I had just managed to leave high school behind me when Pat Benatar’s first album was released in 1979. I can’t say I remember it, although I was listening to the radio in those days, and almost certainly heard the singles from it. Her second album, Crimes of Passion, was a different story. 
Released in the summer of 1980, it was loaded with radio-friendly songs, and I purchased a copy of the LP. It was mostly straight-ahead rock, played cleanly (i.e. more like pop than punk), though with more skill than creativity, and more attitude than musicality. One thing in particular, however, made it stand out among the rest of the rock radio fare: Benatar had terrific pipes. Although my favorite track at the time was the little-noticed and perhaps overly-muscular cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”, roughly half the songs on the album became staples on FM rock radio. The album was popular enough to earn Benatar a Grammy award. Several albums in a similar vein followed, with Benatar earning a string of Grammy awards for rocking pop ballads and anthems.
My interest in her music had dissipated pretty quickly, however. As a rule, I was no fan of music that appealed to the “Grammy Awards” crowd – a truism that has become ever more true over time. In reality, what she’d been selling was less a musical quest than a stage show: a tough girl persona embedded in a “sex kitten in spandex” package of lipstick, mascara, and mini-skirts. While I was certainly no paragon of male virtue, that shtick was nonetheless not a long-term attraction for me, and the songwriting just wasn’t that good, so I tuned her out in my search for personally meaningful music in the wasteland of the early/mid 80’s commercial Rock scene. What I didn’t realize during those years was that, behind the hit singles and MTV videos, there was a genuine musical personality developing out of the collaboration between Benatar and her guitarist-turned-husband Neil Giraldo.
I recall reading an interview comment from Benatar many years ago expressing her discomfort over the awareness that the scores of young men pressed up near the stage when she was performing were focusing their attention on her crotch. I had little sympathy for her at the time, since that kind of erotic appeal seemed to be precisely her intended vehicle in her drive for success. Nonetheless, it’s apparent now, looking back at her body of work over the period, that she really did regret at least the side-effects of her early marketing approach, and that she really did want to present herself in a different stage persona.
Musically, she and Giraldo were also carving out a new musical direction, one that was more personal, and less cliched and bombastic. In hindsight, this is evident at least as early as their 1984 album Tropico, published while Benatar was pregnant with their first child, and it was fully evident by the time of their 1988 album Wide Awake In Dreamland. But I managed to completely miss it, and was oblivious to it for years, until I was recently clearing up the remnants of my 20-year-ago music digitization project.
I had digitized Crimes of Passion to MP3 back then, but had subsequently deleted it as lacking enough musical interest for me to keep. However, in a recent review comparing my digital music library with my legacy media archive, I decided to revisit the album for the sake of culling any worthwhile tracks. My thought was to also obtain MP3s of the better tracks from the various other Pat Benatar albums, and combine them all to create a homemade “Best Of” collection. I started checking out Benatar songs online, mostly from compilation albums, and mostly from the more familiar early period. Then I watched a couple of TV talk show interviews from the 1990s on YouTube, which included live renditions of some very different sounding newer music. After digging a little deeper, I realized that the Benatar-Giraldo music produced during the 1990s stood head & shoulders above the 1980s work in musical quality. Their popularity had collapsed, but their work had matured fabulously.
In 1991, they followed up Wide Awake In Dreamland with an album of mostly jump blues covers called True Love. How well that album works is debatable, but 
it clearly informed and powered their next album, which was a return to performing original rock songs, but with a distinctly funkier and bluesier sound than they had played in the 1980s. That 1993 album, Gravity’s Rainbow, brings together everything the duo had been trying to do with their more creative songs from the late 1980s, into a fresh-sounding, energetic album that does not have a weak song on it (discounting the 30-second opening ditty). Perhaps not surprisingly, it was their first album composed entirely by the band. They followed that up with an even more mature sounding album in 1997 called Innamorata, which, if perhaps not quite as consistent as the previous album, nonetheless contains plenty of engaging music, including a song with one of the cooler grooves I’ve heard (“River of Love”), which I rank as my favorite from the pair. Although one won’t find instrumental virtuosity on these albums, they are both excellently performed and produced collections of songs bursting with mature but vibrant personality, and the multi-layered vocals are outstanding.
After discovering the 1990s work, I went back to explore the deeper album cuts from the post-Crimes of Passion era. Although my historic judgment on the immediate follow-up album (Precious Time) stood up to scrutiny (weak writing), the four albums produced between 1982 and 1988 all contained some musically 
compelling deep cuts, even if the more popular tracks were sometimes shallow. My intended home-made “Best Of” collection was growing like a weed, with the two mid-90s albums included in their entirety, along with large chunks of the later 1980s releases. Ultimately, I broke that intended collection up into five sub-collections: three stand-alone albums (Crimes of Passion; Gravity’s Rainbow; Innamorata), and two 70-80 minute collections of cuts from the other albums (1979-1985, and 1988-2003). My little “Best Of Benatar” collection quite surprisingly turned into almost five hours of music.
Benatar and Giraldo appear to have stopped publishing music after an unfortunately weaker 2003 follow-up to Innamorata called Go, the cover of which features a close-up photo of the 50-year old Benatar apparently trying to 
recapture the glam of her early persona, complete with over-the-top lipstick and a bizarre eye shadow application suggestive to me of the transhumanism that has fueled the sexual revolution. This is a shame, as the more recent work preceding this evinced a certain humanism that seemed to be at least somewhat informed by Benatar’s Catholic sensibilities, whereas Go seems bitter, angry, and accusatory. There are a handful of worthy tracks on the album, but it seems misdirected overall, and it flopped commercially.
Benatar and Giraldo remain happily married, after almost 40 years. If nothing else, they’ve managed to beat some demons that seriously haunt the commercial music industry community, and there’s something to say for that. I wish them and their children well, and I’m very glad I decided to give their music one more try before tossing it for good. It’s been four months since I discovered the “better side” of Pat Benatar, and her music shows no signs of drifting off my playlists anytime soon. There’s some really good stuff in their catalog if you look behind the hits.