Between a Heart and a Rock Place (10 page)

Saying nothing about it to me, the label had picked a cover shot
from these supposed publicity photos. I was stunned. How could you make an album cover with no relevance to what had been recorded?

“We haven't done a cover shoot,” I reminded him.

“You're going to love it when it's finished,” he said. The back of the cover mock-up was another shot of me. No mention of the band. No names. Nothing. Seated next to me, Spyder didn't say anything, but we could both feel the tension building. I took a minute to keep myself in check before I really lost it.

“This isn't going to work,” I said after a long pause. “At the very least, there has to be a photo of the band on this cover.” That was not what he wanted to hear.

“Do you have any idea how stupid and naïve you are?” he asked in his most patronizing tone. “No one wants to see the band. This is about you. No one cares about the band.”

For a split second, I was speechless.
Did he really just say that out loud? With Spyder, a band member, sitting right here next to me?
It wasn't just the sentiment that surprised me. After all, everything the label had done told me they felt this way. It was the fact that he'd come here, to the living room that I shared with Spyder, and said those words to my face. In addition to being blatantly insensitive, it was disrespectful to both of us. There was absolutely no concern for Spyder and no concern for discretion. They were just dissing him to his face without an ounce of remorse. My anger, which had been building for weeks and months, boiled over. I threw him and his cover out of my house. We were done talking.

This was an issue for my manager to handle. It was his job to represent my interests in disputes with the label. Frustratingly, I got the same amount of cooperation on the cover issue as I had on the question of Spyder's production credit. None. Newman would not support me. Coming so soon on the heels of the producing debacle, I could see that he was caught up in record label politics. Something had changed. Newman was making the huge mistake of trying to stay neutral. He'd
protect me only so far and stop short of offending them. While he did his best not to hurt me, he thought that he could straddle the middle ground without jeopardizing his relationship with either side.

As usual the only person forced to compromise was me. The front cover would remain of me alone, and the back would be a photo of the band. Contractually they had the advantage. Normally, after a success like we'd seen for our first record, the manager would have gone back in to renegotiate the artist's contract for the next album, giving the artist more control over things like artwork and song choice. For some reason, that never happened with us. Chrysalis had total control over this album cover, just as they did with the last one. I had no option but to keep the front cover they'd chosen, of me alone, and shoot the back cover with the band.

On the day of the photo shoot, the boys arrived dressed in the clothes they wore onstage, only to be told they were to change into the wardrobe some stylist had brought along. It was a bad day. The glammed-up outfits could only be described as lame. Rock and roll band?
Please
. The guys looked like they'd stepped out of the pages of
GQ
magazine. The expressions on their faces in that picture are priceless. They were all thoroughly disgusted. From then on, the band and I referred to what would become my biggest album as
Crimes of Fashion
.

It was too late to do anything about it, though. I didn't have one bit of control over what was done with regard to cover art, or much of anything beyond the music, at that point. I was the resident star, but that status got me nothing.

I like to think that I have a pretty good asshole detector. But I realized then that I had been dead wrong about Terry Ellis. I liked him very much when we first met at Tramps. He seemed like a stand-up guy, interested in me as a person and in my music. Instead, he was turning out to be one of the most arrogant and overblown men I'd ever met. And with the exception of our one ally, Buzzard, Terry surrounded himself with people who were just like him.

The label wasn't finished pissing me off. The biggest insult came as the new tour to promote the release of
Crimes of Passion
got started. I picked up a copy of
Billboard
in the Denver airport, knowing that Chrysalis had taken out a full-page ad to promote the album. With no advance warning, no hint of what was going on, I saw myself practically nude on the pages of the most important music trade magazine in the nation. I slammed the magazine shut and tucked it under my arm. I felt like I'd been raped.

They had taken the cover photo to the album and airbrushed off the tank top I was wearing. In its place, they'd put a sign over my seemingly nude chest that announced the release date of the new record. As if that weren't enough, they'd also given me a boob job. So I was not only naked, but naked with cleavage. I am a very small woman. I do not have large breasts (I only weighed ninety pounds back then). In fact, I'm damn near flat chested and that's just how I like it. But they'd drawn on breasts and cleavage, which was insulting and humiliating.

I kept thinking,
Who approved this
?
Not me.

Aside from being embarrassing, the photo was stupid. Didn't they understand that people already knew how I was built? All people had to do was take one look at me and they'd know I didn't look like that. Were
Billboard
readers suddenly going to flock to my album because I'd miraculously grown new breasts? It was sexism at its worst, and I immediately broke down. Months of stress, exhaustion, and frustration came pouring out of me. I'd been going nonstop for so long. I'd toured relentlessly and promoted as hard as anyone could. In the face of numerous obstacles, I'd recorded an album that I knew had enormous potential. I was on the cusp of something great, but in that moment, all I felt was shame.

I called my parents. I had to prepare them.

“I don't know if you've seen it,” I began, “but I promise you that I am not naked in
Billboard
!”

I was a long way from short skirts and matrons now.

C
HRYSALIS'S PROMOTIONAL TACTICS FOR
Crimes of Passion
may have been questionable, but the music was a stratospheric success.

Crimes of Passion
was both a critical and a commercial smash, with a lot of journalists picking up on what we'd been trying to do, pointing to the hard-rocking grit and interplay between vocals and guitars. It sold over a million records just on the strength of the debut single, “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” on its way to sales of over five million.
Billboard
pronounced me dominant among female rockers. The album was nominated for a Grammy award for Best Rock Performance, Female.

On the heels of “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” “Treat Me Right” became the album's second hit single. Meanwhile AOR (album-oriented radio) started playing “Hell Is for Children,” and the song got great reviews, including one from
Billboard
calling it “a stunning rocker.” Given this initially warm reception, I couldn't have been more surprised when the song became controversial.

To support the album, we went out on tour that fall, and my first hint that anything was going on was when someone came backstage at a show and told me that there were some people picketing the venue.
The protest was over the use of the word “hell” in a song involving children. I was stunned. What was child abuse if not hellish? And with all of the things going on in the world, was a song exposing child abuse really something to protest? I had written the song believing that I was helping to raise awareness of a major social problem.

Thankfully, the negative reaction from this one group wasn't shared by many. By the time we came off the first leg of the tour, the management office was receiving mailbags full of thank-you letters from people who had been abused as children. I sat there on the floor and read every one of them. Most were from adults who said that it had meant so much for them to hear the lines “You shouldn't have to pay for your love with your bones and your flesh.”

But despite the critical raves and the instant sales, the year after the release of
Crimes of Passion
turned out to be the worst of my life. It should have been a year of celebration, enjoying our success, and relishing that we were making music that people everywhere were embracing. Even though they loved what we'd done in the studio, the record label continued to mess with Spyder and me. Strange things started happening to Spyder when it came to things that Chrysalis handled. Spyder wouldn't get paid on time and would have to ask about his check. If the band members' names were listed on a marquee, Spyder's name might be left off. Often, he wasn't invited to meetings.

They treated him like dirt, and it was shameful. I could tell it was starting to wear him down, because it was also starting to wear me down. My desire for us to be seen as a band hardened even more. Over and over I was given the credit for what we were doing. And over and over I tried to counter that idea. I kept reminding everyone—the label, journalists, radio—that the success we were having was due to everyone, not just me. But people saw the name “Pat Benatar” and assumed I was the sole reason for the sound. This misconception was the gorilla in the room in our relationship, and I spent the next twenty years trying to undo this perception. (Today, after almost three decades, I
finally feel that people know the real story of Spyder's contribution, but it's been a long, frustrating road.)

I wasn't the only one who believed Spyder was being treated shabbily.

In October 1980, the same month that “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” entered the Top 40 chart,
Rolling Stone
's Steve Pond noted that Spyder's position in the band appeared to be “tricky.” Pond pointed out Spyder's significant involvement in the recording process, adding, “Not everyone wants his contributions publicized. On the back of her new album [
Crimes of Passion
], Benatar thanks him ‘for all the heart and hard work in the Production of this Record. I love you.' But the current Chrysalis bio doesn't even mention that he writes songs.”

The record label's attitude started to fray the relationship between Spyder and me. He began to believe that mixing personal relationships and a band
would
cause problems, just like Chrysalis had predicted. The frustrating part of it was that the label's treatment of us was causing trouble for the relationship; our relationship wasn't causing problems for the music. The real problem for them was that the difficulties with Olsen and
Crimes of Passion
had made us even closer than we were before. They couldn't get between us or around us. They lost whatever control they thought they had over me, and treating Spyder poorly was the closest they could come to payback.

This tension was fueled by the label's continued inability to back me up when I needed their support. I had interviews and visits to the local rock and roll station in every city we played. I could just about count on half of the deejays or program directors hitting on me, and not in a subtle way. I'd walk in and some jerk would pat his lap.

“You come right over here and sit down, honey. We'll see if we can't get that record played.”

“Fuck you,” I'd fire back. Suddenly I was back in the Roaring Twenties Café with the men chomping their cigars. Only this time, when I said, “Fuck you,” nobody was laughing.

The label and Newman were in hysterics.

“You can't say ‘fuck you' to radio people!”

“The hell I can't. I just did.” I never had to put up with that shit from my band. I never had to put up with that shit from guys at Catch a Rising Star or other places I'd played early on. Why would I put up with that trash from some radio guy?

But Chrysalis didn't see it that way. There was a double standard for women in this business and they were all too willing to remind me of that. If a guy said “fuck you” to someone it was rock and roll; for a woman to do it was disrespectful. This was rock and roll's dirty little secret: it was 1980, the women's movement had been around for almost twenty years, and yet overt sexism and misogyny were alive and well. With all its posturing as a crusader for liberal beliefs, the music business was overrun with chauvinism.

There were so many different ways that the issue would rear its ugly head. While there were the blatant things, like my image and being harassed by radio DJs, it was also more subtle. We'd be pushing to get airtime for our songs, and radio programmers would say things like, “We'll definitely put the single in heavy rotation at the end of the week, but we can't right now. We're already playing a single by a girl.” When the guys at radio stations weren't hitting on me, they were bringing out some sexy poster and wanting me to sign it to them, to write some personal note. I knew they didn't do that with the male rockers who visited their stations, and I was livid.

I've sometimes heard people say that I was exaggerating about this. Maybe it wasn't happening to them. Maybe their people did a good job of insulating them from what was going on. I can only speak for myself and my experience, but it was happening to me on a daily basis and I was out there alone. No matter what I was doing, the sexual implication was always there. I wondered what would happen if I uglied myself up—quit wearing the tight pants, put a jacket on. The whole idea of being a pretty girl who could sing wore on me.

While I was well aware that the sexy image was something I'd created, I never meant for it to be the focal point. What I wanted was the image of the attractive-yet-capable woman that I had made up. My problem was not that people thought I was sexy, it was that Chrysalis
only
wanted the sexy part. It was offensive but also boring—typical of most men's thinking in postfeminist America.

I started to question whether I was cut out to be a star. Celebrity can be a terrible thing. Your life is no longer your own. Boundaries that were once respected are torn down. And if that happens quickly, it is overwhelming. Now before you start that “poor little rock star, five million records sold and she has to sign a few autographs” shit, understand this: sudden stardom really is difficult. Anyone who says different is lying. That doesn't mean it's not fun or totally worth it, but no matter how much you want to be in the public eye, no matter how grateful you are to have been given the opportunity, nothing, and I mean nothing, can prepare you for celebrity. It changes your life in ways you can't predict. It happens so quickly that you spend all of your time trying to adjust and all of your energy goes into finding a graceful way to navigate this new addition to your life.

I was clueless that we'd become celebrities until it was so blatant it was unavoidable. It was all happening so fast, and I was too busy rehearsing, doing press, and performing to really take notice. But we were playing a show in Gainesville, Florida, that fall when I learned just how strange this whole fame thing could make people act.

It was right at the beginning of the
Crimes of Passion
tour, and with only one other tour under our belt, we were relatively new at this. Gainesville is where the University of Florida is located, and we were staying in a hotel not far from the school. We hadn't yet graduated to the Four Seasons or the Ritz Carlton, so the hotel was a pretty cheap setup. The morning of the gig, we woke up, took showers, and went off to the venue, where we spent most of the afternoon tucked away in our dressing rooms. Eventually one of our crew members went outside
for a smoke and noticed a tent that was set up in the parking lot with a sign that read, “Pat Benatar Souvenirs.” Curious, he walked over to see what it was about.

Lying out on a table were little pieces of fabric and other odds and ends—not much to look at, let alone buy, but then he found out where they came from. It turned out that some college kids bribed the front desk at our cheap hotel to find out what room we'd stayed in. They unscrewed the windows, snuck in, and stole our bedding and our trash. They had cut up the sheets and pillowcases we'd slept on into little squares and they were selling them. They were also selling our garbage—old Kleenex, used Q-tips, and razors. Of course, management went out and confiscated everything, but they'd already made a good amount of cash.

Needless to say, the change of public awareness that we'd felt during the tour for
In the Heat of the Night
was nothing compared to what happened after “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” was released. Photographers hid out everywhere. You start to feel like you are being chased every time you leave the house. It was especially hard for me, because I never wanted to be rude to
anyone
.

And that was the trouble: I remained the same person I had always been. Private. Polite. Generally accommodating. This wasn't just because of the speed with which fame had hit. It was just who I was. It was almost impossible for me to be a jerk to total strangers, to act rude or brush off people. Especially when I knew they were following me around because they were fans. I never wanted to act like an asshole. Still, the attention had driven me almost over the edge, and the breaking point drove up in the form of a VW bus.

We were at home in Tarzana between touring and promotional appearances. I got up one morning, threw on a robe, and walked outside to get the newspaper. A bunch of kids in a VW van jumped out and started taking pictures of me with flashes flaring. I was startled and felt invaded. This was my own house. I was in a fucking bathrobe.

I knew then that I couldn't live there any longer. I was going to have to find a secluded house, maybe in a gated community, a place where I could have some kind of privacy. Up until then I would have laughed at the idea of my having to live behind fences. But that's how quickly things were changing.

 

B
ETWEEN
S
PYDER BEING INSULTED
, the sexed-up image problem, and the reality of fame, Spyder and I found ourselves increasingly on edge. For the first time since we'd come together as a couple, I felt a space opening up between us. We hadn't put it there, but that didn't matter—it was there nonetheless. I was going crazy trying to tour and fulfill the publicity demands. Every city meant more interviews, more radio visits, and more anger from me about being treated like a sex object. Chrysalis's only response was to tell me to keep quiet about it.

In many ways it was much worse for Spyder. For one thing,
Crimes of Passion
was being heralded as brilliant, and he was getting no credit for it. Continual slights from the label not only insulted him but hurt him. He is such a good-hearted,
nice
person. I'm very quick to say that he is
much
nicer than I am. Nice people feel things, whether they bitch about it or not. It's there. In addition, the celebrity angle was as hard for him as it was for me. When we were together, it was a circus. Spyder could still walk down the street, go to a store. But when I was along, it was a different story.

The tension between us began to mount more and more, eventually building to the point that when I was nominated for a Grammy Award, Spyder didn't attend the ceremony with me. The show, which honored work done in 1980, was held on February 25, 1981, at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Spyder didn't come with me, so Rick Newman escorted me instead.

I wasn't sure whether winning would be a good thing. The Grammy is a mainstream award, and back then some in the rock and roll world believed winning—or even being nominated—damaged your credibility. If you did happen to win, it was understood that you should not act too thrilled, or gush, or bounce up to accept the prize. At that time I was concerned about giving the appearance of selling out. I'd heard a few rumblings that some people thought we were a “corporate entity.” Ridiculous as that was, getting that label would have been the kiss of death in rock and roll.