In 1979 my parents sold the house I grew up in. We went from a neighborhood where every mother knew every other mother to an apartment complex where the girls my age had already done things I had only heard about secondhand, and they were not shy about letting me know it. I was eleven and had the social equipment of a golden retriever. One of my friends in that complex had a father who ran a company doing merchandising for major rock acts, which meant an enormous record collection in that apartment, including pressings you could not buy anywhere. That is where I found a promo-only copy of “In the Heat of the Night.” Alex Chatelain shot the cover, which I did not know at eleven and would not have cared about. Pat Benatar stands in the light off a window in a black slip with straps you could snap between two fingers, one arm bent up into her hair. The eyeliner does most of the work, laid on heavy enough to read across a room, and she is looking straight out of the sleeve at whoever picked it up. My friend looked over my shoulder and said she looked like a slut. I agreed, approvingly, and neither of us had the first idea what we were talking about. Then I put the needle down and Benatar’s voice confirmed everything the photograph had told me. She had been trained for opera and here she was singing rock like a bad girl. I found out later that her mother kicked her out of the house over it. Twenty years later I can draw a straight line from that afternoon to every woman I have ever been in love with.
She belts. That was the first thing and it is still the thing, a woman going full voice at you from the second the record starts, and the volume is not the impressive part. The impressive part is that she is that loud and still that accurate, hitting the note dead center every time and holding it exactly as long as she means to. That comes from the opera training and there is no faking it. What the band does around all that is the smartest decision on the record. Peter Coleman produced most of it and Mike Chapman took three songs in the middle of side one, and the playing under Benatar is tight, clean, and completely unshowy throughout. Neil Giraldo could tear these songs open and never once does. Scott St. Clair Sheets, Roger Capps, and Glen Alexander Hamilton lock down a hard flat surface and hold it. People have called that timidity for ten years now. It is the opposite. A singer with that much power needs something solid to push against, and everybody on this record understood that their job was to give her a wall and get out of the way.
The opener is the proof. “Heartbreaker” came from Geoff Gill and Cliff Wade by way of the English singer Jenny Darren, who cut it first on her 1978 album “Queen of Fools,” and Benatar reworked the wording for American ears, taking out phrases like “A to Zed.” She sings the verses tight and low with most of what she has still in reserve, and when she opens up on the chorus you can hear that she is nowhere near the ceiling. The song is about wanting a man everybody has warned you about, and she sings it like somebody who has already run the numbers and made her decision. She wrote two songs on the record with Roger Capps. “My Clone Sleeps Alone” sets a flawless engineered duplicate against the real woman who makes mistakes, and Benatar sings the duplicate’s specifications with the flat precision of somebody imitating a machine, which is a technical joke only a trained singer can land. “So Sincere” closes the album on a couple who have loved each other into suffocation, and she sings it bored, which is the cruelest available reading. But the song that gives away exactly what she is, is the Alan Parsons Project cover, “Don’t Let It Show,” written by Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons for the “I Robot” album. It is the ballad on a rock record, the place where a lesser singer goes small and pretty, and Benatar does not go small at all. She fills it, loud and rich and tonally perfect, sustaining notes with a purity that has nothing to do with rock and roll and everything to do with where she trained. Nobody at Chrysalis appears to have heard any of this.
The label led with “I Need a Lover,” her cover of the John Mellencamp song, then tried “If You Think You Know How to Love Me,” written by Nicky Chinn with the same Mike Chapman who produced it, and both went out and died in America without charting at all. Two swings at making her sound like somebody else’s idea. It took until October, and “Heartbreaker,” before anybody at the label put out the song where she sounds like herself, and that is the one that broke her. Then Neil Giraldo’s “We Live for Love” gave her the first top ten of her career, which means the label also had a writer sitting in the band and had not noticed him either. The album crept up the charts for six months after release before it peaked, which I love, because it means nobody handed this to her. In France they put out “Rated X,” the Nick Gilder and James McCulloch song about a woman making her living in the sex trade, and it charted there, and somewhere in the wake of that the rumor reached me that a European outlet had taken the whole thing at face value and filed Benatar as a porn actress. I was eleven or twelve and I believed every word of it, and I would like to report that it gave me pause. It did the opposite.
I moved into that apartment complex knowing nothing and surrounded by girls who knew everything, and the honest outcome could have gone two ways. I could have decided that being outmatched was a problem to solve, or I could have decided it was the whole appeal. Benatar settled it for me from inside a record sleeve I was not supposed to have. Twenty years on, “In the Heat of the Night” still sounds like a woman who has taken the measure of the room and is waiting to see whether anybody in it can keep up. I have wanted to be in that room ever since.
This review originally appeared in the Roswell Neighbor
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