Between a Heart and a Rock Place (24 page)

In many ways, the final straw had been the way everything ended with Newman. To know that the team that had helped make it all happen had also played a role in its near destruction was difficult to face. The people who'd shared our success had managed to taint the experience so badly that retirement seemed to be the only logical solution. There was too much in the way, too many obstacles that over-
shadowed the joy of making music. To have worked so hard, to have struggled with the rampant sexism, to have kept a marriage intact when everyone was hell-bent on destroying it, to have found a way to balance motherhood and a career—to have done all that only to be done in by my own camp was heartbreaking. I didn't see any way to salvage it once that had happened. It simply wasn't worth it. I was done.

 

A
ND THAT WOULD HAVE
been the end of it. Truly, the story would have ended right there if it hadn't been for the man I married, the man who always knew how to push me into ideas that initially seemed completely ridiculous and probably were. But he also knew how to be pretty persistent.

One day in 1990, he came to me with exactly this kind of idea: he wanted to make a jump blues album. I was incredulous.

“Absolutely not,” I told him. “There's no way we're doing that.”

Spyder and I had loved the blues all our lives. It was the music we played at home, for personal enjoyment. Big Maybelle and Sonny Boy Williamson are my absolute favorite singers. Spyder knew that. And he also knew enjoying that music as a listener was one thing, but singing it was something else entirely. He was convinced we would make an amazing record, but I was pretty sure that he'd lost his mind. I didn't want to be one more white chick trying to sing the blues, and Christ, who was whiter than me? It seemed like a recipe for disaster, but Spyder was adamant—just like he always is when he knows he's right about something.

He was right about one thing: with total creative control, now was as good a time as any to roll the dice. I mean, honestly, since I was already thinking about quitting, what difference would it really make? We had a chance to make whatever record we wanted to make. Why not use that to try to remember why the hell we were even making
records in the first place? I wasn't completely sold, but Spyder has this wonderfully annoying habit of never totally hearing me, especially when he's trying to persuade me to challenge myself. In the end, even though I wasn't 100 percent convinced, he'd planted the seed in my head, and he knew that was all he needed.

He set out to find the people who could make it work. He started out by approaching our friend Chuck Domanico, a great upright bass session player. Chuck was unbelievable and had played with everyone, including Frank Sinatra and many of the blues players we loved. He was a big guy with this big belly and masses of curly black hair. He was Italian, but he definitely sported an Afro. And he was constantly smoking, coughing, and telling stories. We knew that with Chuck, not only would we make some great music, we'd have a great time in the process.

With Chuckie on board, Spyder then went about putting the rest of the band together, eventually securing the group Roomful of Blues. They were tremendous players out of Providence, Rhode Island. They'd released their debut album in 1977 and had been playing constantly ever since. Respected and revered, they're widely considered to be responsible for paving the way for artists like the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Spyder loved their work and knew they were exactly who we needed to make this record swing.

“I'll just cut some tracks,” he said, trying to entice me. “Then you can see what you think.”

“Okay. Just a few tracks, though.”

“Right, first we need to pick some songs.”

And so we listened and listened. I picked some of my favorites and he picked some of his. The band came to Spyder's Soul Kitchen, and in eighteen days we ended up making a record. The recording was unlike anything we'd done before, a completely unique experience. With few exceptions we recorded without overdubbing, and if something was messed up, we went in and redid the whole thing. Everyone was in a terrific mood all the time, and Chuck set the tone. He was an endless
source of irreverent humor that came out no matter what was going on. And he was strictly a union guy. We'd be on a roll recording, and then out of the blue, he'd stop us and say, “Lunch break!” We'd do two or three takes at a time, and then he'd stop us again and say, “That's enough.” He'd then blow on his hands, kiss each of his fingers, and say, “You gotta let 'em know when they done good,” before laughing uproariously. There wasn't a single moment during the making of that record that wasn't pure delight.

The last song we planned to record for
True Love
was “I Feel Lucky,” which was going to be an up-tempo, swinging rave in the style of Louis Prima. Spyder and Myron had written the lyrics, and when it came time to write the music for the song, to get in the mood, Spyder would start drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes first thing in the morning. He never was much of a coffee drinker because it just made him a wired maniac. He'd have an occasional espresso after dinner, but that was the extent of it. But when he was creating the music for “I Feel Lucky,” I'd find him at the piano, jacked up on caffeine, working out this
boom, boom, boom
progression. He was the Mad Hatter on steroids, but he wrote one hell of a song.

“You are nuts!” I'd tell him. “You're flying! What do you think you are doing?”

“You gotta hear this song! It's gonna be great!”

The song was this fast-paced swing number that was unrelenting from the first note. He showed the horn guys what he was doing, and they jumped all over it. Those guys just rocked it. When they finished I shook my head and said, “Spyder, you are a maniac. I hope you know that.”

“Oh yeah, I know it,” he said with coffee-induced glee.

You can hear the fun we were having in every bar of
True Love
. This recording was joyous for many reasons, not the least of which was that we felt like we were being reborn. Spyder called it a
cleanse,
an event that turned the tables on the old mistakes and grievances.

When it came time to do the video for the title track, “True Love,” the idea was to show the beauty in all the ways that people experience love. That included the love between a parent and a child, between brothers and sisters, between a preacher and his congregation, between friends. This was about true love in its many forms. We filmed scenes of a young couple holding an infant, beautiful laughing children—and the label wanted it all cut out and replaced with me…being sexy. Yawn. It was ridiculous. And it didn't happen; in the end they came around and the result was a tender, beautiful, and sensual video. Compared to our past dealings on creative issues, their initial opposition to the video ended up being just a small bump in the road.

We did a short tour to promote the record, convincing Chuckie and the entire Roomful of Blues band to go with us. Unfortunately promoters were still a little nervous after the disastrous
Wide Awake
tour. Rather than take the chance that audiences might not want to hear us playing the blues, they covered their butts by billing the show with the ambiguous moniker “An Evening with Pat Benatar.” As a result, there were occasionally disgruntled audience members who'd come to hear us play our bigger hits and would get unruly from time to time.

“Play ‘Heartbreaker'!” they'd call out.

“Darlin', you're at the wrong show,” I'd call back.

We were playing songs off the record, like B. B. King's “Payin' the Cost to Be the Boss” and “I've Got Papers on You,” and Albert King's “I Get Evil.” There was no question we rocked, but there was also no mistaking the fact that “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” was not happening at these shows. We tried to get the advance promotion changed so that people knew what they were going to be hearing, but there wasn't enough time. The main thing that happened was that a few marquees read “Rock and Soul.”

Even with that small glitch, we had a blast. Chuckie entertained us with his endless stories, and traveling with Roomful was like having
all your crazy brothers over for Sunday dinner at once. We had a lot of laughs, but most important, it wiped the tour slate clean. It was like starting over; we'd been given a gift, a second chance.

There's no doubt that as an album
True Love
wasn't as commercially successful as the earlier records, but it was a completely different genre. It had absolutely no radio support. It was like comparing apples and oranges. Blues records can't be held to the same sales standards as pop and rock records.
True Love
sold 339,000 copies in the U.S., and for the blues, that's a damn good showing.

In the end, making
True Love
turned out to be the most important decision of our career. Spyder's idea to create a record that had a completely different direction was brilliant and fateful—exactly what we needed to conjure the spark that had brought us together in the first place.
True Love
was a labor of love from two people who couldn't bear the thought of a life without music. When it was finished it had surpassed all that we hoped for. We were newly inspired and ready to begin the next phase of our musical life together.
True Love
was God's gift to us for sticking it out.

 

W
ITH
T
RUE
L
OVE
, we'd put the new Chrysalis's pledge to give us creative control to the test, so we decided to sign on for another record,
Gravity's Rainbow
. It would be our last with them.

From the start, we were looking to make this album something that was more traditional for us, but the impact that
True Love
had on our psyches was apparent. The high from
True Love
carried over to
Gravity's Rainbow,
making the atmosphere positive and optimistic. We were all happy to be there. Don Gehman was co-producing with Spyder, and he was a mellow, upbeat guy. He brought along his engineer, Rick Will, who we could tell right away was born under the same “I'm a bent, lovable lunatic” sign that Spyder was. We had some fun. We were
happy to be back playing the kind of music that had been our signature sound. Seeing all those amps again and hearing that wailing guitar just made me smile. I had tucked my love for all of this away in a safe place and it had survived. In spite of everything, I still loved my job.

By the time we recorded
Gravity's Rainbow,
Spyder and I had given up trying to have another child. We'd been trying for almost nine years—ever since Haley had been born. In 1988, I'd had an ectopic pregnancy and lost the baby very early on, and that was enough to make us feel that we were not destined to have another child. We desperately wanted one, but it just wasn't going to happen.

One weekend while we were making
Gravity's Rainbow,
we went away—just on a little getaway to decompress from recording since I had to be back on Monday to shoot the cover for the record. That weekend, Spyder and I talked about how we really needed to stop trying for another baby. Obviously God had a different plan for us, and we were so grateful to have Haley, who was now eight years old. We made a pact to give up the hope of having another child and simply live in the present, enjoying our family the way it was.

On Monday after the relaxing trip, I went to the studio where the shoot would take place. I got my hair and makeup done, and then it was time to go to work with the stylist. She'd put together a bunch of outfits for me to try on, but I always hated this part, dressing and undressing—the whole thing was so tedious. On this particular day, it was especially awful because apparently she'd gotten all the wrong sizes. Everything was uncomfortably snug.

“I don't understand it. I know I took the correct measurements,” she said, exasperated.

“Don't worry about it,” I said, trying to adjust the seams on my clothes. “Let's just get it over with.”

We tried on several outfits and took Polaroids to preview how they looked before we started the actual shoot. One of the photos in the pile was a close-up of my face to check the lighting. I picked it up to see
if I liked the makeup, and looking closely at my face, I stopped dead: there, in my eyes, was the light I'd seen before, in the footage from the “Painted Desert” video.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I told myself not to get my hopes up. I didn't say a word to anyone, and I finished the shoot. On the way home I had the limo driver stop at an all-night pharmacy, where I bought a pregnancy test. This was back when you had to wait to do the test in the morning, so when I got home, I hid the test and set my alarm to get up before Spyder. I got up the next morning and took the test. The line was blue. It was a miracle. Nearly nine years of trying and finally, a baby. I ran into the bedroom and jumped on my sleeping husband, waking him out of a dead sleep.

“Spyder, wake up! We're pregnant!”

“What? What? What are you talking about?”

“I took the test, it's blue, I'm pregnant.”

He just stared at me. “Nope. I don't believe it. You did it wrong. I'm going to the drugstore and getting another test.”

It was six-thirty in the morning and the closest pharmacy didn't open until seven
A.M
. He sat there waiting, and when it finally opened, he bought $150 worth of tests. We spent the next hour turning sticks blue. Oh yeah, we were definitely pregnant, and we had a pile of blue plastic sticks scattered across our bathroom floor to prove it. The next day I went to the doctor, and it was verified—we were having another baby.

The knowledge that I was pregnant again made the release of
Gravity's Rainbow
a particularly joyous occasion. This album was back in the AOR pocket and contained a big hit with “Everybody Lay Down,” which reached number 3 on the album rock chart. A second single, “Somebody's Baby,” was released with a beautiful and compelling video.