35 Years Ago: Pat Benatar Triumphs Over Turmoil With ‘Crimes of Passion’
By Jeff Giles August 5, 2015 8:30 AM
Recording
Crimes of Passion, however, was far from simple. Although they’d enjoyed recording
In the Heat of the Night with producer Peter Coleman, Benatar and Giraldo found themselves directed by their label, Chrysalis, into partnering up with former
Fleetwood Mac producer
Keith Olsen for the follow-up. As Benatar told UCR, she and Giraldo had to fight twice as hard for their vision.
“[
Olsen] was a fine guy, whatever, but I mean, he was just the wrong dude,” Benatar asserted. “It was great, because [Giraldo] basically had to step in, because I was in hell and I couldn’t work with [
Olsen]. I was so used to Peter and I wanted to be with him and I wanted to be with [Giraldo]. He’d learned so much from Peter Coleman while we were working with him, so it was a great thing, even though it was hellish, it really opened the door for [Giraldo] to start producing on his own. He went in there and saved the record.”
“It was really pivotal, because we had made one record and this was about to be the sophomore jinx,” added Giraldo. “None of us felt like that, but it was really difficult.”
As Giraldo remembers it, those tensions came to a head early on — in fact, he related a story from the sessions for “Hell Is for Children,” which he thinks was the first song they tracked for the LP.
“[
Olsen] gave me the keys to his car. He said, ‘Here, I’m going to work on the vocal a little bit, you can take the keys and the car and go have a good time,’” recalled Giraldo. “So I took his Porsche and Patricia’s sitting on the floor crying, going, ‘I can’t deal with this guy, listen to what I just did’ and I listened and I went, ‘Uh-oh.’ That was the end of that,” he laughed. “I never got the keys again.”
Those sorts of snafus have always been common for young artists, particularly women, but neither
Olsen’s imprint nor cheesecake press photos had a negative impact on Crimes of Passion‘s sales performance — by early 1981, John Lennon‘s Double Fantasy was the only thing keeping it out of the top spot, and in the summer of ’81, she was back with her third album, Precious Time, which did go to No. 1. She’d stay at or near the top of the charts for the remainder of the decade.
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