me from the beginning. We’d written songs before, and I felt comfortable sharing these thoughts with him.
Zel started to write lyrics as well. Together the two of us refined it. I kept thinking that if we could put a message out there in song, maybe it would help raise awareness. Maybe it would inspire people to get involved. I didn’t set out to be a crusader, but I did hope that people would listen. I just wanted to reach people and using my voice seemed like the best way to do that. When we’d written most of the lyrics, I talked to Spyder.
“Take a look at what Zel and I have been working on. I don’t know what to do with it, because it’s got nothing to do with the music we’ve been making. But I feel strongly about it and want to do something. Can you make it into a song?”
Spyder agreed and wrote all of the music, taking our words and creating a chilling, wailing melody that turned all the pain and suffering in the lyrics into a searing rock anthem. In its original form, the song was about ten minutes long. We cut it back to five to fit it on the album. Of all the songs I’ve recorded, it’s the song I’m most proud of. Over the years, we’ve received thousands of letters from people who were abused as children, saying how much it helped them and how happy they were that someone cared enough to write a song about them, a song that reminded them they were not forgotten. Even today, we play it at every concert we do, in a show of solidarity.
“Hell Is for Children” was the first song we cut when we got to Los Angeles. I went into the session hoping for the best, and coming off such an amazingly successful year, we could see we were on the ascent. We had a hit record, but we didn’t want this just to be a remake of the first album. This needed to have a new approach, a fresh sound. We had spent over a year performing live, and the sound that had evolved was grittier, heavier. My voice began to settle and work together with the band, which had become a thunderous and raw wrecking machine. We wanted to capture that intensity on the new record. In terms of both sound and subject matter, “Hell Is for Children” would set the tone.
Problems with the recording began almost immediately. While we’d entered poised and confident to make this record, the fact that we had to contend with a totally new producer complicated things. The rhythm that we had established with Peter Coleman and Mike Chapman was gone. We had to start all over again with Keith Olsen. This was unnerving. Even though we felt we’d made tremendous strides in our playing, we were still neophytes with a lot to learn. We weren’t ready to take on another record alone, and unfortunately that was what we ended up having to do.
At first Keith Olsen seemed like a great guy. His success was well documented, and it made us optimistic that he would bring us closer to our goals musically. We were eager to learn what this new “mentor” had to offer. But as I watched him put down tracks for the songs, something appeared off. For one thing, he didn’t seem to be paying attention to much of what we were doing. He was distracted and distant. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. If this was just his style of producing, I didn’t like it. It was uncomfortable, as if there was no one at the helm. There always seemed to be something else going on that was commanding his attention, and that feeling of no one being in charge made me incredibly anxious.
