InTheStudio.net, the web home of North American syndicated rock radio show and website, InTheStudio: The Stories Behind History’s Greatest Rock Bands, celebrates the 35th anniversary of Pat Benatar’s sophomore multi-platinum album, Crimes Of Passion.

Pat Benatar, born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski in Brooklyn New York, no doubt inherited her 4 1/2 octave voice from her mother who’d been in the chorus of the New York City opera. But at 19, Pat decided to forgo Julliard and opera and got married. Her first big break would come as a cabaret singer at the club Catch A Rising Star, which would lead to a record deal and her first album, 1979’s In The Heat Of The Night.

Thirty-five years ago today, Pat released Crimes of Passion, containing a signature single, the Top 10 “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”, followed by two Top 20 hits “You Better Run” and “Treat Me Right”. The one, two, three punch would land Pat her first Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance and set her on a pace eventually as “the 1980s’ most successful female rocker”, according to Rolling Stone.

Pat Benatar shares with InTheStudio host Redbeard what it was like being a breakout female rockstar in the early ‘80s, with her record company pushing sex appeal while the Feminist Movement pushed back, with Benatar squeezed between them.

“It was an exciting time, but it was very confusing. Ten years down the road everybody figured out where to be and what’s cool and what’s not. It’s not like today when all of us made mistakes and now people can look at us and say, ‘Ok, we won’t do what they did.’  That’s the whole point of time passing. People now that come out get to see what not to do... We had no one, I had no one to look to.”

Tune in to the interview at this location.