Pat Benatar – Hit Me With Your Best Shot (Live)

He Wrote It At 3AM After Punching Pillows In Therapy And ATV Erased The Master

Released on 15 September 1980, Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” climbed to number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 in December, becoming her first top ten hit in the US and earning RIAA Gold certification for selling over one million copies. The song reached number seven on Cash Box, topped the Tunecaster Rock Tracks chart, and peaked at number five in Canada. Written by Canadian songwriter Eddie Schwartz after a bizarre pillow-punching therapy session in Toronto, the track almost never existed. ATV Music hated the demo so much they erased the master recordings. Only engineer John Rhys secretly saved one cassette copy, handing it to a heartbroken Schwartz at their final dinner together. That cassette eventually reached Marv Goodman’s desk at ATV’s New York office, where Pat Benatar allegedly heard it through the wall during a meeting next door. The song became the centerpiece of Crimes of Passion, Benatar’s best-selling album which sold four million copies in the US and earned her first Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance in 1981.

The chart performance represented a commercial breakthrough for Benatar, whose debut album In the Heat of the Night had produced minor hits “Heartbreaker” and “We Live For Love” without cracking the top ten. Crimes of Passion debuted on the Billboard 200 for the week ending 23 August 1980, spending five weeks at number two in January 1981, blocked only by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy following Lennon’s murder on 8 December 1980. The album peaked at number two in Canada, number six in New Zealand, number sixteen in Australia, and number twenty-seven in Sweden. It placed at number five on Billboard’s 1981 year-end album chart and earned four-times Platinum certification in the US and five-times Platinum in Canada. The song’s slow climb to number nine took months, demonstrating unusual staying power as it became a staple of album-rock radio and aerobics classes nationwide. Radio airplay sustained it through December 1980, precisely when John Lennon’s death dominated headlines.

Eddie Schwartz wrote the song in Toronto during his mid-twenties while struggling with self-improvement and working as guitarist for Canadian singer Charity Brown. He attended therapy sessions involving bio-energetics, which included punching pillows to release hostility. Standing on the doorstep after one particularly strange session, the title simply came to him. Weeks later while driving to a gig along a Toronto highway, the sky seemed to open up and the music arrived complete with chorus, though verse lyrics remained unfinished. He frantically drove to the venue, grabbed a guitar, figured out the chords in his head, and jotted everything down. That night after the gig ended, he booked a 3am recording session scheduled to run until six or seven in the morning. With nothing written except the chorus and basic melody, he completed the demo in those predawn hours. The original lyrics were written from a male perspective with the line “Before I put another notch in your lipstick case,” which Benatar changed to “my lipstick case” when she recorded it.

Recording took place during winter 1980 at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles with producer Keith Olsen, who’d been recruited after Mike Chapman, who co-produced Benatar’s debut, had a falling out with Chrysalis Records. Benatar sang lead vocals while husband-to-be Neil “Spyder” Giraldo played guitar alongside Scott St. Clair Sheets on additional guitars, Roger Capps on bass and background vocals, and Myron Grombacher on drums, beginning what would become a long tenure in Benatar’s band lasting into the late 1990s. Giraldo had previously been in the band Derringer, which had rejected the song years earlier when Schwartz first pitched it. Giraldo remembered it when Benatar began recording her second album and suggested they cut it. The band recorded live tracking before layering overdubs to enhance clarity and dynamics, preserving spontaneous energy that distinguished it from more heavily processed recordings of the era. The final mix lasted two minutes fifty-two seconds, radio-friendly and concise with the central hook repeated emphatically after each verse and pre-chorus for maximum memorability.

“Hit Me With Your Best Shot” appeared as the fourth track on Crimes of Passion and the second single following “You Better Run,” Benatar’s cover of The Young Rascals classic which peaked at number forty-two in the US and became the second music video ever aired on MTV in 1981. The album represented stylistic evolution from her debut, incorporating rawer, more aggressive rock edge with greater emphasis on original compositions co-authored by Benatar and Giraldo. Other tracks included “Treat Me Right,” which reached the US top twenty, “Hell Is for Children,” which proved Benatar’s mettle as a writer according to critics, and a cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.” The album thematically explored volatile undercurrents of intense emotions and relationships, establishing Benatar as a prominent female rock artist in the early 1980s. Pre-release anticipation built through live performances during her 1980 tour supporting the album, generating word-of-mouth buzz before widespread airplay.

The song’s cultural impact extended far beyond the charts. It became ubiquitous at baseball and soccer games, heard in countless arenas and stadiums decades after its release. During the aerobics craze of the early 1980s, instructors played it constantly in classes, with participants often emulating Benatar’s colorful fashion choices featuring dancewear, eye shadow, and spandex. The MTV guitar riff that became the network’s music theme during its 1981 launch came directly from “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” The song appeared on numerous compilations including multi-artist collections and Benatar retrospectives like Best Shots, All Fired Up: The Very Best Of Pat Benatar, and Heartbreaker: 16 Classic Performances. In 1984, Benatar expressed ambivalence to Songwriter Connection magazine, admitting she’d outgrown certain lyrics particularly the line “you’re a real tough cookie,” recalling once announcing Eddie Schwartz’s name to 1,500 people who responded with dead silence.

The 2022 announcement that Benatar would no longer perform the song sparked controversy and debate. She told USA Today she couldn’t say those words out loud with a smile on her face anymore as her small contribution to protesting mass shootings in the United States. She acknowledged the title was tongue-in-cheek but felt she had to draw the line, telling fans who wanted to hear it to go home and listen to it there rather than expecting her to perform it live. Schwartz maintained the title should be taken metaphorically, explaining the song at its core addressed self-confidence with the message “no matter what you throw at me, I can handle it, I can play in your league.” The lyrics were laden with sexual innuendo but framed romantic confrontation as combative test of resilience, with the narrator challenging a historically dominant partner to put up their dukes and get down to it, inviting opposition as means to demonstrate inner strength rather than yielding to defeat.

Schwartz’s career flourished following the song’s success. He became a successful producer based in Nashville, working with Joe Cocker, Carly Simon, The Doobie Brothers, and Jeffrey Osborne, writing over two hundred songs including Paul Carrack’s “Don’t Shed a Tear.” He recorded his own version on his 1995 album Tour De Schwartz. Male bands covering the song often changed the lipstick case line to “guitar case” to maintain the gender perspective. The song featured in Rock Band video games and continued earning radio play decades later. Benatar was inducted into Entertainment Weekly’s Fashion Hall of Fame in 2006, with her citation reading that long before Madonna worked that fuchsia leotard, Pat Benatar was honing a look that incorporated dancewear, colorful eye shadow, and spandex, spandex, spandex. She served as national spokesperson for the “It’s Hip To H.E.A.R.” program educating baby boomers about hearing health, acknowledging that years of rockin’ were beginning to take a toll on their generation raised on rock and roll.

Looking back, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” represents the improbable journey from pillow-punching therapy to cultural touchstone. Eddie Schwartz standing on that Toronto doorstep in his mid-twenties, frustrated with weird bio-energetics sessions, couldn’t have imagined his spontaneous title would become one of the most recognizable rock songs of the 1980s. The demo that ATV hated so much they erased it, saved only by one sympathetic engineer’s secret cassette, became a million-selling single that defined an era. Pat Benatar, the classically trained mezzo-soprano from Brooklyn who’d been pursuing jazzy cabaret work in the spirit of Liza Minnelli while recording commercial jingles to pay bills, found her voice through someone else’s therapy breakthrough. The song that arrived at 3am during a Toronto recording session, written by a guitarist with no verse lyrics yet, transformed into the track that established Benatar as rock royalty and proved female artists could dominate rock radio without compromise. As Schwartz reflected decades later, the core message remained timeless: facing challenges head-on affirms capacity to prevail. Whether punching pillows in therapy or confronting heartbreak in relationships, resilience comes from accepting the invitation to get hit with the best shot and staying standing. Benatar may no longer perform it, citing concerns about language and violence in modern America, but the song endures as a defiant declaration that some cookies are tough enough to handle whatever life throws at them, knock them down, and watch them get right back on their feet again.