Between a Heart and a Rock Place

by Pat Benatar

  As I said the words, I could feel a shift taking hold. Everyone started to rally; the energy was changing and we were moving from fear to pride. And just as the transformation of the crowd seemed at its pinnacle, we launched into “Invincible,” and the lyrics took on a whole new meaning: “We can’t afford to be innocent / Stand up and face the enemy / It’s a do or die situation / We will be invincible.”

  We continued in that way for the rest of the evening, playing songs and discussing how everyone was feeling. So many of them worried that we wouldn’t be able to get back to normalcy any time soon. They worried about the upcoming holidays, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and whether we’d be able to celebrate as a country.

  “How are we gonna have Christmas? How will anyone feel like celebrating?” one person called out.

  “Oh, we’re gonna have Christmas,” I shouted back. “We’re going to do what we do best: pick ourselves up and move forward. We are going to have Christmas!”

  That night, when we got back to the hotel, the genesis of a song started rolling around in my head. The lyrics would come from the conversations we had with the audience at the Napa show. I would call it “Christmas in America.” Part of the song goes like this:

  So keep your babies close tonight

  Hug your husband, kiss your wife

  Be thankful for this way of life,

  We’re fortunate to share

  And not forget the ones we’ve lost

  Their memory lives on in our hearts

  They’ll be forever in our thoughts

  And always in our prayers

  Unto this world a child is born

  His gift was meant for everyone

  The light of peace shines on and on

  And never fades away

  America, America indivisible we are

  One nation under God

  And that will never change

  Coz it’s Christmas in America

  Let the angels sing

  It’s Christmas in America

  Let freedom ring

  Let peace resound throughout the world

  Especially on this day

  It’s Christmas in America

  God bless the USA

  That night, I was awed by the healing power of music. It wasn’t so much anything I had done as it was the crowd’s willingness to go along with me, to open and come together. Standing up there that night, I felt an intense sense of pride that our music had helped ease the pain of a terrible situation, if even for just a couple of hours. The whole thing was cathartic. I had never done any kind of a sit-down with an audience. To have that conversation on that night was exhilarating and healing.

  As fate would have it, we played four more shows in quick succession, and for each of those shows, I repeated the give-and-take. I needed it and the audiences needed it. Every time it was the same, an audience filled with flag-waving, heartbroken Americans who rallied and stood strong as the night went on. What those shows taught me is that we do have a collective American soul. It was important for that audience to have a place to come on the night of 9/11, a place where they could interact and show their love of their country. Even as I write this almost nine years later, the memory of those days is so vivid and uplifting.

  Most Americans acted with grace and exemplary behavior in the face of this tragedy, but there is always a group who just can’t seem to get with the program. This group usually needs a two-by-four across the face to get the point, and the promoter of our final show was precisely one of these people.

  One of the conditions of our summer tours is that we always have to be home and off tour by September 15, because that’s when school starts. I’m a hands-on mom when it comes to the girls’ schools and so I’d always made that a priority. After those four dates following September 11, we had gone home to California so Hana would be there for the first day of school. We had a few days to unwind, and then we were scheduled for a final show in Florida that would have required us to fly. Of course, after 9/11 there was a ban on flying for several days. This fact was publicized in every newspaper and on every TV and radio station. You would have had to have been living underground not to know about it. It was assumed we would not perform, because no one was flying, the skies were not safe, and there wasn’t enough time to drive across the country and make the show.

  Well, apparently the promoter in Florida didn’t care about any of that. The moment the ban was lifted, he demanded we do the gig. When John called me to tell me the news, I was incredulous.

  “No way. You tell the promoter we fly with our children, and I’m not getting on a plane with them a week after terrorists attacked our country. Tell him we’ll reschedule when things calm down. When we can be sure it’s safe to fly. We’ll honor the contract and make up the date. This guy has to understand the situation.”

  He didn’t. He was adamant that we play and threatened to sue us if we didn’t fulfill our obligation. What is it about human beings? Disasters either bring out the best in us or show the ugliness that we’re capable of. I was stunned but not surprised. So I decided what I was willing to do. I told our agent Brad Goodman to call the promoter and ask him if he had children. If he did, I asked him to put his wife and one child on a plane, not a private jet but a commercial airliner, so they could fly across the country to California to pick me and my family up. If he was willing to do that, then I would fly to Florida and do the gig.

  You know what happened then. That was the end of it. He didn’t ask again, nor did he sue me.

  One thing that I believe 9/11 did for people was to make them see just how precious and fragile life is, and to make family a priority. At least I hope it did. We’d tried hard to put our family first, and 9/11 simply reinforced the importance of those choices.

  WHILE 9/11 LEFT EVERYONE reeling in emotion, I had no doubt that we would all emerge a stronger, more resilient country as a result of what we’d been through. But as it turned out, it wouldn’t be long until my personal resilience was tested again by tragedy.

  On December 2, 2002, my brother, Andy, died suddenly of a heart attack at the young age of forty-six. He was driving my father-in-law and Haley when it happened, and even in the middle of it, he had the wherewithal to slow down the car so they wouldn’t crash. The instant Spyder and I heard what had happened, we sped over to my parents’ house and told them there’d been an accident. We all rushed to the hospital. I can still see the emergency doors swinging open and Haley leaning forward and shaking her head no. He didn’t make it.

  My family was heartbroken. Andy had been my best friend since childhood. He was one of the great joys of my life—his humor, his gentle demeanor, his love of family. Just because we were all grown up didn’t mean that I’d lost my feelings of responsibility toward him. I was still on the lookout for him at all times, and now he was gone in an instant. Even now, all these years later, I still have dreams about Andy. In my dreams he’s alive and laughs at my surprise at seeing him. He’s still the joker, still my baby brother. He tells me that he is fine. I miss him every day.

  In the aftermath, I just couldn’t stand it. Nor could my parents. It nearly killed them. I couldn’t make sense of how something like this could happen, how someone so special could be taken from me with such swift resolution. It was so awful that I found myself wanting to spend more time in Hawaii, wanting to get as far from the familiar as possible. When he died we were still building our house there, and though initially it was just meant to be a getaway, it was our dream to live there full-time. After Andy died, I started thinking a lot about the impermanence of life, and eventually Spyder and I agreed that we should stop talking about living in Hana and actually do it. And after all that happened, we decided that it would be the right time to just do it. We ended up staying for four glorious years.

  Perhaps it was partly because we were looking for a way to channel our sadness over Andy’s death into our music, but in the year following his death, Spyder started wanting to get in the studio
again. We hadn’t made a studio album since 1997’s Innamorata. So he said, “Why don’t we make a record?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m feeling kind of lazy.”

  “Come on, come on.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve decided now that I’m an old woman in my fifties, I’m just gonna be opinionated and lazy.”

  “You were a pain in the ass when you were young! Now you want to be an old pain in the ass?”

  And so we ended up laughing and making a record titled Go. It’s a guitar-driven record, something we’d moved away from on Innamorata. It was great to be bashing again. It was the first album that we recorded completely digitally—no tape whatsoever. While I was intrigued by the new process, I was a little freaked out as well. All the tracks, all the vocals, weren’t on the twenty-four-track tape; they were numbers stored on air. It was strange to think that there was nothing physical that existed to prove what we’d actually made. It was all just space on a computer.

  Making Go was a unique experience. It was the first time after twenty-four years of recording that we would make a record totally unencumbered. We weren’t just musicians anymore. Of course, the workload was enormous at times. There was no strolling into the studio at one P.M., Starbucks in hand. We were in charge of financing, distribution, marketing artwork, and while it was a daunting responsibility, it was exciting to finally realize the goal we’d been working toward for so long. All of the lessons we’d learned from our experience with Innamorata were put to incredibly good use, and they really supported our decision to learn the indie business from the outside before diving in ourselves.

  We worked round the clock, and when we weren’t recording, we were doing any number of other necessary tasks, from writing to choosing artwork for the cover to making distribution deals. It was busy but gratifying. The idea that we were responsible for our own destiny was extraordinary. If things went south it was our doing. Likewise, if things were a success, that would be our fault too. Either way, it was so much easier to live our fate knowing that we weren’t at the mercy of someone else’s whim.

  Recording was fun for me, although Spyder says that he got too deep into making it and couldn’t climb out—couldn’t wrap it up. Then when he did finish it, he scrapped parts and redid them. Consequently, he’s not a big fan of Go, but I think this all happened in part because our focus was spread out into so many areas. A big part of that record was learning how to manage and delegate duties when we were running the whole show. With a lot of that learning done, we’d have a better sense of things next time. In the end I think we made a good, solid record with some great stuff on it, but more important, we created the model for all future projects. We put “Christmas in America” on as a bonus track, and all the proceeds from the sale of the single were donated to a 9/11 charity organization.

  After Go, we went on our annual summer tour, of course, but we also took on other projects as we kept ourselves visible. Of these, my absolute favorite was CMT Crossroads, a show on Country Music Television that pairs country artists with artists from other genres, and the two come together for a performance. We were set up with Martina McBride, whose work I was familiar with and had high regard for because of her vocal talent. As it turned out, I was even more impressed by her down-to-earth, no-nonsense personality. This was a woman I could relate to. She was much younger than me but was basically dealing with all the issues I’d dealt with throughout my career, save the sleazy program directors (there were laws against that now). But she, too, would pack up her daughters and take them with her, and she reminded me that juggling home, family, and career was alive and well. We spent an interesting and enlightening weekend together, comparing notes and swapping tips. The close bond that we shared ended up coming through in our performance, which went better than I could have ever anticipated, becoming the second-highest rated in the show’s history.

  COMING OFF THE POSITIVE experience of the Crossroads performance, during the next several years, we concentrated on one thing: achieving balance. Discovering and then implementing a schedule that worked for us instead of against us. It was important to stay in the public’s consciousness and we had to stockpile cash to fund future projects. We knew what we wanted and that was to not have to deal with the pressure to record. If wanted to record, great, but if not, we wanted that to be great too. So we went about implementing a strategy that could help us achieve that.

  The cornerstone of this plan was rethinking the way we toured in the summer. Touring would become the financial anchor subsidizing all our creative projects, but it would be done in a time frame that benefited our family life. It needed to be on an annual basis, but on our terms. And with kids in school that meant the summer—every summer. It wasn’t easy at first; agents and promoters balked, saying it couldn’t be done, that neither we nor anyone else would make any money. But in the end, it did work, and everyone profited both financially and on a much more basic level.

  Part of the key to touring was making sure that my voice could go the distance. If touring was going to be the centerpiece of our plan, I needed to make sure my voice could make it. I didn’t want to be one of those singers who had to create totally new arrangements of her songs just so she could hit the notes. I knew that people came out to shows to hear their favorite songs, and while it’s one thing to inject new life into those songs, it’s another to revamp them completely. I wanted these songs to take people back. To remind them of what rock and roll sounds like. To do that I would have to take care of my vocal cords.

  My classical voice training and my discipline over the years had given my voice longevity, and of course not smoking and not drinking had only helped my chances. (Not partying may have made me boring by rock star standards, but at least I could still sing.) While we always packed the tour schedule to the brim, we also made sure to build in days off so that I could give my throat a rest. I knew I had the stamina to keep singing like I wanted to. I just needed to be smart about it.

  Touring by itself, though, would not be enough. We had to diversify, and so we branched out, doing more TV and more endorsements. A couple of years ago we’d shot an episode of Dharma and Greg, playing ourselves. We get stranded in an airport with Dharma and Greg and a couple that is going to get married. Dharma decides to throw a wedding for them, so Spyder and I perform the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun.” Spyder got a kick out of the fact that the only other music person who’d appeared on the show was Bob Dylan. It was fun working with Jenna Elfman because she was such a nut, just as funny offstage as she is in character.

  That experience went well enough that I thought I should do some more—not because I was looking to transition into an acting career at age fifty, but because it was an easy way to show people that I was out there. If they saw my face on VH1’s Behind the Music or A&E’s Biography, there wouldn’t be that same question mark about what I was up to now the next time they looked in the local paper and saw that I was coming to town.

  We ended up doing a bunch of TV guest spots, usually playing ourselves. We were guests on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and on an episode of Charmed, with an assortment of music specials mixed in. Spyder and I also appeared as ourselves in a 2008 episode of The Young and the Restless, singing at the Indigo Club. Our buddy David Kurtz writes the music for Y&R (as it’s affectionately known) and he’d been asking us to come on the show for years. Finally, we agreed to do it. TV is such a strange medium, not really my thing. But everyone in the cast and crew was very sweet, and we did have a good time.

  When we weren’t making assorted TV appearances, we were cross-marketing our recorded music, live performances, merchandise, and anything else we could throw in the pot. I let my entrepreneurial spirit take over and just ran wild with the possibilities now that we were calling the shots. We licensed our music, and looked for new ways to put it out there. With total power, I could keep the reins as slack or tight as I wanted. I soon discovered that while I made a pretty good rock star, I made an even bett
er businesswoman.

  All sorts of different opportunities popped up. We put out a few different video retrospectives that contained all of the videos we’d released. “Love Is a Battlefield” was featured in the movie 13 Going on 30, much to the delight of Hana, who was nine at the time. In 2007, we heard about an interesting opportunity coming our way: a video game called Guitar Hero wanted to use “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” Never one to shun new ways to promote and market, I was excited not only that a whole new generation of fans would be listening to our song, but that for four minutes, everyone would get to be Spyder, playing onstage at one of our shows. I must say, it was not what either of us envisioned when we first sat down in that studio together, but it was pretty damn cool.

  Spyder also started to branch out beyond music, beginning a new business venture, On the Rock Nutrition. Spyder is Sicilian and most Italians have terrible stomach issues; “acido” is a common ailment. After years of searching for a natural remedy, he decided to make one himself. His mission was to improve his health and vitality, which years of touring had compromised. He hired a group of chemists and they began formulating, under his guidance, a natural, food-based product that supports energy and digestion. The product Burn Out was born. Spyder currently runs a brisk and successful online site for his products and this year will begin retail distribution.