Pat Benatar, Neil Giraldo and John Waite in Dallas

Last night, Fermin and I went to see the Pat Benatar concert.  Although I liked Pat back in the day, and feel so lucky I got to see her, my main reason for going was to see John Waite, who was billed as her opener.

John Waite!  First, the singer of the Baby's, and then his solo career of the 80s.  His first solo album was "Ignition" and it's one of my all time favorites.  The song "Change" is on that one, and I hope you're familiar with it...But if not, let me introduce you.
 


So what I learned last night is that Neil Giraldo (Pat Benatar's husband, producter, co-writer, and guitarist) had a huge hand in that Ignition album.  He arranged a lot of those songs, and played guitar.  Neil also produced, arranged, and played guitar on the Rick Springfield song, "Jessie's Girl".  Oh yeah, and then all those songs he did with Pat Benatar.

Anyway, back to John Waite.  John Waite is 62, but looks- at least from an 11th row from stage distance, exactly the same as he did back in the 80s!  And he sounds at least as good.  He has, in my opinion anyway, one of the best male voices in Rock/Pop.  Unfortunately, he only had about a 40 minute long set, and there just wasn't enough time for him to sing enough to satisfy me.  He only did about 8 songs, and two of them were new-ish "country" songs he had written within the past 10 years when he was living in Nashville.  He sang "Change", and "Missing You" from his solo albums.  He did a few Baby's songs- "Head First" and a few others.  But,  NOT ENOUGH JOHN WAITE.

This Pat Benatar concert celebrates the 35th year of her and Neil's musical anniversary together.  And I think she said they've had 32 years of marriage.  Wow.  They had a 4 minutes video that told the story of how they grew up and met.  And then they played hit after hit for about 2 hours.

It was good, but it was LOUD.  So loud that I couldn't hear it very well, if that makes sense.  And Pat's voice had so much reverb, it took a while to get used to.

Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo are obviously great musicians and performers, and they came off as very nice and appreciative people. They let fans up by the stage the entire concert, shook hands with gobs of people as they came back out for an encore, got in close to fans for photos, tossed out lots of guitar pics, and were very gracious to everyone for coming out and supporting them for all these years.

Pat Benatar- cute as ever

Neil Giraldo-  actually looking better than ever

The videos took with my iPhone last night weren't very good, so I'm instead posting up the second song EVER played on MTV, "You Better Run."  Pat told us last night that Neil was officially the first guitarist to ever appear in an MTV video.  And she was the first female.  Many (many!) years later, they both look and sound great.