Today’s Top 5: Pat Benatar

Most folks know the first video played on MTV: “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. What many people often forget, or never learned, is the second video: Pat Benatar’s rendition of the Rascals’ “You Better Run.”

In the beginning, MTV basically translated the radio experience to TV – and that, believe it or not, was it. (The “reality” programming that now congests the cable channel wouldn’t arrive until 1992 and The Real World.) VJs, aka video jockeys, introduced music videos and sometimes interviewed the artists. As this list of the first 208 tracks played shows, the songs spanned the typical AOR spectrum of styles. There was plenty of new wave, rock and pop, in other words, but no R&B or soul. And there were limited videos available at the start, as that list shows, which meant many clips – including “You Better Run” – were played over and over again.

The impact was immediate.

In her memoir, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Pat Benatar recalls, “In one week, our world changed. After Crimes of Passion, I’d become much more recognizable, but it was nothing like what happened after MTV. To have a hit song on the radio was to have someone know your voice, your sound. To have a hit video was to have someone know your face. The semi-anonymity that we enjoyed was gone. We had officially arrived, and America had seen our faces—a lot. In the week that followed MTV’s launch, I could no longer go to the grocery store or the movies, because I was swamped. People didn’t simply look at me and think I looked familiar. They thought they knew me. It was great and awful, a blessing and a curse. There was no handbook for how to deal with that kind of stardom. Even musicians who’d hit it big on the radio never had to contend with their faces being literally everywhere overnight.”  (The memoir is well worth the read, I should mention.)

Prior, her career was already on an upward arc – her first album, In the Heat of the Night, was released in August 1979 and made it to No. 12 on the charts; and the single “Heartbreaker,” which was a mainstay on AOR radio, made it to No. 23. A year later, Crimes of Passion soared to No. 2 on the charts, while one single, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” cracked the Top 10 at No. 9 and another single, “Treat Me Right,” eked into the Top 20 at No. 18.

But MTV pushed her into the stratosphere. Here’s one of her latter-day videos, from 1985, which I always liked:

Anyway, the scans that spread out across this page are from the Pat Benatar fan club circa the Get Nervous (1983) album. The LP (and cassette) came with a mailer, which I sent in; I received the fold-out pamphlet a month or two later. One side has the pictures; the other, the album’s lyrics. And speaking of Get Nervous, here’s Pat and band on British TV in promotion of it…