Free Republic

“Shadows of the Night” endured a difficult route to becoming a global hit single in 1982 – and Pat Benatar, who made it happen, endured her own challenges along the way. The song was written by D.L. Byron specifically for the 1980 movie Times Square, but producers of the teenage runaway story felt it didn’t have hit potential, and rejected it. Subsequent versions were released in 1981 by German-based singer Helen Shneider and vocalist and actress Rachel Sweet, with modest results. As Benatar worked on her fourth album Get Nervous, she and drummer Myron Grombacher decided to reshape “Shadows of...

Pat Benatar isn’t known for being violent. She found herself angry enough to lash out, however, when Chrysalis Records overruled an attempt to escape from her glamorous image. There'd been slow-building frustration with label boss Terry Ellis, who Benatar believed was incapable of thinking he could ever be wrong. “Chrysalis kept at me, and it seemed like they just never stopped – it was one thing after another,” Benatar wrote in her 2011 memoir Between a Heart and a Rock Place. “I came to call it ‘the gauntlet,’ because it felt like that was what I was running through. Every...