by Ann Wilson
I had to press them to allow us to perform. I guess my brief twenty-second phone call had not been memorable. Eventually, we were directed to a small cement pallet that was actually outside the venue. It was near the performer’s entrance, so we played to an audience of arriving bands, on the way to the main stage to play their shows.
We played “The Cruel War,” and Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child,” which Nancy sang. A few people clapped when we finished. Somehow it still felt like a huge victory that we had participated. We didn’t so much leave “the stage” as we simply walked off our cement pallet and moved back into the crowd.
But the odd positioning of our “stage” turned into a stroke of fortune. We were hanging out near our cement pad later, and that was how we came to spot Sonny and Cher as they were leaving. As they walked toward their limo, they were right next to us for a brief moment. Sonny was wearing a saffron-colored pants suit with matching Beatle boots.
And then Cher was right next to me. She looked at me for a moment, as if to say something, though she didn’t speak, and neither did I. We had . . . a moment, or at least I had a moment. Her hair was like shining black satin. She was breathtaking: her makeup, her hair, and her short dress that matched Sonny’s suit. She seemed the perfect sixties Kabuki doll, complete with a pale, otherworldly expression. She was impossibly thin, gamine even. She was the most perfectly beautiful thing I’d ever seen in person. She was everything I felt I was not.
Seeing Cher Bono standing there next to me was a turning point in my youth. It was an epiphany for me. Here, in front of me, was the perfect fantasy girl of my imagination, who looked much like the drawings—fashioned after Jane Asher or Pattie Boyd—in my Beatles novels. Cher was present, but distant. She was beautiful and yet broken, I felt. It is an image that will never leave my memory. She wasn’t an image on a television screen, or a picture in a magazine—she was a human being. And it was obvious even to my youthful self that she was a human trapped in the consequence of her fame, trapped inside a bubble.
Cher and her hippie prince climbed into their black stretch limo. The window went up, and she was in a capsule, on the other side of the mirror. Safe, protected, a far cry from the happy, tripped-out hippie mythology of Monterey.
I stared at that limo for a long, long while. Eventually, the traffic around it cleared, and they pulled away.
What I did not know at the time was that the distorted reflection in that limo window—the woman behind the mirror, fresh from the stage, all dolled up—would one day be me. Our adventure at the Trips Festival ended, like most of our shows in those days, with us at a payphone, using the change Dotes had given us to call for a ride back home.
And then, magically, a half hour after we called, there was Dotes tooling along in the car. He drove up to the Trips Festival as if he were picking us up from a high school football game. He never doubted us, never wondered whether we got in trouble, never for a second seemed to think we weren’t capable of handling anything we ran into, even a Trips Festival.
He seemed to innately know how important it was for us to play music, and he and my mom supported that. It wasn’t because they thought we’d be famous one day—that dream didn’t exist in a suburban home in 1967, even a supportive one. They did it simply because they wanted us to be happy. Their belief in us was absolute. That gift had an even stronger effect on my life than Cher’s saffron-colored mini-dress.
On our trip back from the Trips Festival, my dad whistled all the way home.
7
A Boy and His Dog
A visit to Hamburg’s notorious Red Light District.
Nude photos get Nancy in trouble. And Ann auditions for
her first big-time band. . . .
ANN WILSON
In my junior and senior years in school, choir became a huge part of my life. I was a second alto. The hundred-member choir was filled with cliques like the rest of school, but our instructor, Allen Lund, changed my life and was the best teacher I ever had. He taught me how to breathe while singing. He said to imagine my body as an empty pitcher, with my breath being water going into the vessel, and to breathe from the part of the pitcher where the water hit first. Once I learned that, my voice soared.
But the most exciting part of choir came senior year, when we traveled to Europe for a series of performances. Our mother organized fundraising for the journey and signed on to be a chaperone, and consequently fourteen-year-old Nancy got to tag along. We went to Norway, Sweden, Holland, and Germany and sang in cathedrals and opera houses.
In Amsterdam, Nancy and I slipped away from the group and went to one of the city’s infamous coffeehouses. In the Bulldog Coffeehouse, wearing our little red blazers with logos that said “Sammamish High School,” we smoked hash.
We were even more brazen in Hamburg. To a Beatles fan, it was a legendary city, and we weren’t about to miss the sights just because they were off-limits to anyone with a red blazer. “Can we go get a soda?” we asked our mother. I had been studying German in high school because the Beatles spoke a few lines in “A Hard Day’s Night,” so when we left I found a city bus downtown. My tiny blonde sister and I strolled through the notorious Reeperbahn, with its drug dealers, pornography shops, and prostitutes on every street corner, to visit the Star Club, where the Beatles had honed their live act. We had now walked where the Beatles had walked.
That year my life took another unexpected turn when I began dating a boy. He was a senior named Don Smith, and he took me to my junior prom. My mom made the dress, of course. For the first time in my life, I got to dance at a dance.
Many of my dates with Don were centered on music, and that year we saw the Association and John Mayall. But sometimes we’d just get together to do drugs. I had started dropping LSD occasionally, and Don and I would trip together in Seattle’s Volunteer Park or go to the movies while high. Once we made the very bad decision to take acid and watch Rosemary’s Baby at the drive-in. It was instantly a bad trip. I sat on some chocolate, it got everywhere, and we both thought it was blood that had spilled in from the movie. Don freaked out and couldn’t drive us home until he came down. I was also on acid with Don the very first time I heard Led Zeppelin at a party, where everyone else was high on speed, and it was a revelation.
Acid, cars, and teenage hormones added up to some of the first make-out sessions of my life, and plenty of heavy petting, but somehow it never fully consumed me. I didn’t sleep with Don. The world of the Connies always seemed to trump everything else. None of the guys I met were able to provide the emotional partnership I needed to be in love, and none of them stacked up against the dreamy, perfect English boys of my novels. I was sophisticated enough to take LSD, but also quite old-fashioned.
I left Sammamish High School in June of 1968, as I began: like a virgin.
NANCY WILSON
In the fall of 1968, I started high school just after Ann finished. She was now attending Cornish Institute in Seattle, studying fashion and art. Sue moved to Salem, Oregon, to start college there. And though that seemed sad at first, it simply gave Ann and me an excuse to travel there for frequent Connie reunions.
Lynn had moved back to Bellevue, and I got to see her often. She and her husband started a commune not far from my parents’ house. I was often over there listening to music, or playing my guitar for whatever hippies were hanging out.
At a young age I had already discovered that older men were often sexually inappropriate with young girls. The year before, one of my medical professionals had tried to kiss me, and though the police weren’t called in that era for such actions, my parents got involved, and we switched providers. The year I started high school, Lynn’s husband asked if he could shoot a nude photo of me. In the commune where my sister and her family lived they had a nude portrait of their whole group on the wall, with the caption “The Hoopers,” a take-off on the word “hippies.” I said, “Sure, I’m a flower child.” I sat nude by a window in a patch of sunlight, and he photographed me. It was
an artistic picture, but my mom got wind of it and blew up with a fury I had never seen before. She slapped me in the face. She ordered me never to go to Lynn’s house again. She told me never to take my clothes off in front of a photographer, or a camera, ever again.
Mama was always afraid Ann or I would become pregnant and turn into what she called “a fallen woman.” She repeatedly cited Judy Garland as her example of someone who had been destroyed by the entertainment industry. “She takes pills,” my pot-smoking mother said. And when Judy died the following year, Mama’s view was cemented. Show business, she was convinced, was a dangerous place for a woman. Maybe she was right.
But my mother’s prejudice didn’t stop us, and that year I began to write songs. Both Ann and I were shifting away from the idea that we would be interpreters, and toward the concept that we had something to say. My first original was titled “Rain Song.” I was channeling Paul Simon and celebrating our return to Seattle after the time we’d spent in the California desert. Though the Beatles would always be the big shadow in the room—and Abbey Road was a revelation—Paul Simon, and soon Joni Mitchell, would rival them. And when Elton John’s first album was available in the United States in 1970, the year I turned sixteen, it floored me. By that point, I listened to music to hear the songwriting, and you couldn’t beat Bernie Taupin for lyrics or songcraft.
During my first year of high school, at a choir competition, I became friends with a brainy girl named Jan Drew. We developed a deep friendship based on our mutual quest to become intellectuals reading great books, and, as the years went by, we tried to do that while being incredibly stoned on pot.
We were a long way from Judy Garland, but if my mother had known the half of it, she would have freaked.
ANN
In my last year of high school I met a classmate who was a drummer, Chris Blaine. He became my best musical friend, outside the Connies, over the next few years. Chris was playing with a few guys, and he asked if I wanted to sing. I went to a rehearsal at Chris’s parents’ house, and that day I joined my first “real” band. We decided to call ourselves “White Sail.”
We got a gig at a local club, but as we arrived at the gig, I saw they misspelled our name on the marquee as “White Sale.” It would have been comical later in my career, but not when I was so vulnerable and raw. In that band, we played only covers, and only big radio hits.
The next month we changed our name to “Daybreak.” We got a regular gig playing the enlisted men’s club at the Fort Lawton Army Reserve Base in Seattle. Nancy would often come to our shows, and sometimes she would sing background vocals.
Chris had a separate gig with a country songwriter who needed a band to play on his songwriting demos, and Daybreak got the gig. Chris thought there might be a bit of extra time at the end of the session, and he asked if Nancy and I had any songs we might want to record.
I had never been in a recording studio before, and even though Audio Recording was a tiny place, it might as well have been Abbey Road. It was where the Fabulous Wailers, the Sonics, and the Frantics had made records. We played on three country songs, including “Drank My Hurt Away.” There was just enough time left over for us to record one Nancy and I had written called “Through Eyes and Glass.” I even played flute on that one.
Kearney Barton ran Audio Recording, and he had his own record label called Topaz. He liked our songs enough that he offered to make up five hundred copies of the two singles made from the demos if we paid him a few bucks. So on the B-side of one of the country tracks, titled “I’m Gonna Drink My Hurt Away,” our song appeared. The track was credited to “Ann Wilson and the Daybreaks,” not the name of our band, plus I was listed as the sole songwriter, leaving out my sister.
When we got the forty-five back from the plant, Dotes spun it again and again on our hi-fi, while our voices came out of the speakers. For so long Nancy and I had a dream that we would be real musicians, but here was actual physical proof we’d done it. It felt like major progress. I could honestly tell people, “I’ve got a record out, Topaz T-1312.” I was a Topaz recording artist.
The record was sent Seattle radio stations. We listened and listened, and though Kearney said it had been played, we never heard it. We tried to keep track of sales, and airplay, but the single never became another local sensation like “Louie, Louie” had.
In the end, Kearney sent 250 unsold copies to me in a giant box. Even that felt like a victory of sorts: Somewhere, somehow, a few people had bought or shoplifted my single. Topaz T-1312 might not have topped the charts, but it was a start.
We then changed our band name again to “A Boy and His Dog,” a salute to a popular sci-fi novel. This line-up featured Chris Blaine on drums, Mick Etchoe on guitar, various bass players who came and went, and both me and Gary Humphries on vocals. It was an era where most bands in the Northwest had two, or sometimes three, different singers, switching off songs or sets.
A Boy and His Dog landed a regular gig at the Hatchcover Tavern in Bellevue every Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. These were the deadest nights at any club, but we still drew good crowds. We were doing only covers, but I started to have a fan base. “Every time you do ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ ” one guy told me, “it about makes me cry.” The band was making a small amount of money, and I received as much as two hundred dollars a month. It was enough to get my first apartment, a few miles from my parents’ house. The move was only temporary. The lure of my bond with Nancy was strong enough that I was still often back in Lake Hills, or Nancy was at my place. Eventually, A Boy and His Dog broke up, and I moved back in with my parents.
I also started thinking about getting a job. Other than guitar lessons, and babysitting, I’d never had a job, and I had few marketable skills. But I was hired at the Kentucky Fried Chicken in downtown Bellevue. I worked there a total of two days, and at the end of my second day I was fired for having “a bad attitude.” It was the last job I ever had, outside music.
Chris Blaine and I stayed in touch, and that year he alerted me to an advertisement in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for a band seeking a drummer and a singer, a perfect combination for us. Chris talked to the guys who placed the ad, a bass player named Steve Fossen and a lead guitar player named Roger Fisher. They were both well known on the local scene and had been in a half dozen bands by that point. For a time Steve and Roger had been known as the Army, but they had to change that since it stopped them from getting gigs on Navy bases. They had been called White Heart, after another sci-fi novel, and then later just Heart. I’d heard the name Heart on the radio when they were playing at local radio station KJR’s Battle of the Bands. They now wanted to call their new band Hocus Pocus, and they asked if Chris and I wanted to try out with them. We asked Gary Humphries to come, too, and arranged an audition at Chris’s house. They knew Mick Etchoe, so he came to the audition as well.
I borrowed my parents’ car. Because these guys had been in some well-known local bands that I had heard about on the radio, I felt like I was going to play with the Beatles. I think Steve and Roger were reticent when they saw me. I overheard Steve ask, “Do you think she is the kind of girl who can do this?” Mick Etchoe, our old bandmate, said, “Just listen to her sing.”
We started with “Son of a Preacherman,” and from that first song it was magic. I then tackled the Beatles’ “A Long and Winding Road,” and by then I had won over the doubters. Roger was beside himself, and I was happy to play with an electric guitar player as good as he was. It went so smoothly that an hour later we were a band.
It was only later I learned that although Roger and Steve had big dreams, they were penniless. They had been living in a local campground. They were hippies with long hair and ideas about love, sex, and freedom that seemed straight out of Easy Rider, which had been released that year. But it was obvious from that first rehearsal that they were great musicians, and by playing with them I was upping my game.
Roger and I planned to get together separately that next week to
see if we could work out some material between my flute and his guitar. I gave him my address, but he said his car wasn’t working. He asked if I could pick him up. He said he’d be on the corner of the highway, near a turnabout, at a certain time, and I was to find him up there. I had to get Mama to drive me. We drove to the turnabout, and there was Roger waiting with his guitar in hand, jumping up and down to get our attention. He jumped in the backseat of the car, and I moved back there with him as we began to discuss what we might do in rehearsal. To anyone witnessing the sight, it would have seemed that my mother, wearing her white driving gloves, was chauffeuring my new guitarist and me all the way home.
8
She’s Here to Sing
Ann sees a nude Fisher brother for the first time. The
Delfonics try to seduce a young Wilson. And an eye-lock
leads to a bed made out of driftwood, and a new chapter. . . .
ANN WILSON
The first nude man I ever saw was our guitar player Roger Fisher. I’d seen pictures in National Geographic of naked tribesmen, but Roger was my first in the flesh “full monty,” and it was unforgettable. I had been sheltered from displays of male anatomy growing up because our father was incredibly modest. But as Hocus Pocus began to tour in the early seventies, I was the only female on the road with five uninhibited young men. It was quite an education.
I saw Roger’s penis five minutes after we’d checked into a motel for our first out of town show. We were booked for a two-week gig at the Town Crier in Richland, Washington. Once in our room, Roger was naked almost immediately, an unleashed stallion walking around. He had no shame about it. Nudity wasn’t sexual with Roger, usually, just an extension of his hippie spirit. He had a great body, which stayed toned and fit not through exercise, but by being in a perpetual state of motion. Clothing just seemed to fall off Roger, and even onstage it was rare to see him with a full shirt on. The clothes he did wear were usually skimpy, or suggestive. He was fond of a pair of jeans on which a girlfriend had embroidered DIG IT across the ass.