by Ann Wilson
The concert itself was both an ultimate high and an annoyance. We were trying to study everything the Beatles were doing musically, to pick up pointers, but because of the constant screaming and flashbulbs, it was hard to concentrate. The sound was wretched.
But the real-life Beatles onstage before us were still magical. We were in the room with what Timothy Leary had called “Divine Avatars.” Everything they did had a special aura, even if what they were doing was ordinary. When George Harrison broke a string, that simple act somehow helped us to feel that we were real musicians, because we had broken strings ourselves. John Lennon chewed gum, but he chewed it in such a John Lennon–like manner, that it seemed illicit. “It should be illegal to chew gum like that,” Nancy whispered in my ear.
They played only eleven songs, starting with Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” and ending with Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” The entire concert lasted less than thirty-five minutes. But August 25 forever became “B-Day,” for “Beatles Day,” to us, the most important anniversary of our childhood.
Not a year has ever gone by without us acknowledging it to each other.
There was one other reason that the Beatles concert ended up being such an important date: It marked the start of our friendship with Sue Ennis, the dearest friend Nancy or I have ever had. She attended the same concert and had seen the article in the newspaper with my picture. Here’s how Sue recalls our meeting:
SUE ENNIS
When my family moved to Bellevue in 1966, the Beatles were the only thing that mattered to me. In the paper, I saw a photo of a girl from my school who had won the Beatles essay contest. I knew I had to go get her. Turns out, she was taking German, as I was, because the Beatles had recorded “Sie Liebt Dich,” and “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand.” That afternoon I slipped into the desk behind her in class.
Revolver had just been released, and I knew if Ann were a true Beatle fan like me, she’d know every track, and not just the single “Good Day Sunshine.” I hummed the sitar riff from George Harrison’s obscure album track, “Love You To.” She took the bait instantly, whipping her head around. “Is George your favorite?” Our lifelong friendship began at that moment. I asked if she’d gone to their show.
“Yes, I saw them with my group,” she said.
“You have a group?” I asked.
“We’re called the Viewpoints and we’re about harmonies. There are four of us, including my sister. She’s twelve.”
A week later she invited me to their house to watch them rehearse. I was shocked at how professional they were, even her little kid sister. They played a few Beatles songs, but also other songs rich with harmonies: “Cherish” by the Association; “The Cruel War” by Peter, Paul and Mary; and “Walk Away Renée” by the Left Banke.
The other two girls were good singers, but the Wilson sister harmonies freaked me out. They were pitch perfect, matching the original songs note for note. They had an intuitive way of knowing exactly when to start and stop, when to turn it on, when to lighten up. I don’t think they ever had the discussion about how they would sing a song—they just fell into it. It was blood harmony. Like the Carter Family, the Everly Brothers, the Bee Gees, or countless other family singing groups, their DNA—their common blood—supplied one voice where there had been two. They were insular, but once they sang, they were like twins.
Ann took the group very seriously. She had formal business cards printed up that read: “The Viewpoints. For bookings call Ann Wilson. Sherwood 6-2710.” She sang with fury, and die-hard commitment. I was beside myself with joy to have found her, privy to an amazing secret: that my new friend, the withdrawn girl from my school, was a hurricane.
In 1966, most schoolgirls in Bellevue accepted or even welcomed the fact that they were heading for a little college, perhaps, marriage, then mommy-hood, and finally whatever was required to support her husband’s dreams. Ann seemed on an entirely different arc, and I couldn’t understand where she got the confidence to claim that she was going to be “a professional musician.” I secretly thought she was naive, but I was in awe of her clueless, unquestioning drive toward a single goal. She offered me a new model of freedom. After that, I never wanted to be apart from the Wilsons.
6
Cryin’ in the Chapel
Ann dials up an LSD festival and asks for a gig, and two
soon-to-be famous television personalities walk by the
serenading Wilsons, as the beat goes on. . . .
NANCY WILSON
The Viewpoints’ first public show was a folk festival on Vashon Island in 1967. We rode the ferry over in our stage costumes, which at that point consisted of granny dresses. We did four songs: “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well,” “Cherish,” “The Cruel War,” and “Walk Away Renée.” We didn’t get paid, but because there were people sitting in folding chairs, we considered it a professional gig.
That same fall, we played at the Sunset Drive-In Theater near our house. There was a mic and a wooden fruit box down in front of the screen, and we were the pre-movie entertainment. We did a handful of other shows at outdoor festivals and schools. We even played the Seattle Auto Show, standing near that year’s model cars as we strummed our acoustic guitars. At the car just over from us, the entertainment was the typical girl in a bikini.
That spring, Ann and I also made our public debut as a duo. It happened on the altar of the First Congregational Church on Mother’s Day, and it was a show that no one present would forget.
Like the nation, our church was torn apart by the Vietnam War. Lincoln Reed often preached about righteousness, but there were conservative members who felt the church should support the war. There were frequent antiwar demonstrations on the streets of Seattle, and even some in Bellevue. Ann and I marched in a few, sometimes alongside our parents. To see Dotes, a lifelong Marine, protesting the war was something else. It might have killed his parents had they been alive, but instead it delighted his high school students.
Once a year our church had what they called “Youth Sunday,” when they turned the preaching over to Youth Group. We were slated to play three songs on the altar, and with five hundred members packed into the church, it was the biggest audience we’d ever faced.
We started with “The Great Mandala (The Wheel of Life),” by Peter, Paul and Mary. The song is one of the most devastating antiwar songs ever written, but it wasn’t so much the political message as it was one word in the seventh line of the song that went through the church like an electric shock. “What the hell does he think he’s doing,” Ann and I sang. We thought we had really nailed the powerful harmonies, but we had failed to consider what singing the word “hell” in church might mean to some of the members. Several walked out.
Our next number didn’t help us, either. We thought it would be funny if we did a cover of Elvis Presley’s “Crying in the Chapel,” as a sort of spoof. We thought wrong. By the time we were finished, a third of the congregation was gone.
We continued on with our last song, which was our most misguided idea. The Doors’ “When the Music’s Over” had just come out, and we imagined it would perfectly end our brilliantly conceived set, as the music would “be over” when we were done. As we sang, the audience kept streaming out, at a fast clip. And when we sang the line “cancel my subscription to the Resurrection,” it was worse than if we’d said “hell” in church. By the finale of our first show as a duo, 60 percent of the audience was gone. Our parents were some of the only adults left.
I felt equal parts guilt and pride. I felt sorry for the people we had offended, but one of the things we had learned from Reed, who I was proud to see was still there, was that Jesus meant his teachings to change the world. Looking at that half-empty auditorium, I wanted to change things even more.
Many in the church thought the performance by the Wilson girls was a disgrace. But it lit a bonfire under us because we saw for the first time that what we did on stage could have an impact on an audience, even if it was a n
egative impact. Before that point, we had sung for ourselves or small groups of friends.
It was a turning point. We started to play out more often after that. We started to want it in a way we never wanted it before.
Over the next year, the church’s membership collapsed, when half the members left following development tycoon Kemper Freeman. A few people thought the Wilson sisters had something to do with it, but the Black Panthers, whom Reed invited to speak one Sunday, probably drove more members away than two long-haired girls with guitars.
The First Congregational Church would also serve as the place where I met one of my dearest friends, Kelly Curtis, who years later would go on to be Pearl Jam’s manager. My mom knew Kelly’s mom, Dot, from the church newsletter. Dot said she was looking for guitar lessons for her son. My mom offered up Ann. Here is how Kelly remembered it:
KELLY CURTIS
My mom arranged for me to take guitar lessons from Ann. Ann was about sixteen at the time, and I was ten. I went over there a few times, and she showed me some chords, but Ann never seemed that into teaching. Nancy was always there, and she was closer to my age, and she and I just really connected. She slowly took over my lessons.
My mom would pay Nancy ten dollars a lesson. As Nancy and I got to know each other better, sometimes we’d just listen to records. When the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s came out, we spent that entire lesson just listening. Sometimes, Nancy would take the ten dollars to a neighbor to buy pot, and we’d smoke that. Then she’d show me a chord or two so I could prove to my mom that I had learned something.
Every time I was there, Nancy and Ann would be playing something. I had never seen people actually performing music live before, so to be in the same room with them, to watch them play a Beatles’ song, was mindboggling. I just fell in love with them, and I fell in love with music through them. It was life changing.
NANCY
In junior high, singing with Ann and playing the guitar became my life. I didn’t date, and other than music I had few outside interests. I took a handful of classical guitar lessons, but I didn’t stick with it. I did learn a few classical tricks, though, that I later used in Heart songs.
My mother played piano. She had Ann and me take lessons, though neither of us stuck with that, either. Ann was more interested in bass, and she bought a Höfner that year (Paul McCartney used one) and learned to play. We also were both in choir and had an excellent choir teacher. The fact that our schools promoted the arts had so much to do with making us feel encouraged.
Between church, school, and home, we were completely ensconced in the dream of music. It became what defined us as people more than anything else. And although we both played guitar, and both sang, our roles were starting to shift, at least as our peers perceived it.
Ann was the girl who sang.
I was the girl with the guitar.
ANN WILSON
By the time I was a junior at Sammamish High School, Dotes had gotten a job teaching English there. His students loved him, and having him at my school made a difficult environment feel more secure to me. I’d see him in the hall every day.
“How you doing, Ann?” he’d say. And then he’d whistle to his next classroom.
He loved teaching, and it made our home life easier. My mother was happy to finally be free of being a Marine wife. They had more friends over, and a kind of informal salon of thinkers, players, and talkers started to make our dinner table a very interesting place for conversation.
Mama would still occasionally go off and leave the house in a huff, but that was less common. Our parents never had a relationship where you saw them holding hands, but it was romantic. In our Lake Hills house, the walls were thin and I could hear them loudly making love at night in their bedroom. Divorce was becoming commonplace around us, but there was rarely a time Nancy or I lived with the fear that our parents wouldn’t be together.
The one moment the idea they’d divorce crossed our minds turned into a comical and odd incident. It played out because by my junior year of high school, Nancy and I were regularly smoking pot. Our mom knew enough to figure that out from the smell (we also grabbed the occasional cigarette when we could). Mom asked if I had smoked pot, and I admitted I had.
A few weeks after that, our mom came up to my bedroom and asked Nancy and me to come to the dining table for “a serious family discussion.” We never had a problem with communication in our family, so we nervously went down the stairs.
“What do you think it is?” Nancy asked me. “Do you think they are getting a divorce?”
Our dad was sitting at the table waiting for us. Our mom sat down and folded her hands on her lap.
“Girls,” she said, “your father and I have an announcement to make.” She paused for effect. “We’ve decided that since we know you girls are smoking marijuana, we would try it, too. We tried it last week. So if you need to talk to us about what it’s like, we understand.”
Nancy has never been good at hiding her emotions, but if she’d been drinking a soda at the time she would have spit it across the room. Instead, her eyebrows jumped. We had no idea what to say, but eventually I meekly uttered “okay” and we retreated to our rooms. Well, they weren’t getting a divorce.
Matters became more complicated a couple of weeks later when after dinner one night, our parents suggested we smoke pot together. We couldn’t exactly refuse, so we sat very uncomfortably, while Dotes lit up a joint, and it was passed around. It wasn’t the best pot, but I wasn’t about to share my connection with our parents!
They only smoked one other time around us, and my sense was it had just been part of a phase when they were exploring counterculture. My mother was fascinated by Alan Watts and read many books about expanding consciousness. And for Dotes, who was into his cups most nights, it was just another way to escape. But the whole thing was totally embarrassing to us. Marijuana was supposed to be the province of teens. They were edging into our turf.
In that era, few things went on in our house that Sue Ennis didn’t immediately know about. She and I would talk for hours at school, she’d come over after classes for a few hours, and then later that same night when she went home we’d talk for hours on the telephone. Much of our conversation was about the Beatles, or the other groups we had started to love by then, the Moody Blues or the Rolling Stones. Sue’s parents were Republicans, and they were always a bit suspicious of anything in our home to start with, but I couldn’t imagine what they would think if they knew my parents smoked pot. Even Sue had a hard time understanding when I phoned her.
“They did WHAT?” Sue said.
She never mentioned it to her parents, of course.
Having Sue in my life made so many things easier for me. She became such a dear friend to us we decided we needed a name for our trio of friends. One night when we’d smoked too much pot, we started calling each other “Connie.” We’d seen an ad in the paper for a music act named “Connie Ted Slats,” and we thought the androgyny of that sounded hilarious, plus Connie was such an average high school girl name, and we were not average high school girls by any means. From that day forth, the three of us were “Connies.” I’d call Sue and say, “Hey, Connie, want to come over?” And she’d reply, “Sure, Connie. Tell the other Connie to get her guitar tuned.”
Having a friend at school was great. If someone teased me, it simply became more fodder to talk about with Sue. But in my last two years of high school, I went though internal transitions, too. I didn’t care as much if I wasn’t popular, because I could see a world beyond high school. Additionally, the concerts I was playing gave me self-confidence that I was good at something.
By my junior year, my stutter was less pronounced. I never knew why it came in the first place, so I didn’t know why it went away, but the shift made me less ostracized.
And though I would battle with weight in coming years, as I turned seventeen my metabolism shifted, and suddenly weight began to drop off me. I lost fifty pounds in a year. I didn’t feel
slim, but by most standards I was average. And average didn’t stand out.
If losing weight made me feel normal for once, my first encounter with a real female rock star in 1967 made me realize that there was a skewed standard toward women in the entertainment industry. Even decades later, I could recall her hair, her shimmering beauty, and her fragileness, but mostly I could remember how skinny she was. For one brief moment, I was her opening act, sort of, something quite different from watching the Beatles from the audience.
It was the summer of 1967, and the radio had announced that the Trips Lansing Festival would occur at the Greenlake Aqua Theater. Nancy and I had changed the name of our band to Rapunzel and had decided to make our style more psychedelic. We were trying to do contemporary songs that you might hear on the radio, and we had lost the granny dresses. I thought we’d be ideal for the Trips Festival, so I called up the promoter.
I started in on a long explanation of how we’d played drive-ins, high school assemblies, and arts and crafts shows, but the guy cut me off. “Sure,” he said. “Come on down for a few songs.” It says much about how casual this festival was that we were approved on the basis of a phone call, and not an audition tape, or any references.
The headliner at the festival was Sonny and Cher. This was the 1967-model of Sonny and Cher, different from the one America would discover when their network television show debuted four years later. In 1967, Sonny and Cher still had a hippie vibe to them, with their macramé vests, go-go boots, and Sonny’s trippy solo album Inner Views. There were a dozen other bands on the bill, including Vanilla Fudge, and our fellow local Merrilee Rush, who would record her chart-topping hit “Angel of the Morning” just four months later. And, most important, there was Rapunzel. My band’s name did not appear on any advertisement or handbill. All our friends had to take our word that we were even on the bill, and so did the promoters when we arrived—they had forgotten we had asked to play.