Between a Heart and a Rock Place (21 page)

At heart, though, I was simply a working mother, and working mothers are all pretty much the same. Our profession is incidental. We all feel like we have no grip, like there aren't enough hands or hours in the day. Every one of us has to choose between our child and our job every day—and it sucks. There's absolutely nothing worse than having to pry the fingers of your sick-with-a-101-degree-temperature toddler off your body and walk out the door to go to work. It's horrible, even when “work” is performing at Madison Square Garden.

One of the most reassuring things I heard around that time was something Chrissie Hynde told me when I ran into her at an event where she had brought her little girl, who was born about six months before Haley. I'd met Chrissie a couple of times while we were on the road. I'd long admired her work. I loved her voice and I appreciated her
unorthodox attitude. But she was dark and moody. There was a distance she possessed. We never really connected, but we were acquaintances and new mothers. I asked her how it was going, being a new mother and a rocker. I hoped maybe, since she was six months ahead of me in the mom department, she would have some good advice or insight.

“How are you doing this?” I asked in desperation. She shook her head.

“I'm not doing it! I'm
not doing it
! I'm just trying to get through the day—
every
day.”

Oh, crap!
I couldn't believe that she was telling me it didn't get any easier. But once I thought it over, I realized that what she'd said was priceless. I knew that I was no different than anyone else. It's the hardest job that you'll ever love. And it
is
your job. I'll never try to perpetuate the big lie—that you can do it all easily. But I will tell you that it's worth every minute of it.

I started being very honest about what being a new mom on the road was like, and I never stopped telling people the truth. Years later, when I had my second daughter, Hana, I remember a young journalist explaining how other singers readied themselves for their shows.

“I've heard that Mariah Carey lies down in the back of the bus and doesn't take her head off the pillow,” the woman said. “Her assistants bring her a warm liquid that she sips through a straw to keep her vocal cords loose.”

I nodded. Okay.

“And Céline Dion doesn't speak for twenty-four hours before a concert,” the woman continued. “How is it with you?”

So I told her how it was with me.

“Here's what I do. I'm standing in the bathroom on the bus trying to put on mascara for the show. My two-year-old is sitting on the potty saying, ‘Mommy, wipe me!' That's how I get ready.”

The young woman, who was only twenty-three years old, was horrified.
Horrified!

“Oh…” was about all she managed to get out. I just smiled. I didn't say anything. I didn't need to.

I'm not sure she got it, unless maybe the day came when she went to a meeting with baby puke on her blouse or had to wipe a child's bottom while trying to get ready for something. As for me, I decided that to be a parent is to develop your sense of humor. I decided I rather liked the idea of being Erma Bombeck with an edge.

Ultimately, what I discovered with Haley was a hard lesson that many women, before and after, have been forced to confront: no matter how wonderful having your baby is, there is a big lie about how you can easily have it all as a working mother. The truth is, you can have it all, but it ain't gonna be easy. It's not like they told you—they lied about motherhood and careers. It's harder than you think it's gonna be. You can do it, and I think you should do it. But go in with your eyes wide open, and know that sometimes people won't try to make it easier for you. They won't realize that your children—your family—must come first, and the career second.

And
that
was the part the feminists conveniently left out. There was no mention of how the scent of a newborn could render you incapable of making a clear decision. No explanation of how love-drunk you would be because of baby spit and chubby little fingers. No sense of how some primal bond hard-wired in your brain could cause you to do unthinkable things—like want to stay home and be a wife and mother.

But that's exactly what happened. In the weeks and months immediately after Haley's birth, my brain went smooth. I couldn't write, I didn't want to sing—I just wanted to be with my baby. “We Belong” had missed the deadline to be nominated for a Grammy, and so for the first time in four years, I didn't win one. That wasn't the strange part, though. The strange part was that I didn't even care.

T
HE DISTANCE THAT
H
ALEY'S
birth put between my music and me quickly became a problem. I had a bunch of dudes around me who wanted to continue with the status quo. Keeping things as they had been was their goal, and they did not want to negotiate this next chapter.

Almost immediately after I'd given birth to Haley, a litany of comments from Chrysalis began in an attempt to motivate me back to work by warning me that there could be backlash about me having a baby.

“No one wants to see a rocker who's someone's mother. Mothers aren't sexy.”

“You downplay this; no talking about the baby, no photos with the baby.”

“You need to make everyone forget it ever happened. You need to assure them that nothing's changed. That you're still the hard-core rocker girl you've always been.”

At first I dismissed all this as their typical insulting bullshit, but after hearing this chorus for long enough, I started to believe it. They
made me feel that by becoming a mother, I'd risked my entire career. It got under my skin. I started to convince myself that the only way to stay on top was to rush back into things. I became panicked. What if they were even half-right? I didn't want to make a mistake and mess everything up for our future, for Haley's future. So I did what needed to be done: I pulled my new mother self together and went to work. And that was how in 1985, approximately three months after giving birth to Haley, I found myself recording the song “Invincible.”

“Invincible” had come to us through our friend Holly Knight, who'd also written “Love Is a Battlefield.” She'd written the song for a film called
The Legend of Billie Jean,
and not long after Haley was born, she approached us to see if we were interested in recording it. In a perfect world this opportunity would have come six months later, allowing me to settle into motherhood, but unfortunately it didn't. I really wasn't ready on any level. I was just beginning to get a routine with Haley, figuring out how to avoid falling asleep on my feet. But there I was back in the studio laying down vocals. When it came time to shoot the video, I hadn't even lost all my pregnancy weight, and we ended up incorporating live performance footage with scenes from the film.

Even though the movie “Invincible” was made for ended up being a bit forgettable, the song itself was a smash, a top-ten song in the U.S. It was the hit that everyone had wanted to keep us visible, but it also had another consequence: it whetted Chrysalis's appetite. They didn't want just one hit single—they wanted a full album.

With the success of “Invincible” fresh in their minds, everyone pushed us to go back into the studio. This time, though, it was clear this wasn't about my career and staying in the game, it was about their bottom line plain and simple. What they didn't understand was how not ready we were for undertaking an entire album. It was one thing to bang out one song, but to craft an entire album so soon after having a baby was unfathomable.

When Chrysalis started making noise about a full album, our entire world was consumed by Haley—as it should have been. We knew we didn't have the focus necessary to get the job done. At that point, the most important thing on our agenda was trying to figure out how to achieve something resembling a sustainable routine. Haley wasn't even sleeping through the night. I was up and down at all hours breast-feeding her and living in a perpetual state of exhaustion. I was in no position to do much of anything, let alone write, rehearse, and record an album.

In most professional musical families, the husband and wife don't usually work together, and this means they have different schedules, making it easier to take turns caring for their kids. Alternatively, one of them is a layperson who can stay at home while the other is off touring or recording. In our case, we had the same schedule. If I was working, Spyder was working. It was a logistical challenge. We didn't want to hire a nanny to take care of this baby we'd waited so long to have.
We
wanted to do it. It's the same struggle all working parents go through. I wanted to stay home, but I knew that would be a mistake professionally, and Chrysalis did not waste an opportunity to remind me of that.

In truth, Chrysalis had bigger problems than dealing with me. The infrastructure of the record company was in the process of a major transition. Over the course of 1985, Terry made it clear that he wanted out, and eventually he sold his share of the company to his cofounder, Chris Wright. This was a stunning, jaw-dropping change. As much as Terry was a pain in the ass, the man knew the record business. He knew how to bring an album to market and how to get it sold. We weren't so sure how things would go with Chris, but the immediate result of Terry's departure was disarray.

Still, the shakeup with Terry and Chris didn't stop Chrysalis from demanding a new album. On the contrary, the banging only got louder
as it became clear they needed another hit record as soon as possible. When I told everyone—including my management—about the realities of having a three-week-old baby, the men made light of it, shrugged it off. I begged Chrysalis for a little more time, but they wouldn't go for it. They didn't want to lose the momentum created by “Invincible.” Strategically, I couldn't argue with them—they were dead right—but on a human level, it couldn't have been more callous. As always, they retreated behind their contract and used that to get what they wanted—no matter how unreasonable it was.

Their shortsightedness was staggering. They were willing to sacrifice all of our futures for one more shot at making some money. Meanwhile the record label as we knew it was disintegrating around us, and the new record that they so desperately wanted us to record would suffer for it. But everyone continued with the same lines they'd been using for years: “You gotta get in the studio. You gotta get in there.” We had no choice; we packed up the baby, got my parents to babysit, and went in to record.

In gambling, craps to be specific, the term “the hard way” refers to rolling doubles to get four, six, eight, or ten. It's difficult. Since you can't roll doubles and get an odd number, “seven, the hard way” is slang for an impossible bet. That's what this record was all about, an impossibility—seven albums in seven years. Hence the eventual title of the album,
Seven the Hard Way
.

Life in the studio on
Seven the Hard Way
was a cruel comedown from the emotional high we'd felt making
Tropico
. There was none of the smoothness or ease that we'd encountered with
Tropico
. This time, everything was a struggle, everybody was agitated, and all of that showed in the final product. There was bickering and fried nerves—not to mention a general lack of cohesion between us and between the cuts themselves. By the end of it, everyone just wanted me to go back to being pregnant.

Attitude was only one part of the problem. Simply put, we didn't have any songs ready. We'd always gone in to make a record with at least half of it written. This time we had nothing. Nothing! And Chrysalis shrugged that off as well.
Just write something
. So while we were trying to record, we were also trying to write the songs. We knew all too well what our process was for writing songs, and writing with the clock ticking in the back of our minds was not a good way to unleash our best material. During the recording, we ended up writing a few good songs that would have become great songs had we been able to work in our usual way, but there was no time. Instead, we recorded songs that hadn't fully evolved, songs that never should have been released. Songs that we weren't even finished writing, for God's sake! We accepted outside material because we had to, but even then the album only contained nine songs, which was ridiculous because normally we had twenty or so contenders from which we'd choose ten to fourteen tracks.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of all this was that many of the tracks were almost there, and knowing that felt so much worse than if we'd missed the mark altogether. It was heartbreaking that we'd spent our whole career striving for such a high level of integrity in everything we did, only to have it end up here. More than ever we saw ourselves for the commodities that we were to the label. They didn't care about us, they didn't care about our future, and they sure as shit didn't care about our family.

I kept lecturing myself to get a grip, but when you are a first-time mother you can't get a grip. You're doing well if you can hang on, feed and change the baby, and maybe—just maybe—get a little sleep. I was always very picky about recording. I wanted everything and everybody to be the best possible. I wanted to work my butt off and have everyone else doing the same. And I didn't want to hear any sissy crying about hard work, either. But there were not enough hours in the day to pull that off this time.

I was so exhausted and distracted that I couldn't do my job, and Spyder was so worried about me that he couldn't do his. I'd be ready to sing and Haley would start crying. We took a Winnebago to the studio every day, and we set up a porta-crib in the studio. Between recording sessions, Haley and I retreated to the RV, but when I was singing, I was often distractedly worrying that Haley was hungry or wanting her mama. The problem was, I couldn't just run back in and check on her. It's virtually impossible to get a cohesive vocal if you're constantly starting and stopping, because you lose all your momentum. This meant I had to continue singing until we got the take. That was just how it had to work. By the time I'd get back to Haley, we were both crying.

In the end, only
Crimes of Passion
surpassed this record in terms of difficulty and tension. Of all our albums,
Seven the Hard Way
cost the most to make and sold the least. The record came out in November 1985, but it was not a huge success, peaking at number 26 and only achieving gold record status, with 500,000 copies sold. It was the first time in seven years that we'd made a record that didn't sell a least a million copies. I was stunned but not surprised. We'd made a record we had no business making, at a time when the record company had no business selling it.

Perhaps the worst part of all this was that making this album at this pace was completely unnecessary. Even just a little sensitivity on their part, a little flexibility in scheduling, would have made all the difference in the world. (Spyder still dreams of taking all of our original songs from that record and crafting them into their true potential. It would be closure—maybe one day.) If they'd been willing to give us just a couple of more months and a bit more space, we would have returned to the studio ready to do what needed to be done. After all, making records was our job, and we knew as well as anyone that we weren't ready to stop doing what we loved. We just needed time to achieve a balance between being parents and being musicians. But that kind of latitude was not in the cards.

The hardest thing to stomach was that I knew they were manipulating me. All of the clarity I'd experienced in the immediate aftermath of becoming a mother was still present, but I was simply too beaten down by exhaustion and fear of making the wrong decision to do anything about it. They knew all of this. They could see it in my face and hear it in my voice. They knew I was struggling, and they used it against us.

Ironically, despite our dissatisfaction with the final result and the lower sales figures, the reviews were good.
Rolling Stone
's Tim Holmes wrote: “Behind the scenes, producer-guitarist-songwriter Neil Giraldo uses the studio like a machete to help Pat slice through the thorny entanglements of relationships. Pat and Neil seem to be a match made in AOR heaven. Their approach combines the sonic bombast of yarbling metal with the intelligence and compassion of feminism. Railing against the constraints of male-dominated power rock, Pat Benatar sings her lungs out with the kind of sentiments that the rock boize might address if only they had the balls. The album is an emotional combat zone.”

Interestingly, without any inside information, Holmes made a shrewd observation:

“Luck has little to do with [Benatar's] position as the apotheosis of Eighties American womanhood—she got there through experience.”

Damn straight.

 

T
HE MINUTE THE RECORD
was released in early 1986, we went out on the road. Naturally, this time out everything about touring changed. With a young baby in tow, life on the bus would never be the same.

Strangely enough, Haley seemed to love all the traveling, and in fact touring with her was easier than it had been to record with her. During the recording, we'd been working twelve-to-sixteen-hour days
with hours on end spent apart from her, but in our insulated world on the road, the schedule was much more manageable, not to mention predictable. Kids thrive on routine, and because of the strict schedule that touring requires, routine was the one thing we had plenty of. I only had two responsibilities every day: be with Haley and perform. Of course, there were also press events and photo sessions, but for the most part my schedule eased up much more than in the past. With Haley around, it was impossible for me to go to radio stations and do endless press like I'd done in the past, so a lot of those options were simply taken off the table. While this gave us more time to be together as a family, it was definitely part of what hurt record sales. It was, however, a price we were willing to pay.

The entire day was organized around naps and feedings. Calling ahead to promoters to find out the best restaurant in town was replaced with locating the closest Chuck E. Cheese or playground. We carted a ton of crap with us—cribs, playpens, strollers, anything and everything we thought we might need. Haley even had her own Anvil cases for toys. (Later on when our second daughter, Hana, was small and I had learned not to drag around so much stuff, we were in a hotel lobby in New York when a tour bus pulled up. Some crew people got out and proceeded to unload a ton of baby gear. It turned out to be Bruce Springsteen's bus, and his wife Patti was there with their kids. Spyder and I just chuckled, remembering the days when we did the same.)