Pat Benatar

`I really wanted to sing rock and roll but I had no outlet.'

By Letta Tayler | Staff Writer

Pat Benatar dominated the pop charts from the late '70s through the early '80s as a petite vixen who dressed in Lycra and spike heels and sounded as tough as any male rocker. ``Hit me with your best shot,'' she taunted in 1980 above thundering drums and snarling guitars. ``Fire away!''

Benatar traces her machisma to her childhood in Lindenhurst, where she was a scrappy kid in a working-class neighborhood in which it was each youngster for him or herself.

``If you didn't play baseball, they'd hit you with the bat anyway,'' she recalled.

The young Patricia Andrzejewski knew how to hit back. ``I'd go right for your throat,'' she said with obvious pride in a phone interview from Malibu, Calif., where she's lived for the past two decades. ``My mother would have to come to school all the time because I was beating up on people.''

Benatar didn't suffer from her childhood scuffles -- indeed, she said, they ``built great character.'' She described her community, where most adults were fishermen and laborers, and her years at Daniel Street Elementary School and Lindenhurst High School (class of 1971), as ``idyllic.''

``We did things like sing at the Christmas tree lighting in the middle of town on Main Street -- where else?'' she remembered. ``It was ridiculously quaint. My husband is from Cleveland; he always thinks I grew up where they filmed `It's a Wonderful Life.'''

Benatar, 45, was the daughter of a sheet-metal worker and a beautician who once sang with the New York City Opera. She threw herself into theater and voice lessons in grade school, singing her first solo when she was 8. ``It was called `It Must Be Spring,' it was this silly little kid's song,'' she said. ``I still know it but I'm not going to sing it for you.''

Her musical training was strictly classical and theatrical. ``I really wanted to sing rock and roll but I had no outlet,'' she said. ``I was singing Puccini and `West Side Story,' but I spent every afternoon after school with my little transistor radio listening to the Rolling Stones . . . and singing in front of the mirror with a hairbrush as a microphone.''

Benatar was completely cut off from the rock scene in nearby Manhattan because her parents were ``ridiculously strict -- I was allowed to go to symphonies, opera and theater but I couldn't go to clubs.''

But Lindenhurst also was ``ridiculously safe. It was a small town when I lived there; you pretty much knew everybody.'' Thus her parents gave her free rein around town -- more rein than they might have if they'd always known what she was up to, she conceded.

``We had no money, we spent our lives at the beach,'' she said of herself and her friends. ``And some of our friends had little boats with motors on them. Everyone was smoking pot and having a great time.''

Benatar left Long Island when she was 19 -- she'd just married her boyfriend, Dennis Benatar, and had moved with him to Richmond, Va., when he was drafted. In 1977, her singing career took off after she moved to Manhattan and divorced (she later married her guitarist, Neil Geraldo).

But the four-time Grammy winner still visits Long Island, and when she performs there, her relatives and old friends turn out en masse. ``When I play Jones Beach? Madonna! Let me tell you, it's packed,'' she said. ''It's like a wedding.''