Events

[ROCK] So, for anyone that might be wondering: it has, essentially, always been “Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo.” Benatar, now 65, met Giraldo while she was on the cusp of recording her stellar 1979 debut, In the Heat of the Night. He was dating Linda Blair at the time, she was in the process of getting divorced. There’s no denying, and Benatar is the first to admit: it was the energy he brought to re-working her demos for the album that really shaped the sound we came to associate with Pat Benatar in the heady years of stardom that followed. But marketing strategies often call the shots, especially going back 40 years. The powers that be during the almighty video age (her cover of the Young Rascals tune “You Better Run” was the second-ever clip aired on MTV) wanted Benatar’s vixen-in-spandex image to grow, which is ironic given that it was basically something she’d tested out one night as a joke. The fact that the two became an item (and married a few years later) was purposefully kept on the down-low,  which is pretty ridiculous since Neil “Spyder” Giraldo’s nimble-fingered guitar work was always a focal point in videos and certainly at live shows, not to mention that fact he’s always been—and remains to this day—easy on the eyes in his own right. Now free of any contractual confines, the pair remain dubbed as a duo, which is how they like it. For the better part of the last 20 years, they have toured quite regularly without releasing much new music, save for a few one-off charity-related singles and one full-length disc, 2003’s Go!. Instead, they’ve chosen to stick with the catalogue of songs for which they’re known best, and they’ve reinforced that with a few live releases over the years (both audio and video) that revel in slightly different arrangements of them. Their current tour, which brings them to the Seneca Niagara Casino Event Center on Saturday, April 14, is a run of acoustic dates. In this case, all that will be on stage is Pat, Neil, an acoustic guitar and a keyboard. There may be some additional guitar parts piped in so the songs retain some semblance of their original shape, but this is the most stripped down and intimate presentation that they’ve ever offered and Benatar’s vocals remain impressive—it’s not to be missed.