Rock star Pat Benatar once had an intense clash with her record label after the birth of her first child, according to Benatar herself.
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The “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” hitmaker recently appeared on an episode of The Magnificent Others With Billy Corgan podcast. During the interview, Benetar said that at the time of the incident, she had a contract with her label to produce an album “every nine months.” When she became pregnant with her first child, the label didn’t want to budge on that contract. She said that she had to have a meeting with reps from the Chrysalis label mere weeks after giving birth.
“I’m breastfeeding, and I’m freaking out, and I got this sh*t 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,” Benatar told the podcast’s host and Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. “And they’re telling me, ‘Okay, that’s great you guys had a baby and all that, but chop-chop.’ They didn’t care that I had a newborn. And all they knew was it was time to go back into the studio.”
Benatar went on to say that the meeting in question was “the only time I was violent in the studio. I threw a stool through the glass window in Capitol Records.”
Pat Benatar Claims That Her Old Label Was Sexist and Misogynistic for How They Treated Her After That Fateful Clash
The intense battle with her label didn’t work in her favor. She had to go “on extension”, which meant that the label could halt her royalty payments if she didn’t finish a new album by the deadline they set.
“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 continued. “So, talk about sexism. Oh yeah. And misogyny. Right there. No slack.”
The album in question ended up becoming Seven The Hard Way from 1985. Benatar went on to say that the experience changed her view of the music industry permanently.
“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,” Benatar concluded.
Benatar stopped producing as much material after the exchange, and she didn’t release another album until three years after Seven The Hard Way was released. Benatar eventually parted ways with Chrysalis after her 1993 record Gravity’s Rainbow.
Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Love Rocks NYC/God’s Love We Deliver
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