Over the weekend, I was listening to the radio and I heard Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”.
It brought back a memory of a Christmas party at the Prince George Free Press some years ago. This wasn’t a big party, it was a get-together one afternoon in the office, but part of it was a karaoke setup.
A few other people sang, and then I checked the list of songs available and picked “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”. I had to change a few words and my voice is nowhere near as good as Pat Benatar’s, but I thought I did a pretty good job.
Afterwards, one of the other people there asked why I picked that song, since it was a hit for a female singer. I told them that it was a hit for a female artist, but that didn’t mean it was written for a female singer.
There was one section of the lyrics that had always bothered me a bit when I heard Benatar sing them: “Before I put another notch in my lipstick case, You better make sure you put me in my place”.
What kind of a woman puts notches in her lipstick case in this situation?
I pondered it for a while, staying awake several nights (OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration) and finally the breakthrough hit.
Suppose you change the lyric to, “Before you put another notch in your lipstick case”. It’s a man singing the song to a woman who’s coming on with a come-on and don’t fight fair, to paraphrase some of the other lyrics.
When I started looking at the song that way, I was not surprised to find it was written by Eddie Schwartz, a Canadian singer-songwriter who was just getting started and was actually in Charity Brown’s backup band at the time.
His singing career never really took off, although he had some success in Canada, but his songwriting made up for it. Besides “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”, he co-wrote “Don’t Shed a Tear” for Paul Carrack and “The Doctor”, which has quickly become one of my favourite Doobie Brothers songs.
I’m sure there a lot of other songs which were either written as a song for a woman which became a hit for a male singer or vice versa, but I’m not really in the mood to start digging.
I mean, it would be tough to find them. If it wasn’t for that one line in “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”, I probably wouldn’t even have thought of it that way.