Pat Benatar once had a “violent” clash with her record label following the birth of her first child.
The singer recalled the incident during a recent appearance on The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan podcast. As Benetar explained, her contract called for “an album every nine months,” and that expectation didn’t change with motherhood. In fact, she was required to sit down for a meeting with representatives from her label, Chrysalis, just weeks after giving birth.
“Now, I’m breastfeeding, and I’m freaking out, and I got this shit all padded in my shirt because I’m going to have to leave my child for the first time, and it’s not even two months,” the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer explained. “And they’re telling me, ‘OK, that’s great you guys had a baby and all that, but chop chop.’”
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“They didn’t care that I had a newborn, and all they knew was it was time to go back into the studio,” Benatar continued. “It was the only time I was violent in the studio. I threw a stool through the glass window in Capitol Records.”
Pat Benatar Slams Her Former Label’s ‘Sexism’ and ‘Misogyny’
Despite the heated exchange, Benatar could not escape the label’s pressure. The singer was put “on extension, meaning the record company would freeze her royalties if she didn’t complete a new album by its deadline.
“I had our baby outside in a Winnebago with my parents watching that child so that I could go in there and make that goddamn record,” Benatar recalled of the sessions for what became 1985’s Seven the Hard Way. “So, talk about sexism. Oh yeah. And misogyny. Right there. No slack.”
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The negative experience impacted Benatar from that point forward. The singer strived to control both her personal and professional lives, and her output of material declined as a result. After Seven the Hard Way, she waited three years before her next album, Wide Awake in Dreamland (1988). She eventually departed Chrysalis following 1993’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
“That’s why that slowed down, because I had to navigate, learn how to do this, go in guns blazing and figure out how to make [the label] stop and go in there and do what we had to do,” she noted.
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Gallery Credit: Corey Irwin
