by Ann Wilson
I graduated from high school in June 1972. I was set to start Pacific University in Oregon in the fall, but before that I decided to travel north to Vancouver to visit Ann. I had gone up to see her a few times during her first year with Michael Fisher. It initially seemed like I had lost her to that relationship. She even started to sound different on the phone, speaking with a Canadian accent, and with a more serious demeanor than she’d had before.
When I traveled up that summer, Ann was forming a new band, and that seemed to bring out her old self again. She and Michael had moved out of the cottage and into the bigger hippie house in front of it, and I stayed with her for a few days.
But I had other reasons for heading to Vancouver. I was meeting my friend Jan Drew to travel to Sechelt Island, off the British Columbia coast. We were going to find Joni Mitchell. We read in a magazine that Joni owned an eighty-acre farm there, and we had the romantic notion to go to her. We never discussed what we might do when we arrived at Joni’s, and in the haze of youth, I never considered failure a possibility. Neither Jan nor I had a car, so we hitchhiked. We got a ride from a hippie, who drove us up the coast to a ferry that went to Sechelt.
When we arrived on Sechelt, we found a fifteen-square-mile island with several thousand residents. It lacked a single sign directing tourists to Joni Mitchell’s house. We flipped a coin, and when it came up heads, we decided to hitchhike south.
A middle-aged man in a Ford truck pulled over, and we climbed in the front with him.
“Where you gals headed?” he asked.
“We’re going to see Joni Mitchell,” I said. I sounded bubbly. “Can you take us to her house?”
The first sign something was wrong came when our driver didn’t know who Joni Mitchell was. The second was when he turned north, when we asked him to go south. The third was when we asked get out, and he ignored us and drove into the woods.
In the late sixties, hitchhiking had been an entirely acceptable method of transportation for any enlightened person. If you saw a driver with long hair, you were part of the same community. It was all very honor system, and it worked really well, for a few short years.
Our problem was those weren’t our years. Jan and I both had older sisters, and we were attempting to recreate their lives, their summer of love, when we missed that period. The seventies never quite reverted to the sixties, no matter how much I wished it. And as the seventies began, I was heading into the woods with a rapist at best, and possibly a killer.
Time seemed to stop, and I did the only thing I knew how to do when times got rough. It was the thing Mama and Dotes taught me to do, which was to “pull rank.” I started talking crazy talk, crazy Marine-talk.
“My father is Major General John Bushrod Wilson of the United States Marine Corps, and he’s expecting us to embark, and if we don’t arrive by oh-nine-hundred hours, he’ll be sending out a bivouac party, a recon squad, to track us down,” I said. I pronounced this with the measured cadence of a drill sergeant, thinking that enunciating every syllable might hide my panic. “If we don’t arrive soon, a search party of enlisted soldiers from the Marine Expeditionary Units will begin combing this island with Marine canine units, raiders and dogs, just like the Corps did at Iwo Jima. The few, the proud, the Marines. No woman left behind.” None of what I said made any sense. The Marines were not going to make an amphibious landing to save us on a remote Canadian island.
But I guess my words had either enough truth to create worry, or enough craziness to make him afraid of us. He stopped the truck and ordered us out. As we watched his taillights disappear, I swore I’d never hitchhike again.
We still had the pressing matter of how we were going to get from the middle of a British Columbia forest to Joni’s garden. We hiked out, found a road, and after hours, came to a general store.
“Can you tell us where Joni Mitchell lives?” we asked the elderly female clerk. She helpfully pointed down the road. We headed in that direction, but after searching for hours, we realized the lady at the store had probably intentionally sent us the wrong way. She was doing what islanders everywhere do: protect their Eden-esque garden from outsiders, and particularly from Joni Mitchell–stalkers. We caught the last ferry back to the mainland that evening.
When we arrived on the other side, we were still thirty miles from Ann and Michael’s house. We had no car, and we had spent the last of our money on the ferry. We didn’t even have a dime to call Ann. Six hours after vowing to never hitchhike again, I was sticking my thumb out, hoping against hope that some kindly hippie would drive by in a Volkswagen bus.
We swore we’d go back for Joni, but we never did. The closest I would get to Joni Mitchell that summer would be the sound of her voice coming out of a radio.
ANN WILSON
Though my romance with Michael Fisher had initially drawn me away from music, I wasn’t gone long. My poetry morphed into songwriting, even if many of the songs I wrote were about Michael Fisher. Two of the first were “Here Song,” and “How Deep It Goes.” I wrote the latter to express my loneliness when Michael and I had a minor fight: “I don’t know what I believe anymore / or whether to leave / or whether to stay / or what I can say / to make you know how deep it goes.” Like many of my lyrics, they were melancholy.
Our initial mad passion couldn’t be sustained without bumps in the road, of course. While Michael was always supportive of my creativity, he watched everything I ate, and counted every beer I drank. I starved myself to be thin for him. It worked for a time, but I was conflicted. I loved him entirely and deeply, yet I was too young to be that devoted. That first year, I was lost in love, but eventually my real self returned, and I saw parts of Michael that were a bit too Henry Higgins–like for me, straight out of My Fair Lady. Our relationship sometimes felt like a tight-fitting garment.
Still, I remained undeniably crazy about Michael Fisher. I began to write a song that year that summed up what being in love had done to me. The words were straight out of the scenes of the wild sexuality that went on in our cottage, but they were also about how love had opened up parts of me heretofore unknown, my own liberation: “My love is the evening breeze touching your skin / the gentle, sweet singing of leaves in the wind / the whisper that calls after you in the night / and kisses your ear in the early moonlight / Let me go crazy on you.” When I wrote about “the whisper that calls,” it wasn’t just the literal whisper in Michael’s ear, or mine, pulling us to that dreamy driftwood bed. The “whisper” was also a voice calling me toward my muse, my empowered womanhood, my fate. At times it didn’t feel like a whisper, but a shout. The whisper of that muse terrified Michael because it was one of the few parts of me he had no sway over.
Michael’s alpha-male personality, though, played an essential part in my career. While moving to Canada seemed like I was leaving the band behind, it was only a temporarily relocation: The band eventually came to me. Michael had always wanted to manage his younger brother’s band, so Roger Fisher, Steve Fossen, plus a drummer and keyboard player who would later depart, moved to Vancouver. They, and their wives, moved in with Michael and me in our tiny cottage.
We lived for a time, more like a commune of hippies than a band, with all of us sharing pots of brown rice, and Roger Fisher running around with very few clothes on. Roger almost immediately began to damn up Lassen Creek with the idea of making a swimming hole. He managed to muscle enough boulders into place to build a pond worthy of beaver, and it held for a few months until a downpour caused it to burst one day with an explosion that woke us in the middle of the night.
Michael was a powerful leader, and he directed us on every aspect of what our band was going to be. It was like in Russia, where they started Communism by saying, “We’ve got a five-year plan.” He sat us down and said, “Here’s what’s going to happen in the first five years.” Our new group hadn’t played a single show, but Michael had already plotted out where we would be if we committed to his vision.
We had to have a name for this ne
w band. We considered several, including going back to Hocus Pocus. Eventually, we settled on a name that Roger and Steve had used before: Heart.
Now that we had a name, we needed a logo. Michael Fisher had already been sketching a Hocus Pocus logo and switched it around a bit. He took the “H” from that drawing, put a heart shape in the serif, and made it “Heart.” He drew it in a single afternoon sitting in our cottage over the creek.
We now had a leader, a band, a name, a logo, and a five-year plan that spelled out everything we would do, and all we would become.
All we needed was to make any part of that plan come true.
10
The Impossible Perfect Thing
A first gig in a cave. A bucktoothed Texan.
And a search for something that was right
there all along.
ANN WILSON
Heart’s first gig was at a Vancouver, B.C., club called the Cave. The name was literal: It was decorated with rocks on the walls to look like a cavern. We had to audition to get the gig. During our tryout, a gust of wind blew in when a door opened, and my acoustic guitar fell to the ground. We got the booking anyway, and made sixty dollars. Before the gig, we were so poor that six of us were living off a hundred-pound bag of rice that Roger’s wife Mary had purchased with her tax refund.
Vancouver had a sophisticated nightclub scene, and there were dozens of clubs that featured live music. We eventually played them all, plus others in the suburbs and the rest of the province, because we couldn’t play downtown every night without cannibalizing our audience. We performed between three and five sets most nights, and sometimes we were onstage for five hours. We paced the show to start with popular radio hits to get the crowd dancing, like the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman,” before shifting to progressive rock, like “Siberian Khatru” by Yes, or “Highway Star” by Deep Purple. As our club career developed, we’d sneak our originals into the set between two covers. “Here’s a little thing we wrote called ‘Crazy On You,’ ” I’d say, trying to soft sell it.
But the part of our show that first gained us fans in Vancouver was our thirty-minute set of Led Zeppelin covers. The interplay between Roger Fisher’s guitar and my voice mimicked the dynamics of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant on songs like “Stairway to Heaven” and “Whole Lotta Love.” Roger even learned to use a bow on his guitar, so he could play “Dazed and Confused” like Page. Our skill at doing Zeppelin became our calling card and earned us most of our first bookings.
The androgyny of Zeppelin always appealed to me—they had just as much of a feminine side as masculine. And though Heart mostly covered their rock songs, Zeppelin were always more of a folk and blues band to me. I could easily sing their ballads, but it took me a while to learn to do the screamers without getting hoarse. I had quit smoking, and that helped, but the clubs we played were so filled with cigarette smoke that it hardly mattered.
I’d seen Led Zeppelin in concert in Seattle, and everyone in Heart went together to see them in Canada in 1973. When they returned to Vancouver in 1975, we had to miss them since we had a gig that night at Oil Can Harry’s, Vancouver’s most prestigious club.
I was onstage when the post-concert crowd began to stream in. To my shock, as I was singing “Stairway to Heaven” Led Zeppelin walked into the club. To me this seemed like the ultimate kismet, but this probably happened to Zeppelin all the time, and they never registered that we were playing their signature song. They immediately retreated to the club’s private pool table room. During our set break, Steve Fossen and Howard Leese talked to John Bonham and Robert Plant. Jimmy Page didn’t talk to anyone because he was being seen to by “his doctor” and was passed out in a booth.
In our early days, we were happy if we made a hundred dollars for a booking, though that didn’t pay for much partying on our part. When club gigs started to earn us more, Michael Fisher carefully doled out our pay, but used most of our earnings to upgrade our equipment. Michael was obsessed with the band’s “surround” sound system, which he designed and built. It became part of our appeal with fans: Whether they liked us or not, we sounded better than any other band on the circuit. Whenever we weren’t playing, Michael and Roger were building new speaker systems.
Though I was the front person of the band, I was still confined by the attitudes the other members of the band had toward women, particularly when we all lived together. I was still expected to clean the house, cook the meals, and wash the clothes. Some of these expectations were Michael Fisher’s, but some were my own. I would wash the sheets, hang them to dry, and iron them so that when Michael came home there would be fresh sheets for him on the bed. But even if I didn’t volunteer, the guys expected that the women would do all the chores.
Two of the band members were married, and Roger’s wife had a daughter, so a baby was part of our group. We were like one big commune in principle, but oftentimes there would be a separation of the sexes during social time, and I didn’t fit in either group. The guys wanted to just be guys, but I didn’t mesh with the other women, either. The girlfriends and wives were sweet and earthy, but their role—being defined only by their support for the men—was not mine.
As we started to play more out-of-town shows, and we’d need hotel rooms, groupies came into the mix. That was the rock guy mentality of the day, and the men in the band took women, and road sex, for granted. Roger Fisher, in particular, was the most sexually driven creature I ever met. He had been hitting on Nancy since he met her, often telling me he was in love with her, though he was married and had a daughter.
When we returned from an out-of-town gig, the wives or girlfriends would immediately descend on me, wanting the truth about what went on with their men. I had to pick between the code of the road, and the sisterhood. I always chose to protect the guys, and band unity, as best I could. It was a rotten position because I witnessed the tears and heartache of these faithful young women when they discovered the indiscretions. Early on I had been naive enough before one road trip to suggest the wives come along. It proved to be a terrible idea. The wives had no fun watching groupies flirt with their men, and the guys had no fun ignoring the flirts.
Michael Fisher was, to my knowledge, too disciplined to be a cad in that way, plus I was his girlfriend and on the road with him. I was also onstage singing songs I had written about Michael, like “Magic Man,” which became one of our most popular originals that year. For Michael to have cheated would have been a betrayal of me and of everything Heart represented to him. That sidestep wasn’t in the five-year plan. Nor was flubbing lyrics, and when that happened Michael didn’t wait a minute when I came offstage. He was on me right away, dressing me down in front of everyone else. Michael was our leader, but no one in the band would ever say that he was easy on us. He was just as harsh when criticizing his brother Roger.
His benign dictatorship did have results though. By 1974, we had become “the number one cabaret band in Vancouver,” which had been on his five-year plan. Early that year we had signed on with a booking agent named Barry Samuels. We told Barry to get us any gig he could, so we played high school dances, proms, weddings, and private parties, in addition to nightclubs. We had started at the bottom of the rung, but as our reputation grew, Barry eventually got our fee up as high as three thousand dollars for a multi-night booking. Although that seemed like a fortune to us, as usual most of it went to better equipment, gear, or the van we got that year. But it was progress.
We were also trying to save money because one of the parts of the five-year plan we had yet to execute was releasing a record. Michael Fisher had contacted every label or producer in town, without success.
We finally got a break when we ran into an engineer named Rolf Henneman who worked at Mushroom, a recording studio and an independent label. Rolf came to see us play, and invited us to audition at Mushroom. Producer Mike Flicker ran the studio, but he wasn’t there the day we arrived. His assistant Howard Leese was, though. Here’s how Howard recalled the first day w
e visited:
HOWARD LEESE
I had first seen them in a club when everyone in Vancouver called them “Little Led Zeppelin.” When you saw Ann sing, you’d say, “Holy, crap, her voice is bigger than Robert Plant’s.” When they came into the studio that day, I was the only one there, but I agreed to record them doing a couple of songs. They played “Willie and the Hand Jive” by Johnny Otis, and a cover of Elton John’s “Sixty Years On.” Ann was great, but at the time, they didn’t seem to have any songs of their own.
Mushroom was interested, but only in Ann. They offered to sign her, alone, to a recording contract. She said it was either the whole band, or nothing, so Mushroom passed.
It would be almost another year, before we’d see them in the studio again.
NANCY WILSON
In the fall of 1972, I moved to Forest Grove, Oregon, to start my freshman year at Pacific University, a private liberal arts school. I wanted to learn about literature, art, and language. When I had to declare a major, I picked art and German, the latter because the Beatles spoke a tiny bit of German, of course.
Even as I reveled in all my higher learning, I was placing flyers in the student union looking for other musicians. I found a gig at a coffeehouse, where I played solo, which was a first for me. I did songs by Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and even an occasional original. Eventually, a guitarist named John Farrell became my duet partner, much as Geoff had been, but this time minus the romance. I made enough from gigging that I was able to buy a Gibson J-55 acoustic guitar and D’Angelico strings. It had a rosewood neck, a spruce top, and a mahogany back. It immediately became my favorite possession.