PAT BENATAR
Pat Benatar (born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski; January 10, 1953) is an American singer-songwriter and four-time Grammy Award winner. During the 1980’s, Benatar had two Multi-Platinum albums, five Platinum albums, three Gold albums, 17 Billboard chartings and 15 of them being Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hits, “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”, “Love Is a Battlefield”, “We Belong”, and “Invincible”. Other popular singles include “Heartbreaker”, “Treat Me Right”, “Fire and Ice”, “Promises in the Dark”, “Shadows of the Night”, and “All Fired Up”. She was the first female artist to play on MTV, performing “You Better Run”. (More from Wikipedia)
John Mellencamp released an album in 1979 under the name on his first album (Johnny Cougar), A Biography that included a Top 40 song, “I Need A Lover”; Pat Benatar also included “I Need a Lover” on her debut album, In the Heat of the Night.
(July 2012)
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Years ago, I heard that there was an unwritten rule among disc jockeys (maybe not unwritten in some places) that you were not supposed to play two songs with female singers one after another, under the theory that listeners wouldn’t be able to tell the songs apart. I cannot imagine that this has ever really been true, but it certainly wasn’t the case by the punk rock/new wave era: Picking artists almost at random, would anyone really have trouble distinguishing Blondie, Pat Benatar, Patti Smith, and Pretenders?
(December 2013)
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I have never seen any of these local CD’s anywhere except at the place where I bought them. But lesser known and unknown albums accumulate with the hit albums, and record stores offering both new and used albums try to sell them also.
I guess I first learned of this when I would go into a record store and start flipping through the stacks. Many stores have separate sections set up for major artists like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Pat Benatar, the Band, Black Sabbath, David Bowie, the B-52’s, etc. Then at the end would be a section simply marked “B”; here would be found albums by other artists whose names start with B. Some would be well known – a stray Boston or Blind Faith or Jack Bruce album might be found there, say – but most were utterly unknown to me. I would kind of flip through them, but I rarely bought anything.
Now when I go into a record store that has major artists in their own marked sections, I usually pass those by and go straight to the plain “B”!
(December 2015)
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In seemingly no time, the music scene was crowded with top bands and artists whose work has held up well over the decades since, among them Patti Smith Group (whose debut album, Horses came out before Ramones, in December 1975), Television, Richard Hell, the Heartbreakers (the punk band not Tom Petty’s group, though he was a part of the scene as well), Talking Heads, the Dead Boys, Blondie, the Clash, the Cars, Elvis Costello, Pat Benatar, Joy Division, the Specials, the Go-Go's, the Police, etc., etc., etc. There were so many that rock critics and others began distinguishing bands in the safety-pin set as “punk” and others that were less confrontational as “new wave”.
(December 2016)
