There’s a moment about forty seconds into “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” where Neil Geraldo’s guitar drops in with that choppy, almost contemptuous little riff, and Pat Benatar hasn’t even opened her mouth yet — and somehow you already know this record means business.
Crimes of Passion came out in August 1980, recorded at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles, and it arrived like a correction. Arena rock belonged to men who wore scarves and stood with their legs apart. Benatar walked into that space and simply refused to negotiate.
The Voice, the Band, the Room
Producer Keith Olsen had already worked with Fleetwood Mac on Rumours and knew how to make a room sound expensive without sounding soft. Engineer Ron Nevison had his fingerprints on everything from Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti to The Who’s Who Are You — a résumé that amounted to: this man understands power. Together they gave Benatar’s voice exactly what it needed, which was space to be dangerous.
Neil Geraldo — guitarist, arranger, and by this point Benatar’s partner — is the unsung architecture of this record. His playing isn’t flashy in the way 1980 often demanded. It’s precise. The riff on “You Better Run” borrows from the Young Rascals original and makes it meaner. Scott St. Clair Sheets plays rhythm guitar alongside him, and the bottom end is held by Roger Capps on bass, with Glen Hamilton on drums.
They are a tight band. Not a session-player tight, a road-band tight. You can hear the difference.
What Olsen and Nevison Actually Built
The drums on this record sit exactly right — not buried, not triggering into oblivion, just present. Hamilton hits and the room responds. This was still an era when engineers treated the room as an instrument rather than a problem to solve, and Cherokee had good rooms.
“Treat Me Right” is the track I come back to when I want to explain to someone what this band could actually do. The verse is restrained and the chorus opens up like a door kicked off its hinges. It’s not complicated music, but it is very well-made music, and those are not the same compliment.
“Hell Is for Children” deserves its own sentence. Written by Benatar and Geraldo with Roger Capps, it was a genuinely uncomfortable song about child abuse dropped into the middle of an album people bought to feel tough at parties. That it doesn’t feel out of place is a testament to how much conviction these recordings carry.
The album went to number two on the Billboard 200 and spent over two years on the chart. It went platinum four times. None of that is what makes it worth putting on tonight.
What makes it worth putting on tonight is that it was made by people who had something to prove and the chops to prove it. Benatar had been singing in Holiday Inns in Virginia when she moved to New York and started playing small clubs. By 1980 she had one moderately successful debut album behind her and a band she trusted completely.
That trust is audible. Every track here sounds like the same five people in the same room, which in 1980 was not as common as you might think. Overdubs were added with restraint. The performances are performances.
There’s an argument that Precious Time, the album that followed this one, is better constructed. Maybe. But Crimes of Passion has the rawer edge, the hunger that second albums sometimes lose when a label starts hovering.
Put it on after ten o’clock. The kids are in bed. Let Geraldo’s guitar come in on “Hit Me” and just let it run.