By the time 1988 rolled around, Pat Benatar had been at the top, or near the top, of the U.S. pop charts for almost ten years, amassing fourteen Top 40 singles (half of which went Top 10) and six Top 20 albums. That's a long time to have any sort of successful music career, much less one spent in the heart of the mainstream, where musical trends change on a dime.
Nobody knew this more than Benatar and guitarist/husband Neil Giraldo. whose previous album Tropico had been their first to not hit the Top 20 despite two notable hit singles "Invincible" and "Sex A Weapon".
With metal and hard rock gaining momentum at radio & MTV, and eager to get back to their edgier rock roots, Benatar and Giraldo set about the task of assembling songs for the album that would hopefully put them back on top, where they belonged.
Despite writing only one song for Benatar's debut album in 1979, over the ensuing decade Giraldo had taken a more hands-on role in songwriting and either wrote or co-wrote seven cuts on Wide Awake In Dreamland.
No doubt feeling the album was on its way to being one of the strongest of their career, but still in need of a high-octane rocker to act as spark plug, Pat and Neil began their search for "just the right song".
Enter Australian guitarist Kerryn Tolhurst.
A veteran of Australia's country rock scene going back to 1973, Tolhurst had enjoyed Australian Top 40 success in 1973 when his band, The Dingoes, hit the Top 40 down under with "Way Out West". By '77, the hits had dried up at home, but the band was finally cleared to relocate to the U.S. after signing to A&M Records.
Once here, the band hoped that opening for Lynyrd Skynyrd on the band's North American tour would launch their career in the States, but, on October 20, 1977 tragedy struck the Skynyrd camp when three members were among those killed in a plane crash.
The tour never happened and the management they shared with Skynyrd was left dealing with the aftermath while the Dingoes died on the vine in a foreign land.
By '79, Tolhurst leaves the band and co-writes a song called "Man On Your Mind" with Glenn Shorrock. The song was the second single from Little River Band's George Martin-produced Time Exposure album and would go on to reach #14 on the U.S, pop charts in the spring of 1982.
One wonders if any of that was known to Benatar and Giraldo when the song "All Fired Up" came to their attention. What they did know was that the song was a moderate hit in Australia for Tolhurst's latest band Rattling Sabres in 1987, but had seen no action outside Australia.
Hearing the original version allows us all to play "armchair Pat Benatar" (or "armchair Neil Giraldo", if you prefer) and this writer will be the first to say that they both deserve writing credit for not only plucking the song out of the vast universe of songs available to them, but also turning an otherwise moody goth rock tune into the pulse-pounding radio rocker their new album needed.
Sure, the ingredients are all there, but the focus on the original version winds up being Tolhurst's angular guitar work more than singer Robert Price's understated vocals or the supreme mother of all choruses that the band brutally withholds until the 1:30 mark.
As a new college radio DJ eager to scoop my fellow DJ's for cool new stuff on my weekly radio show, I distinctly recall spinning a promo copy of the song and not making it that far.
What had started promisingly enough with edgy guitar work that put them firmly in the "RIYL Flesh For Lulu and Cactus World News" category had devolved into an overly earnest John McCafferty & The Beaver Brown Band song with no real destination in mind.
In the hands of Giraldo and Benatar, though, the chorus that Rattling Sabres had buried at the end of two full verses was dug out, dusted off, and given a whole new coat of chrome.
The video and single went into immediate heavy rotation on MTV and Top 40 radio, eventually hitting #19 on the U.S. Singles chart and becoming so synonymous with Benatar's success that she would name her greatest hits album All Fired Up: The Very Best of Pat Benatar.
Of no real importance to the story, but potentially interesting to fans of American punk, take note of the writing credits on the single's B-side, a song called "Nothin Sacred": Tolhurst and a fellow by the name of Ivan freakin' Kral, formerly of Blondie, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, and, most notably, John Waite's Ignition album, which Neil Giraldo produced in 1982.
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tales from the top 20