Before MTV turned Pat Benatar into the leather-clad queen of early 80s rock, she spent the entire 1970s fighting her way out of choir robes, bank uniforms and sleazy lounge gigs. From Lindenhurst High School in 1971 to a platinum debut by decade’s end, her path was anything but neat.
If you grew up with “Heartbreaker” or “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” on the radio, this is the prequel: how a Juilliard-bound soprano, a bad day at the bank and a Halloween costume conspired to turn Patricia Andrzejewski into Pat Benatar.
From Lindenhurst choir kid to almost-Juilliard
Patricia Mae Andrzejewski was born in Brooklyn in 1953 and raised in Lindenhurst, Long Island, where her mother Millie, a trained singer who had shelved her own ambitions, pushed her toward formal music study. In high school she was the petite powerhouse of the Lindenhurst musical department, starring in productions, fronting choirs and developing the precise, bell-like tone that would later slice through loud guitars.
By her senior year she had done the unthinkable for a working-class Long Island kid: she was accepted to the Juilliard School. Instead of heading to Manhattan conservatories, she followedhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Benatar a safer plan, training as a coloratura soprano and enrolling at Stony Brook University to study health education before dropping out around age 19 to marry her high school boyfriend, Dennis Benatar, and follow his Army postings.
Newlywed, bored and stuck in a bank
Marriage did not lead to instant glamour. Early in the 70s the couple landed near Richmond, Virginia, where she worked as a bank teller, the classic picture of middle-class respectability with a very un-classic Polish last name on her ID plate. She has recalled Southern customers eyeing “Andrzejewski,” deciding she was not local enough and moving to the next window with open hostility.
On paper she was doing everything right for a young officer’s wife: steady job, neat house, predictable future. Inside, she was dying of boredom. A small singing sideline in lounges and a Roaring Twenties themed restaurant started as a way to make a little extra cash and stay near a microphone, but it quickly exposed how much she hated counting other people’s money while her own talent sat idle.
Roaring Twenties and Coxon’s Army: bar-band boot camp
The breaking point came after she went to a Liza Minnelli concert in Virginia and watched a tiny woman absolutely dominate an arena. The next day she quit the bank, deciding that if she was going to be exhausted at the end of a shift it might as well be from singing, not from smiling at people depositing paychecks.
Her “promotion” was perversely humbling: a singing waitress slot at a prohibition-style joint called the Roaring Twenties, where customers brown-bagged their booze, she wore flapper outfits and had to belt standards while dodging salad dressing on her stockings. When a drunk grabbed her garter and asked what would happen if he pulled it, she snapped that she would put his eye out, an early glimpse of the zero-tolerance attitude that would later burn through songs like “Hell Is for Children.”
Out of that circus she graduated to Coxon’s Army, a 10-piece lounge band built around pianist Phil Coxon. Night after night they hammered through Motown, “Proud Mary” and standards in Richmond clubs, tight enough to land a never-aired PBS special and to cut her first single, “Day Gig,” in 1974 for the tiny Trace label. It was hardly glamorous, but it was where a classically trained voice learned to survive over clinking glasses, bad monitors and cigarette haze instead of orchestra pits.
1971–1979 at a glance
| Year | Where she was | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1971 | Lindenhurst High graduate, Long Island | Choir star with Juilliard-level chops walks away from classical track. |
| Early 70s | Army wife near Richmond, Virginia | Bank teller by day, lounge and theme-restaurant singer by night. |
| 1973–1974 | Roaring Twenties & Coxon’s Army | Quits the bank after a Liza Minnelli concert, learns to front a bar band, records “Day Gig.” |
| 1975 | Back in New York City | Leaves Coxon’s Army, drives north with a few thousand dollars and no safety net. |
| 1975–1977 | Catch a Rising Star & off-Broadway | Blows away a 2 a.m. open mic with a Judy Garland tune, lands a manager and a steady club residency, appears in Harry Chapin’s rock musical “The Zinger.” |
| 1977–1979 | New York clubs, then Chrysalis Records | Accidentally invents her spandex stage persona on Halloween, headlines Tramps, signs to Chrysalis and cuts In the Heat of the Night. |
Back to New York: burning the safety net
By the mid 70s Coxon’s Army was on the verge of breaking out of the local circuit, which is exactly when Benatar walked. Against everyone’s advice she stuffed her belongings into a car, drove back to New York City with roughly $2,500 and decided she would rather fail in Manhattan than stagnate in Richmond.
In 1975 she stood in line behind more than two dozen hopefuls at an Upper East Side comedy club called Catch a Rising Star and did not hit the stage until around 2 a.m. Her song choice was pure musical-theater kid: Judy Garland’s “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” – but when she tore into it, the exhausted room exploded, and club owner Rick Newman rushed in, demanding to know who this tiny woman with the artillery-shell voice was.
Newman became her manager, turned her amateur-night slot into a paid residency and started feeding her higher-profile work, including the role of Zephyr in Harry Chapin’s futuristic rock musical “The Zinger,” which ran on Long Island in 1976 and sharpened her theatrical instincts on a real stage.
Catch a Rising Star and the accidental sex symbol
For a couple of years she was a curiosity on the New York club scene: a diminutive singer with almost operatic range, doing Orbison and Rascals covers at Tramps and Catch a Rising Star, still dressed more like a theater kid than a rock menace. The talent was obvious, but the image had not caught up yet.
Halloween 1977 changed that. After winning a costume contest at Café Figaro dressed in black spandex, fringe, boots and heavy eyeliner inspired by the B-movie Cat-Women of the Moon, she walked into Catch a Rising Star still in character and did her usual set. Same songs, same arrangements – but this time the crowd lost its mind, and she realized, with some disgust, that clothes and makeup could hit the audience as hard as her upper register.
She would later describe that new look as a “punk version of Tinker Bell,” admitting in her memoir that the persona felt accidental but instantly gave her a different kind of bravado onstage. The industry certainly tried to twist it into pure cheesecake, even airbrushing tops off her chest in ads without permission, but the core of the character was hers: tough, funny, half-cartoon and half-threat, a weaponized answer to every guy who had ever grabbed her garter at the Roaring Twenties.
From club rat to Chrysalis recording artist
By 1978 she was juggling Catch a Rising Star sets with commercial jingle work and headlining stretches at the New York club Tramps, where label scouts finally saw the full package: freakish range, arena-sized projection and a spandex-clad image that did not look like anyone else on their roster. Within a short time Chrysalis Records co-founder Terry Ellis signed her, setting in motion the most ruthless phase of her 70s apprenticeship – remaking her bar band into a lean rock unit and pushing her into the studio.
Chrysalis paired her with songwriter-producer Mike Chapman and, crucially, with a young guitarist named Neil “Spyder” Giraldo, who attacked his instrument with the same intensity she aimed at a melody. Together they cut In the Heat of the Night in 1979, a debut that fused her conservatory-grade voice with hard rock riffs and yielded “Heartbreaker” and Giraldo’s “We Live for Love,” instantly repositioning the ex-bank teller from Richmond as a new kind of female rock threat on FM radio.
What musicians can steal from Benatar’s 70s grind
Treat your voice like an instrument, not a brand
Benatar did not abandon her classical foundation; she redirected it. Years of coloratura work gave her breath control and pitch accuracy, but the Roaring Twenties and Coxon’s Army forced her to learn how to bend that technique into soul shouts and rock wails without shredding her throat. If you sing, that combination of discipline and dirt is the real secret sauce.
Play the ugly rooms
Nothing in a conservatory prepares you for brown-bag dives where you are “live muzak” and the audience is grabbing at your costume. Those rooms taught her to command attention without lights, pyro or sympathetic sound techs – skills that made big stages feel easy later.
Image is a tool, not your boss
The Halloween revelation at Catch a Rising Star proved that audiences and labels respond to visual shock, sometimes more than sound. Benatar’s edgy move was to keep control of that image as much as possible, using it to amplify, not replace, the power of her voice.
Conclusion: from class choir to “Heartbreaker”
Between 1971 and 1979, Pat Benatar lived an entire musical lifetime: honor-student soprano, soldier’s wife, abused singing waitress, bar-band workhorse, 2 a.m. club rat and, finally, radio-dominating rock singer. By the time “Heartbreaker” hit, the overnight success story was a lie; what you were really hearing was a decade of grind, humiliation and stubborn refusal to do anything but sing.
For listeners who remember cranking her records on cassette in the late 70s, knowing this backstory makes those choruses hit even harder. The woman snarling through your speakers had already walked through the fire long before the world decided she was famous.
