Pat Benatar is 68 years old today.
Benatar is a mezzo-soprano with 14 Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hits, "Hit Me with Your Best Shot," "Love Is a Battlefield," "We Belong" and "Invincible."
Born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, her family later moved to North Hamilton Avenue in Lindenhurst, New York, a village in the Long Island township of Babylon. She became interested in theater and began voice lessons, singing her first solo at age eight, at Daniel Street Elementary School, a song called "It Must Be Spring."
Benatar was cut off from the rock scene in nearby Manhattan. Her musical training was strictly classical and theatrical. Training as a coloratura with plans to attend the Juilliard School, Benatar surprised family, friends and teachers by deciding a classical career was not for her and pursued health education at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
At 19, she dropped out of school and worked as a bank teller outside Richmond, Virginia. In 1973, Benatar quit her job to pursue a singing career after being inspired by a Liza Minnelli concert she saw in Richmond.
She got a job as a singing waitress at a flapper-esque nightclub named The Roaring Twenties and got a gig singing in the lounge band, Coxon's Army, a regular group at Sam Miller's basement club.
The band garnered enough attention to be the subject of a never-aired PBS special, and the band's bassist, Roger Capps, also would go on to be the original bass player for Benatar’s band.
The period also yielded Benatar's first and only single until her eventual 1979 debut on Chrysalis Records, "Day Gig" (1974). Her big break came in 1975 at an amateur night at the comedy club, Catch a Rising Star, in New York. Her rousing rendition of Judy Garland's "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" earned her a call back by club owner, Rick Newman, who would become her manager.
At 22, she also landed the part of Zephyr in Harry Chapin's futuristic rock musical, The Zinger. The production, which debuted on March 19, 1976, at the Performing Arts Foundation's (PAF) Playhouse in Huntington Station, Long Island, ran for a month and also featured Beverly D'Angelo and Christine Lahti.
Between appearances at Catch a Rising Star and recording commercial jingles for Pepsi Cola and a number of regional concerns, she headlined New York City’s Tramps nightclub from March 29 - April 1, 1978, where her performance impressed representatives from several record companies.
She was signed to Chrysalis Records by co-founder Terry Ellis the following week. Benatar recorded her first album, In the Heat of the Night, in June and July, 1979.
In 2010, Benatar published her autobiography, Between a Heart and a Rock Place, discussing her early life and success in the music business.