All Fired Up

Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew has the turntable spinning with Pat Benatar’s “All Fired Up,” the lead track off her 1988 album Wide Awake in Dreamland, and it’s one of those records that still lights up a room decades later. The story behind this one is pure rock and roll luck mixed with a little Australian grit. Kerryn Tolhurst, a guitarist who’d been around with bands like The Dingoes and Country Radio, wrote the original version while hanging out in Melbourne with his short-lived group the Rattling Sabres. He bought a vintage Marshall combo, plugged in his Gretsch Nashville, and the riff and chords just spilled out. He had some lyrics floating around under the working title “Working Against The Clock,” and they locked in. Then one day, stuck in traffic, the phrase “All Fired Up” hit him for the chorus and the whole thing clicked. The Sabres cut it as a single on the Mighty Boy label in 1987, and it barely cracked the Australian charts at number 94. But fate stepped in when someone from that label was in Los Angeles pitching the track to an A&R person at Chrysalis. Pat’s manager happened to walk by, heard it, and figured it might work for the album she was putting together. Pat and her longtime partner Neil Giraldo (along with drummer Myron Grombacher) tweaked some of the lyrics so they fit her point of view, and the rest is history. Tolhurst has said he still prefers his original take, which is fair enough, but Benatar’s version turned it into a full-blown anthem.

That version landed as the opening cut and first single from Wide Awake in Dreamland. It climbed to number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100, which turned out to be her last trip into the US top 40, and it peaked even higher on the Mainstream Rock chart at number 2. Over in Australia it was a monster, hitting number 2 and becoming one of the biggest records of 1988 down under. It also did solid business in the UK and Canada, both at number 19, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. The album itself, her seventh studio effort, was mostly cut in Neil’s own studio space, with Peter Coleman and Giraldo handling the bulk of the production while Keith Forsey stepped in on this particular track. Wide Awake in Dreamland marked a bit of a resurgence after some of the earlier eighties highs had cooled, and it still holds up as a solid rock record with a little more maturity than the pure spitfire stuff from the start of the decade. Pat has talked in interviews about wanting to stay wide awake to what was happening around her, and the album title itself carries that idea of looking around instead of just going along. One contemporary piece quoted her saying the song’s message was basically that if you wait and stay patient, things have a way of lining up when they’re meant to. It’s the kind of track that still shows up near the top of her live setlists, right alongside the big ones, because that energy never really left the stage.

Pat herself has always had that fire, and it didn’t come out of nowhere. She was born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski on January 10, 1953, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and grew up in Lindenhurst out on Long Island. Her mom, Mildred, was a beautician who had also trained as an opera singer and even sang with the New York City Opera chorus, so the voice was in the house from the start. Her dad worked sheet metal. Little Pat was singing solos by the time she was eight, did musical theater in high school (including Queen Guinevere in Camelot), and trained classically as a coloratura. There was talk of Juilliard, but she ended up at Stony Brook for a while studying health education instead. At 19 she dropped out to marry her high school sweetheart, Dennis Benatar, who had been drafted into the Army. They landed in Virginia, where she took a job as a bank teller near Richmond while he was stationed at Fort Lee. It was steady work, but it wasn’t the life she wanted.

Everything shifted after she saw Liza Minnelli perform in Richmond. That night she realized she had to sing for real. She quit the bank, started working as a singing waitress at a spot called The Roaring Twenties, and hooked up with pianist Phil Coxon. They expanded into a ten-piece lounge band called Coxon’s Army that played the local clubs and even drew enough attention for a PBS special that never quite aired. In 1975 she packed up her Honda Civic with about $2,500 saved and headed back to New York. She had read about the open-mic nights at comedy clubs and figured Catch a Rising Star was the place to try. She stood in line, got a number, and finally went on around three in the morning on what must have been a packed amateur night. She tore into Judy Garland’s “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” eyes squeezed shut the whole time because she was terrified. When she opened them the place was screaming, and owner Rick Newman came rushing in asking who she was. He became her manager, and the club circuit opened up. She also did jingles on the side, including work for Pepsi, to keep the lights on.

The real break came with a run at Tramps down in the Village. A glowing review brought the record company people out in force, and Terry Ellis of Chrysalis signed her. Around the same time she connected with guitarist Neil Giraldo, whose playing locked in exactly with what she was hearing in her head. They became the core of the band, co-writers, and eventually husband and wife after they married on Maui in February 1982. The debut album, In the Heat of the Night, arrived in 1979 with “Heartbreaker” and “We Live for Love,” and the rest of the eighties belonged to her. Four straight Grammys for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, platinum records stacked up, and a stage presence that never backed down. She has called herself a feminist from as far back as she can remember, and the records backed it up. Even after the big MTV years and the shift toward bluesier territory on later albums like True Love, the partnership with Neil stayed the constant.

You can dig into all of it on the official site at benatargiraldo.com, where they keep the tour dates, the discography, and the news coming. They’re active on Facebook, Instagram, and X as well, posting about the road, the new children’s book they put out, and the occasional behind-the-scenes moment. For the dedicated crew, the folks at The Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo Fan Club run a solid online home with updates, a Facebook group, and the kind of inside track that longtime listeners appreciate. And if you’re digging the freeform album-rock vibe that keeps records like this one alive, you already know where to find the signal over at THE ZOO. The Zoo Crew will keep the deep cuts and the stories spinning for the Freaks who know a real rock anthem when they hear one.