Treat Me Right - Pat Benatar

No one made straight ahead rock in the early 80s better than Pat Benatar. There weren’t that many female artists doing this at the time (the pantheon included Heart and Joan Jett on the rock side and Blondie, Stevie Nicks, Quarterflash, the Go Gos, and later on the Bangles on the poppier side) but I’m not just talking about female artists here. Benatar’s songs and production were among the best stuff that any rockers were putting out. There was a very nice fusion between guitar and keyboards in these songs (also true of the first few Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers albums) that disappeared in the 90s and really has never come back. Things got way too guitar oriented (both toward electric/distorted/lead sounds and jangly/acoustic/rhythm work) and the production values got too bass/drums heavy and overorchestrated. Plus, at least in America, there eventually was a general reaction against 80s synth pop which led to an overall dismissal of keyboards and, in my opinion, an overall degradation of pop and rock sounds that inevitably affected the songwriting (and still does today). Anyway, I digress…

Treat Me Right, from 1981, is one of Benatar’s less well known hits, although it got a decent amount of airplay on rock and pop stations at the time. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the video of this on Youtube. So you’ll have to settle for this bizarre fan scrapbook of anime, Harry Potter, Capt. Jack Sparrow, and random other stuff that was set to the song (sound quality is pretty good, actually).