Chrysalis 1346
Producers: Keith Olsen and Neil Geraldo
Track listing: Promises in the Dark / Fire and Ice / Just Like Me / Precious Time / It’s a Tuff Life / Take It Any Way You Want it/ Evil Genius / Hard to Believe / Helter Skelter
August 15, 1981
1 week
With the success of her second album, 1980’s Crimes of Passion, Pat Benatar became a star. The album spent five weeks at number two in early 1981, but was unable to unseat John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy from the top spot. Following the album’s release, Benatar toured extensively while attempting to come up with new songs for her third album. “I was freaking out,” she says. “We were doing most of the writing for Precious Time on the road. Then we came home, we took two weeks off, and then we went right into the studio, so we were pretty fried.”
While Benatar had proven that she was a songwriter in her own right with “Hell Is for Children” from Crimes of Passion, she was still just dabbling in songwriting around the period of Precious Time. “I really wasn’t that confident,” she says. Benatar, guitarist Neil Geraldo, guitarist Scott Sheets, and drummer Myron Grombacher all had songwriting credits on Precious Time, but they also brought in some hired guns. Tom Kelly co-wrote “Fire and Ice,” which went on to become Benatar’s third top 20 hit, and Billy Steinberg penned the title track. The album closed with Benatar’s version of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” Says Benatar, “My mother even knew the lyrics to that song, because I was such a big Beatles fan when I was growing up. That song was something that rocked, sounded dark, and it was a lot of fun to scream to.”
“Promises in the Dark,” one of two songs Benatar wrote with her longtime boyfriend Geraldo, is a particularly memorable song for the singer. “I wrote it on tour when we were on a plane,” she says. “When we got back home I wanted to play it for Neil, but I was still kind of shy about writing lyrics, especially when they were about him. One night I slipped them under the door, because I was too embarrassed to show it to him face-to-face.”
On Precious Time, Geraldo was credited as co-producer for the first time. “Neil really co-produced Crimes of Passion, but he didn’t get the credit for it. This was a little more relaxed, because there wasn’t that tension that he was doing all this work and not getting credit for it.” The sessions, at Sound City and Goodnight L.A., went fairly quick. “We just went in there, drank lots of coffee, and went for it,” Benatar says. “I didn’t do lots of tracking or use a drum machine. We just went in there and played.”
While the album was in progress, Benatar picked up a Grammy Award for best female rock performance, for Crimes of Passion. With the momentum of the Grammy win, Precious Time hit Number One in its fourth week on the chart.
While Benatar went on to win another Grammy, this time for “Fire and Ice,” she says that Precious Time wasn’t her best shot. “If we could have combined some of the songs from the third album with some of the songs from Get Nervous [Benatar’s fourth album], we would have the correct record, but we made the record too soon,” she says. “I really think Precious Time went to Number One on the strength of Crimes of Passion. That’s the record that should have gone to Number One.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of August 15, 1981
1. Precious Time, Pat Benatar
2. 4, Foreigner
3. Long Distance Voyager, Moody Blues
4. Street Songs, Rick James
5. Escape, Journey