by Ann Wilson
My school had practice spaces where I could sign out a room with a piano, and I began to practice more. I felt like such a bohemian intellectual, but I also felt lonely being away from home for the first time. I wrote a friend that first month to say, “I’m learning so much, but have no one to share it with.”
I would still travel to visit Ann in Vancouver on school breaks, and a few times I sat in with Heart for a song, or two. “You should join the band,” Ann said. I knew one day we’d again be in a band together, but I was still in the college mindset.
Pacific was a relatively expensive school, and when the year ended my parents asked if I was serious enough to continue. College always felt temporary, but I wasn’t ready to give it up. I decided to transfer to Portland State University, in downtown Portland, because I thought being in a big city would give me more music opportunities. I was trying to play both sides I guess, music and school, to see where each might go.
In the fall of 1973, I started at Portland State. I liked the school, but I still felt isolated. To fight that, on one of my trips to Vancouver to visit Ann, I rescued a black lab. I named him Zooey, after the J. D. Salinger book Frannie and Zooey. Zooey became the charter member of my “small but appreciative audience,” coming to any gig I had, and loyally listening to me play for hours each day. Zooey wasn’t supposed to live in the dorm with me, but I smuggled him in and hid him the way other girls were hiding boyfriends.
The week I started classes, I also began searching for a musical partner. As I began to audition players, I wrote a friend a letter outlining what I was looking for. It read, in part:
“I’ve posted some notices around school asking for anyone who sings and plays acoustic guitar or bass well, because I intend, as soon as possible, to form a trio of excellent musicians, especially excellent singers, who can help me do what I’m longing to do with my music. Every day I receive an audition candidate or two into my dorm room, and serve them tea, and talk to them for a short time, and hand them a guitar, and then sit and listen. So far, all I’ve heard, as you might have predicted, is sheer bullshit trash. Every day I get more impatient for my person to walk in.
“It’s a comical experiment to invite strangers from the outside into your territory, and challenge them. I’ve found strange pleasure in it, and several times it has become so laughable that I had to look out my window, as if I could hear better in that pose, to contain my laughter. Last night, I was visited by a ‘long tall Texan’ with buckteeth and filthy hands. The gentleness, and timidness of his eyes contradicted his entire countenance, and he played songs which I could have mastered at age twelve, thumping each loafer-clad foot, thump-click-thump (like Captain Hook), which immediately intrigued Zooey, who began to chew on the distracting shoes, each in turn. His original songs were full of such lyrics as, ‘going steady with the sun,’ ‘wish you were my sister, and had sucked from my mom.’ MOM! I couldn’t believe it. He finally left, after playing five or six ‘just one mores.’
“I want ideally to have two other flexible and talented people, who would be willing to make an intensely serious project out of creating music with me. As always, I expect the impossible perfect thing to simply find me, and introduce itself. I want it to be a vocal-oriented trio with everything from the daintiest subtle breathtaking beauty to the hardest, meanest, dirtiest release. Please give me a miracle with no onions. I would be clean without mud. No more of this now: It only serves to frustrate me more.”
I never found a consistent musical partner in Portland, though I did play solo a few times at the student union. My attempt to simultaneously pursue music and college increased my frustration with both. Every time I visited my parents in Bellevue, they questioned me on whether I should continue at my college. Every time I visited Ann in Vancouver, she entreated me to join the band, which was becoming more popular by the day.
In another letter I wrote a friend that spring, I summed up my quandary, noting that my parents had suggested I attend the University of Washington, where in-state tuition was less. On the idea of joining Heart, I wrote, “I could join Ann in her musical endeavors, which judging by the present state of things, would entail ample monetary gain, and the certainty of immediate travel. I don’t know if I’m ready to take upon the bond of membership, which would be indefinite. My calling in music also seems to be of an acoustic nature.” I wrote another friend a similar letter, but put it more succinctly, in all caps: “SHOULD I JOIN THE BAND?” She wrote back, “YES, YES, YES.”
That spring, on my next trip to Vancouver, I asked Ann if we could include more acoustic songs if I joined the band. “That’s what I’ve always imagined” she said. “That’s why I want you to join.”
I made the decision that I was leaving Portland, but I still wasn’t sure whether I was headed to Seattle for the University of Washington, or to Vancouver. Ann wrote me that week to announce she, Michael, Roger, and Roger’s wife, Mary, had moved to a home on Water Lane in West Vancouver. She described it as the most beautiful setting she’d ever seen—the house backed up against a huge park filled with ancient trees, and a rocky beach. The keyboard player in Heart had quit, and Ann said if I came up I could have his waterbed.
Ann also reported that the new house had reignited her creative streak, and she was writing more than ever. “I want you to be part of that,” she said. Seeing those words in my sister’s handwriting made me realize that just as I was looking for “my person” in music, so was Ann. We were both seeking the same thing. Ever since Ann had moved to Vancouver to be with Michael, I had been telling friends how I needed to find “my person,” my musical partner, and I put up flyers all over Oregon seeking that connection.
What I had temporarily forgotten was that “my person,” my “impossible perfect thing,” was right here next to me, and always had been.
11
The Northern Lights
Nancy joins Heart but faces a frozen bed and questions
on whether her guitar is plugged in. Heart completes their
debut album and survives a run-in with a moose. . . .
NANCY WILSON
I arrived in Vancouver in mid-1974 to join Heart. I moved in with Ann, Michael Fisher, and Roger Fisher in that picturesque house on Water Lane. Though Ann was ecstatic to have me join the band, there were complications. Roger had recently separated from his wife, and he began hitting on me right away. I turned down his advances, and in my basement room, slept on the promised waterbed alone. The bed proved less comfy than expected. It was an old-fashioned waterbed without baffles, and it sloshed with any movement. The only time the bed didn’t shift was in the winter when it froze into a solid block of ice.
Moving to Canada required that I apply for status as a “landed emigrant,” and that took time. Ann and the rest of the band had been approved the previous year, which meant they could work in Canada. I was on hold waiting for my application to be considered—and even once it was considered, my acceptance wasn’t a sure thing.
Yet the biggest complication came from the band members. Though Ann wanted me in the group, some of the guys resisted. They didn’t like my idea that we might play more acoustic music, and they were afraid there would be a shift in power with two sisters in the band. The band insisted that I “audition” to join, and so I began to sit in for a few songs every night to see how it worked with two females, and another acoustic guitar, onstage. I was given the assignment to work up the introduction to the Yes song “The Clap.” It was very complicated, but I learned it and played it with Heart at a tavern one night. I passed, and for Heart’s next show, at Starvin’ Marvin’s Bump City, I was onstage for an entire set. Within three months, I was a permanent part of the band.
Steering Heart toward more acoustic material proved to be a bigger challenge. The group’s reputation was based on playing radio hits, songs that the crowd could dance to. We began to include an occasional Seals and Croft song, or Elton John number, and those were places for me to shine. My love for Elton John was so s
trong that when his Vancouver show sold out that year, I insisted on going, even though we only arrived back in town after an all-night drive and no sleep. I had no ticket and no money, so I begged our booking agent Barry Samuels to front me money to try to buy one from a scalper. Barry agreed, but only if I got on my knees and promised I would repay him. With my borrowed money, I bought a scalped ticket outside the hall. At the entrance hall I was turned away and nearly arrested when the ticket I purchased turned out to be counterfeit. I was not going to be turned away, though. I found a place in the loading area where two sections of the chain-link fence were locked together, and I climbed over the fence and ran into the crowd. I stood up through the entire concert because I didn’t have a seat, but then so did everyone else. The concert was worth the humiliation, the financial cost, and the pain in my fingers from climbing the fence.
It was almost as hard to get the rest of the band to embrace the folk music I wanted. Ann and I soon realized the easiest way to get them to play acoustic numbers was to write original songs for the band in that format. Heart was already talking about putting together enough material for an album, and that’s what Ann and I set to work on that fall.
ANN WILSON
I had always wanted Nancy in the band, but there was an unintended result that was also beneficial to our marketing: The idea that our band had two sisters in it became part of our calling card and changed forever the way we were perceived. There were plenty of bands with a female singer, but in that era it was extremely rare for a band to have two women, rarer still for them to play guitar, and almost unheard of for them to be sisters. The “sister act” jokes started immediately. As a veteran of clubs, I was used to sexist and sexual comments, but it was hard to watch Nancy suffer them. She was also asked every night if her guitar was really plugged in, or if she really knew how to play it.
Heart was not a huge financial success then. Though Heart was the most popular band in Vancouver, we were greatly limited by geography in the bookings we could accept. The most lucrative market was still the States, but due to Michael Fisher’s draft status we couldn’t travel there. We found ourselves forced to head deeper and deeper into the Canadian prairie simply to find a gig playing for a school prom.
The only way to break out of the chains of the club circuit was to record, and that’s what we concentrated on during the next year. Michael Fisher approached every label in Canada and in the United States, but failed to land any offers. He had, however, continued to foster a relationship with Mushroom and producer Mike Flicker. Flicker finally came and saw us almost a year after I’d recorded our first demo at Mushroom.
Here’s how Flicker recalled that period:
MIKE FLICKER
Nancy had just joined the band and was still a diamond in the rough, and not quite comfortable onstage. But it was the first time I had ever seen a female onstage playing a guitar, so I was impressed with that. I was just blown away by Ann’s voice, though. A few of the other guys in the band were not cutting it, and I couldn’t imagine bringing them in to record the type of album I was used to making. But I saw the politics of it, so I came to the group with an odd offer. I said I’d be interested in signing Ann, Nancy, and Roger Fisher. I wanted to sign Roger, frankly, for the only reason that without Roger, Michael Fisher wouldn’t go for it. Because Michael was Ann’s boyfriend, it was strictly a political decision, as it was my shot to get the two girls. They went for it. And so the contract, which became a hugely disputed contract later on, only consisted of those three members.
The band came into the studio and we chose to do one song, “How Deep It Goes.” This was customary in those days, to make sure you could get enough radio attention to warrant recording a full album. I brought in a studio drummer, and Howard Leese arranged a string part. When we were done, we released it as a single.
The single only got a small amount of airplay. Ann later told me that she and Nancy would call up the local station using different accents and request it multiple times. We were all disappointed it hadn’t become a hit, and it looked like Mushroom’s relationship with Heart would end there. I had a boss at the label, and he wasn’t interested. In the meantime, Ann and Nancy started writing together more, and those results were impressive. When they sat down with me and played songs like “Crazy On You,” “Magic Man,” and “Soul of the Sea,” I knew we had to make an album. Then my boss had a heart attack, and I was able to make the album my way. In a bizarre twist of fate, a heart attack saved Heart.
Initially, as the studio sessions began, it felt like we were simply recording singles, and the songs lacked cohesion to each other. Singles were important still, but this was the era of the album, and I told them that. Ann came by a few days later to say she had a song she thought could frame the record. She played me “Dreamboat Annie.” That, I told her, was a thread we could build a whole album around. It immediately became the album title—there was nothing else considered.
From there, Dreamboat Annie came together easily in the studio. Howard Leese had such a great time working on the record, they offered him a job in the band, and he took it. Mushroom released a single of “Magic Man” before the album was done, with high expectations. It started to get airplay around Vancouver and in a few other markets, but it wasn’t a hit the way I had imagined it would be. It took some time to grow.
The single benefited greatly at the time from the Canadian content law. That was a requirement that Canadian radio stations devote at least one fourth of their content to Canadian artists. It was passed to stop the domination of U.S. acts, but when it came to Heart it had unintended consequences. I was originally from the states, but I had immigrant status, as did Ann, so Dreamboat Annie qualified as a Canadian album, and a significant portion of the early airplay came from that. But the law also hurt Heart when they tried to break the record in the United States, since broadcasters there were suspicious of any Canadian record, since it might have only gotten airplay due to the content regulation.
Having “Magic Man” on the radio helped the band in Vancouver, but they were already popular there. To survive, the band had to take every live gig they could. They would play these shows deep in the interior of British Columbia, braving snowy roads to get to the gigs.
And then I got a phone call that their van had hit a moose.
NANCY
We were on our way to an out-of-town show in the interior of British Columbia. Michael Fisher was driving, Ann was in the passenger seat, and Roger and I were in the back. It was a clear night, though the roads were icy. I looked out the window, and on the horizon I saw these eerie green lights, and thought, “What’s that?” Then I realized I was seeing the aurora borealis.
“Wow, oh, my God!” I said. “The Northern Lights! Ann, come look out the window.” Ann had just moved from the front passenger’s seat to the back, when there was a loud explosion. I looked up to see a shattered windshield, and a moose bouncing off the van. The van struck the moose at exactly the point where Ann had been sitting just moments before, and the result was a big gash in the van. The glass from the windshield covered the passenger seat, which was thankfully empty. I don’t know if I was more shocked by the sight of the magnificent animal bleeding on the side of the road, or the idea that my sister had come inches from being killed or at least seriously injured, with a face full of glass. An angel was watching over us that night. The accident could have changed the whole course of everything. There might have been no musical career, no band, no Dreamboat Annie, but instead a whole other life.
As it was everyone in Heart survived and, after shaking glass off our clothes, we were no worse for the wear. Our van was another story—it required expensive repairs. But the moose suffered the direst consequences, dying by the side of the road. As our van limped to the nearest service station, I noticed tufts of the moose’s fur still adhered to the spot in the van where Ann had once been sitting.
Dreamboat Annie came out in Canada in October 1975. We had released “Crazy On You” a
s a single, and it had received airplay, but our circumstances changed little. Mushroom was a tiny label and had been unable to convince any U.S. company to pick up the album, so only a few thousand copies were sent to stores there, the biggest music market in the world, and our homeland. And though we still sold out most of our Vancouver club dates, we couldn’t play there every weekend. This explains why, when the offer came in for two weeks in Calgary at Lucifer’s, we jumped at the gig. The club even ran an ad in the Calgary Herald announcing, “Lucifer’s is proud to present ‘Heart,’ Dynamic Recording Stars, featuring the latest hit Dreamboat Annie,” along with a picture of Ann and me.
The Lucifer’s gig was almost as damaging to us as hitting the moose. We were fired after Ann criticized the club’s food and became temporarily stuck in the middle of the Canadian prairie. But that opportunity to open up for Rod Stewart became available, and we were stunned. We found we were suddenly stars in Montreal, where “Magic Man” had become an FM radio hit, and soon the rest of the album was a certified smash on Canadian radio. We didn’t immediately become rich—having a hit album in Canada, on a tiny independent label, didn’t translate into riches, but it was a start.
Mushroom’s director of promotions, one of only three employees, was Shelley Siegel. He tried to capitalize on our airplay that fall and drove Ann and me to what seemed like every radio station in Canada. We’d go in, meet the DJ, maybe do a station ID, and then Shelley would tell us to go wait in the car for him. We had no idea what was going on, and what the music industry was really driven by.
ANN
Though we were stars in Canada, the United States was a tough nut for us to crack. We had to break the States manually, by taking opening slots on tours, and traveling to radio stations with Shelley Siegel to shake hands, just as we had already done in Canada. We slowly made progress and got airplay at KSHE in St. Louis, WLUP in Chicago, and WMMS in Cleveland. After the Rod Stewart tour, we did a month of dates with ZZ Top, which brought us even more exposure. It was eye-opening for Nancy and me because we witnessed firsthand how masculine guitar rock wooed audiences. The guys in ZZ Top were supportive, though, and taught us how to balance our soft side with the hard. We became a better live band after only a few of those dates. Other tours that year found us opening up for Jefferson Starship, Strawbs, and the Bee Gees.