Cashing Out in the Pursuit of Creativity

In 1975, Pink Floyd released a sinister-sounding song about rebellious rockers being co-opted by the music biz and its big wallet. They called it “Welcome to the Machine.”

Before long, Pat Benatar and Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart would be climbing toward extreme riches among the gears and flywheels. Heart’s debut album in 1976, and Benatar’s in 1979, established them as the top female acts in hard rock during the late ‘70s and through much of the 1980s, as Heart scored eight million-selling albums and Benatar six.

The Wilson sisters’ new band, the Lovemongers, and Benatar are coming to Orange County for separate shows Sunday night, but their mutual theme might be titled “Good Riddance to the Machine.” Recording budgets and concert draws have shrunk since their arena-rocking commercial prime. Yet both have recently made the most endearing albums of their careers.

Benatar struck her initial, and most indelible, pop pose as the blustery tough customer belting out “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” and John Cougar Mellencamp’s “I Need a Lover.” She and Neil Giraldo, her guitarist spouse and songwriting collaborator, smoothed their sound in time for the techno-pop ‘80s, yielding the tasty “We Belong.” But Benatar’s music remained strictly of, by and for the machine until dwindling sales left her in search of a new direction.

“True Love,” a 1991 detour into blues, and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” an uninspired return in 1993 to rock, hardly served as harbingers of “Innamorata,” a gorgeous-sounding album that substitutes beautifully honed acoustic guitar and violin textures for the old arena rock, dispenses with Giraldo’s raucous solos and features the couple’s most personal and intelligent songwriting. Fans of such ‘90s stars as Paula Cole, Sarah McLachlan and Sheryl Crow might well enjoy it.

The Lovemongers’ debut album, “Whirlygig,” due out Dec. 9, is an even bigger surprise, given the plumed, image-laden falseness, sonic gaseousness and thematic drivel that propelled Heart to huge sales in the mid- to late-’80s while giving critics coronaries. (Songs from the band’s ‘70s beginnings in imitative but well-crafted Zep-inspired hard-rock and folk-rock hold up much better.) Joined by Sue Ennis and Frank Cox, old friends from their hometown of Seattle, the Wilson sisters have produced a pop-rock album that is catchy yet off-center, accessible and down-to-earth. They seem to be singing to have fun and to probe personal issues, rather than to fit some album-rock programming guru’s idea of a hit.

Benatar, 44, and Ann Wilson, 47, admitted in separate phone interviews this week that the machine’s dubious welcome has had a toll on their artistry. Each wished she’d had the resolve to escape it sooner.

“This is the first time in our career we were able to make a record in peace, without outside intervention from record companies, letting the songs develop over two years,” Benatar said from a tour stop in Albuquerque, N.M. “We left Chrysalis [her longtime label] four years ago and financed the record ourselves.”

Pressure for fresh product, and for songs that could grease the marketing gears, led to spotty output, Benatar said. “The lyrical content now is a lot more developed and stronger because we had more time. I’ve made 13 records, and I probably should have made seven. But it’s never going to happen again. I’ve had two C-sections, and I’m 45 [as of next Jan. 10]. Nobody’s telling me [expletive]. This is how the records should be made from now on.”

Few rockers are willing to change while they’re riding the gravy train. But Benatar now wishes that she had shown more spine sooner.

“If they would have left us alone 10 years ago, who knows where we’d be now--not so much in career, but artistically. How much further could it have gone? Absolutely, I wish I would have had more [guts]. But life is the way it is. . . . All that matters to me is where it ends up, not where it’s been.”

Benatar now records for CMC International, an independent label with major-label distribution by BMG. Her desire for a hit has kept her touring since May with a show that represents the new album along with past highlights. “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” has been retired, she said.

“I only perform the ones I can get behind, and I can’t find a way to make that one work. It’s too campy and silly and tongue-in-cheek.”

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Ann Wilson says she and her sister grew painfully uncomfortable with their musical lives while Heart was on its glitzy roll, complete with costume-ball outfits and a repertoire littered with songs by outside hack writers who had the big, arena-ballad touch.

“It wasn’t fun. It was a situation where we were expected to look, sound, behave and perform a certain way. If we varied from those expectations, we heard about it, from management, from the male members of the band.”

The Lovemongers, she said, is “an attempt to get back to some essence that is real.” The group first performed in 1991 at a Seattle peace rally against the Persian Gulf War; it released an all-covers EP in 1992, contributed a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore” to the “Singles” soundtrack, and has since played numerous hometown benefit concerts, Wilson said. The Sunday concert is part of the band’s first tour.

Ennis has been the sisters’ songwriting partner since the early days. Cox has been part of Seattle’s grass-roots pop scene, supporting himself as a telephone switchboard operator and newspaper deliveryman while developing a vocal style akin to Adrian Belew’s.

Any lineup fronted by the Wilsons could justly bill itself as Heart, but Ann said they want a low-key approach for now.

“We don’t want to break up Heart for good, but it needs a timeout. There are a lot of expectations put on Heart by the industry, radio and fans to put out a certain type of thing, but right now we feel like traveling light.”

The self-financed “Whirlygig” is on Will Records, a little-known Seattle label.

“It’s very human and wasn’t recorded with any thought of, ‘What format does it fit into on the radio?’ ” Wilson said. “When and if we bring back Heart, it’s going to be something real and something cool. We could never go back to the way things were in the ‘80s, because they were too unpleasant.”

Wilson, a single mom raising a 6-year-old daughter, said the money Heart earned was too hard to resist. But sacrificing creative control took its toll: “I began to have some pretty bad problems with stage fright. I couldn’t figure out what was different. I’d been doing it so many years on this level, and all of a sudden it was scaring me. It was the cumulative pressure. I was ready to get down from that big, [expletive] pedestal, because it was too much for me.”

So why didn’t the Wilsons stage a coup and retake control?

“I wish I would have had the personal strength to pull myself out of it a bit sooner, but I didn’t, and neither did Nance,” Wilson said.

Like Benatar, Ann Wilson’s signature is a big, rangy, blast-force voice. But, also like Benatar on “Innamorata,” she has toned it down drastically on “Whirlygig” to better serve less ponderous material.

“In this particular bunch of songs, there just wasn’t a time for Ann to go to ‘11,’ which was great for me, because I don’t like being expected to go to ’11.’ You can have more control, and being a singer is more truly about emoting than just blasting. In the show there’s a couple of songs where I do that. It gives people a cheap thrill, I guess, to hear me go “Waaahhh!”

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* Pat Benatar plays Sunday at the Freedman Forum Concert Theater, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim. 7 p.m. $22.50-$42.50. (714) 999-9599 (box office) or (714) 999-5485 (taped information).

* The Lovemongers and Elaine Summers play Sunday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $30-$32. (714) 496-8930.