The 1980 song Pat Benatar won’t play live anymore: “Fans are having a heart attack”
The 1980s wouldn’t have been the same without Pat Benatar.
The pop-rock singer was a major force in pulling the lumbering styles of the 1970s into the bright, shiny, and new scene of the ’80s. With huge hair, plenty of spandex, and an arsenal of catchy songs at her disposal, Benatar blazed the trail that hundreds of other singers would follow in the decade. She was perfect for MTV, so much so that her video for ‘You Better Run’ became the second-ever video played when the network was first launched.
When she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022, along with her husband and longtime musical partner Neil Giraldo, there was a renewed appreciation for Benatar’s discography. Classic tracks like ‘Heartbreaker’, ‘We Belong’, and ‘Love is a Battlefield’ were highlighted, but if Benatar has one signature song among her large list of all-time tracks, it has to be ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’.
Part of what makes that song’s legacy so interesting is how it has evolved far beyond its original intent. What began as a punchy, defiant slice of pop-rock bravado quickly became shorthand for Benatar’s entire persona, embodying the strength and attitude that defined her rise in the early days of MTV.
At the same time, its journey from near-obscurity to chart success highlights just how fragile the path to a hit can be. Songs that go on to define an artist’s career are not always treated as such in their infancy, often facing rejection or indifference before finding the right ears at the right moment. In that sense, ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’ feels like a perfect example of persistence paying off, both for the songwriter and for the artist who ultimately brought it to life.
Written by songwriter Eddie Schwartz, ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’ was Benatar’s first top ten hit in the US and went on to be certified gold by the RIAA. “That was my introduction to the music business,” Schwartz told SongFacts about the track. “It took weeks and weeks to convince them to demo it, and once we did demo it they hated it so much they actually erased the master recordings. I was supposed to be there for a number of weeks, but because of all this back and forth about ‘Best Shot,’ I ended up being there for months”.
“I was about to get on a plane to go back to Toronto and I was so dejected that my favorite song had been recorded and then erased,” he added. “The engineer, John Rhys, invited me to dinner the last night to cheer me up and at dinner he passed me over a little cassette and said, ‘They told me to erase the song and I had to because they’re my biggest client, but I made one copy of the song for you because I knew how much you loved the song’.”
“When I got back to Toronto, ATV had just hired a new guy in New York named Marv Goodman,” Schwatz said about the song’s eventual path to Benatar. “He was working at Chrysalis but he was going to leave and go to ATV, but while he was still at Chrysalis for the last couple of weeks he was listening to material he’d be working with at ATV so I sent him ‘Hit Me.’ Sure enough, he liked it and kept playing it over and over again. The story I heard was that Pat Benatar took a meeting in the office next door, heard it through the wall, got excited about it and that’s how she heard ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’.”
Despite being one of her most beloved songs, Benatar made the decision to retire ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’ in 2022. The reason was simple – the escalating gun violence in the United States permanently put her off performing the song.
“We’re not doing ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’ and fans are having a heart attack and I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, in deference to the victims of the families of these mass shootings, I’m not singing it.’ I tell them, if you want to hear the song, go home and listen to it,” she told USA Today.
“(The title) is tongue-in-cheek, but you have to draw the line,” she added. “I can’t say those words out loud with a smile on my face, I just can’t,” she said. “I’m not going to go on stage and soapbox – I go to my legislators – but that’s my small contribution to protesting. I’m not going to sing it. Tough.”
Check out ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’ down below.
