by Ann Wilson
You lying so low in the weeds
I bet you gonna ambush me
You’d have me down, down, down, down on my knees, wouldn’t you?
Barracuda! Ohh!
Back over time we were all trying for free
You met the porpoise and me, aha
No right, no wrong, selling a song
A name whisper game.
If the real thing don’t do the trick
You better make up something quick
You gonna burn, burn, burn, burn to the wick
Ohh, Barracuda! Oh yeah.
I had never written lyrics so quickly. We didn’t even know the meaning of the word “misogyny” at the time, but we felt it loud and clear, and reacted with anger. Nancy came back to the hotel and joined in, and her anger mixed with mine. She supplied the melodies, and the bridge. The rest of the sound was provided by Michael Derosier’s beat, and Roger Fisher’s riff. The song has a crazy bar-of-five that made “Barracuda” interesting. If you were dancing to it, it suddenly shifted, and you had your good foot in the air.
It wasn’t the only song that season with a galloping beat, though. Long after “Barracuda” came together, a tiny brouhaha erupted when we toured with Nazareth, who had scored a hit with a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “This Flight Tonight.” Nazareth’s Manny Charlton came to our dressing room after our first show with them and gently, but tersely, suggested we had ripped their gallop off. I told Manny we were “channeling Led Zeppelin,” who had stolen it from Joan Baez’s “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,” who had taken it from the bluesmen, who had taken it from Old Stinky Rag Jackson, who had taken it from drummers in Kenya, who had taken it from gypsies, who had learned it from Adam. And Adam got it from Lilith. She got it from the horses. That shut him up.
When we went into the studio to record “Barracuda,” Roger was experimenting with feedback. His guitar cord brushed against his amp, and it made a bizarre sound. It was a brilliant accident, and exactly the kind of inventiveness that only a non-linear player like Roger could pull off. You could never ever do something like that today with ProTools. Here’s how Roger recalled how his contribution to “Barracuda” came together:
ROGER FISHER
We were at a soundcheck, probably in the Midwest somewhere. Derosier and I would get there first, so we could have some time to play. And we’d get down, shred, while they were setting up the gear. We were locked in that gallop mode. My brother said, “That’s a pretty good riff, you should make a song around that.” So we kept developing that. . . .
There was one point during the [studio] session, when I leaned over the amp, and I had a flanger on for an effect, and all of a sudden, this wah-wah-type sound came out of the amp. So I took the plug for the guitar out, and put that metal plug next to the amplifier tubes. . . . What you’re hearing is a cord plugged into the amplifier, but the guitar itself was not even plugged in. The other end of the cord was next to the amplifier tubes. It’s called oscillation. I said, “record this.” We stopped and started a few times so we could get the cycle in just the right place. Mike Flicker said, “What should we call it?” I said, “Alien Attack.” It became “Barracuda.”
13
Natural Fantasies
A goat and a wagon mark the debut of Little Queen. Heart’s
mother comments on the evils of taverns. And the Wilsons
become accidental babysitters for a southern drummer. . . .
NANCY WILSON
Our first album on Portrait Records, Little Queen, came out May 14, 1977. It became our second Top Ten and would sell over three million copies in the next year. “Barracuda,” “Kick It Out,” and “Little Queen” all were hit singles, with “Barracuda” going to number eleven on Billboard. When Magazine later was re-released, we had the distinction of having all three of our albums on the charts at the same time.
The cover of Little Queen became one of our most iconographic images, even though it wasn’t our favorite. Ann once told me she could smile in a thousand pictures but it was always the photograph with the pout that was chosen and would live forever. She had smiled in most of the other pictures that day, but they picked the one with her pout. There was a kernel of reality in the photo, but only a kernel. Ann and I had a joke that no matter what we did, the press would always imagine her as fierce and raw, and me as ethereal and angelic; even though those roles had little basis in reality, they had more to do with our hair color than our personalities. We were still new enough on the scene that promoters often would reverse our names, and so as a joke we made up buttons that read, “Ann’s the brunette. Nancy’s the blonde.”
On the Little Queen album cover we were chasing the gypsy vibe on songs like “Dream of the Archer.” We were on the road so much, we felt like gypsies, so we threw out the idea to the record label that we could dress like that. We were in Los Angeles at the time and discovered that in Hollywood we could rent anything, including a gypsy wagon and a goat.
We shot the album cover in Elysian Park in Los Angeles. The guys in the band had fun doing it because it was different from how they usually dressed onstage. With their beards and long hair, they looked like they already belonged to a different century. Nothing that we rented looked good on Ann, so she just wore her own clothes. We wanted it to be completely authentic, but there is one place you can see a zipper on Ann’s boot. And though the cover looked “back to nature,” even that was a bit of a façade. Elysian Park surrounds Dodger Stadium, so our gypsy camp was right next door to the ballpark.
Ann and I felt like we had our own fashion sense, long before the days when rock stars hired stylists. The clothes we wore onstage, and off, we usually sewed ourselves. If we didn’t make something, we bought it off the rack and doctored it. For a time Ann wore an outfit onstage that was a bathrobe she purchased at Nordstrom’s. After she sewed rhinestones on it and wore it with purple tights and knee-high boots, it was fashion.
Everyone in Heart had a unique fashion sense, and if we walked down the street together, we looked like a band. The poster of us that came out in the Little Queen era showing us arm-in-arm at the end of a show was emblematic. Ann wore a red and black corset, while I had on a long red dress with a black ribbon around my neck. Steve Fossen wore a white hippie shirt, with necklaces around his neck (he often wore a unitard onstage to show off his third nipple!). Roger wore a buckskin vest, tied at his waist. Michael Derosier was shirtless, in pajama-style drawstring pants. And Howard Leese wore pajama pants, a karate-type robe, and a purple sash around his neck—an outfit that could have belonged to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Howard would often dress in a blousy shirt and carry a saber, or in chaps and boots with pirate feathers in his hair. A few years later, he became fond of one-piece Spandex jumpsuits, which he had in several colors with matching amplifiers. Howard came by it honestly—his parents were in the fur and jewelry businesses.
Because all of the members of Heart liked showy clothes, and those were hard to find in 1977, the guys sometimes had to buy women’s clothes. In just over a year, we’d all shift into more Asian-inspired fashion for Dog and Butterfly. But Little Queen was pure gypsy.
ANN WILSON
In July 1977, we appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone for the first time. The magazine used a photograph of just Nancy and me, and this became a sticking point with the guys in the band. It had become a common theme, the guys feeling jealous when so much attention was paid to us. We tried to be inclusive, but often they didn’t want to attend the interview sessions, arguing that there would only be questions for us. The Rolling Stone piece addressed this tension. “All the time,” I told the magazine, “I say, ‘Today, I’m going to do four interviews and if you guys want to come along, follow on, present yourselves.’ They always choose not to because it’s too much work; they’d rather sit in the sun.”
Heart had begun as a democracy, but in truth as the band moved along it shifted, particularly after Nancy joined. The transition wasn’t just due to the fact that the press zeroed in on Nancy and me: It a
lso had much to do with songwriting. As our success grew, the demand for new songs was constant, and the pressure fell almost exclusively on us. The guys loved to jam, particularly at soundcheck, but there was a big difference between crafting a riff and writing an entire song. The distractions of stardom were powerful, and Nancy and I had to retreat to the Oregon Coast, often with Sue Ennis, to write. That was the kind of discipline that most of the guys in the band, all brilliant improvisational players onstage, found hard to come by. “By being so creative, and coming up with such good ideas, they’ve challenged us males to do the same,” Roger told Rolling Stone.
That Rolling Stone cover was a perfect example of how getting press was a mixed blessing. Most of the story focused on inane questions the writer had about groupies, sexuality, and gender, with very little emphasis on music. The cover headline, “Natural Fantasies, Natural Acts,” was not quite as explicit as “It Was Only Our First Time,” but the implication wasn’t lost on anyone. One pull quote read, “The sexual fantasy we give onstage is a very natural one.” I did say that, but it was in response to repeated questions about sexuality. We knew sexiness was an element of rock ’n’ roll, but we were already exhausted by this topic because it was always being raised. The writer also played up our physical stereotypes, but with a higher brow than usual: “[The Wilsons] look strikingly like the good (blond) and evil (dark) sisters in Ingmar Berman’s The Virgin Spring.”
If these were the topics of a story on Heart in Rolling Stone, imagine what the articles were like in down market publications. Circus and Hit Parader seemed to be obsessed with us, and while it was rewarding when Circus named me the female vocalist of the year several times in a row, the sensationalism of their coverage was maddening. One Circus cover doctored a photo to make it appear that I was staring up adoringly at Robert Plant. The only time I’d ever even been in the same room with Plant was back in our Vancouver club days when he walked into the venue while I was onstage singing.
Even the storied New York Times couldn’t resist talking about our appearance. John Rockwell noted our “striking good looks,” but also mentioned what Rockwell thought was our “conformance to expected feminine archetypes in such matters.” We could not escape the expectations of male critics.
Creem was the worst offender. Being sophomoric was part of the magazine’s appeal, and for several years we were their favorite whipping posts. One profile of us was headlined “Heart of My Piece,” began with the word “sex” and ended with the writer’s suggestion that he was leaving our interview to go have sex with his girlfriend while fantasizing about us. Another Creem article was a massive feature that used the word “sex” dozens of times, including the last paragraph, which simply read “sex, sex, sex, sex. . . .” That writer asked us exactly how much “to the nearest ten thousand dollars” we would ask to pose in the nude for him (we didn’t answer, but he nonetheless put his question in the article). He also asked if we would date him.
We would not.
There was one feature article that year we truly enjoyed reading because it wasn’t focused on us, but instead was about our parents. It appeared in the Bellevue Journal-American, our hometown paper, and ran with large photographs of Mama and Dotes. Our parents were unguarded and spoke with the kind of clarity you rarely found in our other clippings. Mama said when I first began to practice the flute “it sounded awful.” Our dad said he listened to our music, but no other “hard rock.” In the previous year, Nancy and I had stopped in to Dotes’s classes a few times to talk about lyrics, until the crowd grew too large. Dotes said our appearances made him so popular with his students, “they no longer love me for myself.”
Both parents mentioned how proud they were of us, and particularly how our early life in the Congregational Church had shaped our values, but there was a hint of trepidation from Mama. She said the rock world was “a strange way to live,” and that when we played “taverns” it “frightened [her] to death.” Mama said people occasionally called her “Heart’s mother.” “Sometimes I resent it,” she said, “but other times I’m proud.”
Mama was right when she said that returning home for us was like coming back to the “womb.” The more we toured, the more we valued being home, but the fewer days we had off, the less time we spent in Seattle. With money we had earned from our Portrait Records advance, Michael and I purchased a house on the shores of Lake Washington, and Nancy bought a place in the area, too. They were lovely homes, but we felt like we rarely enjoyed them.
In a few years time, we also bought our parents a new home on Lake Washington. We had worked so hard for our success, with their absolute support, and buying them a beautiful house seemed right. But when we packed up everything from our old home in Lake Hills, it was more than bittersweet. As the final boxes were gathered from a house we had lived in longer than any other, it felt like the end of childhood. I said good-bye to our handprints on the back cement. As the movers drove away, we all said good-bye and dusted off our shoes a final time.
I had another Bellevue experience that year which also brought back memories of childhood: I attended my ten-year high school reunion. I rented a limo, got all dressed up, and went with my best friend Sue. I thought I was going to have my moment of glory, but there were so many people coming up who were fans of the band, I felt I was backstage at a concert, signing autographs for a line of people I didn’t know.
The few conversations I had didn’t go particularly well. One guy who never paid any attention to me in high school started flirting. “Wow,” he said. “You’re looking really good these days. I always did think of you as someone special.” This guy had been so cruel to me in school I could still remember what he told me in tenth grade: “When women stand and put their legs together,” he had announced, “you should still be able to see light between their thighs.” I had failed his test then, and now. Still, he was sidling up, and acting like he was going to get lucky.
I wasn’t having any of it. I was perfectly willing to let the past be the past, and to let high school be a memory. But when he started flirting with someone he had mocked, it went too far, and I wasn’t able to let it go. “Give me a break,” I told him. “You were so mean to me back in high school. Fuck you.” I walked away.
A few minutes later I spotted Red, the boy who back in seventh grade had announced to the whole class that I was “a fat thing” when he’d heard I had a crush on him. It was exactly the sort of scene I had dreamed of all these years, that I would arrive at my high school reunion as a star, on the cover of Rolling Stone, and prove to everyone that I really mattered. Instead, I walked in the other direction and away from a confrontation with Red. Once I was faced with my old demons, all I wanted to do was escape.
I left my high school reunion as I had left high school most days, wishing the car would move faster so the bad memory might fade quicker. Only this time, I was telling a limo driver to speed it up.
Even when we had a few days at home, Heart was almost immediately back on the road because there were always shows to do. The demands of playing hundreds of concerts a year around the globe quickly outpaced our capacity to travel by bus, so we leased a jet. It sounded luxurious, and in a way it was, but the convenience meant the label and concert promoters could ask more of us. The best part was that with the plane we could take our dogs with us on tour. After a show, we’d all get on the plane, and if you were taking a picture from outside, you would have seen all these people partying in the aisles, with dogs jumping everywhere.
Eventually, some of the guys in the band claimed they were “afraid” to fly at night. We always suspected they just wanted to hook up with women after the show, but a couple of them were actually scared. Michael Derosier was truly afraid to fly in the early days, and Howard Leese was so uneasy that he would carry a motorcycle helmet with him on the plane and wear it during take off and landing. It didn’t help matters when our manager Ken Kinnear bought an eight-seat prop jet of his own and would often fly us on short trips. Our ol
d friend Kelly Curtis had begun to work for us as our press agent, but he never let us forget the time Kinnear made Kelly fly with him and the crew to Europe in that prop jet—Nancy and I had flown earlier on a commercial jet. Ken’s plane had to stop in Newfoundland on the way, and it took them three days to get to Europe.
We had a few of what seemed like near misses in those days and some very uncomfortable flights. One particular itinerary had us fly from Los Angeles to the Dominican Republic, then to Puerto Rico, then to Chicago, all in three days. We had all our band, crew, and gear in the small plane, and it was overloaded. The cabin began to run out of air. I had one of the first anxiety attacks of my life, and they had to give me a canister of oxygen to calm me down. The only place I could lie down in the crammed plane was in the aisle. As I lay on my back with an oxygen mask on my face looking up at the plane’s ceiling, my life felt anything but glamorous.
In the United States we often toured with Southern rock bands, which were odd pairings for us, but concert promoters thought they needed the yin and the yang. The worst of these was the Marshall Tucker Band, who repeatedly made sexist comments toward us. At a show before fifty thousand people at Denver’s Mile High Stadium, a member of the Marshall Tucker Band crew pulled the plug on the sound system mid-song to force us off stage. I was right in the middle of singing “Crazy On You” when the sound just disappeared. We were stunned, and so was the audience. As we walked away, the members of Marshall Tucker made catcalls. I never knew whether they were just jerks, or whether they thought we would upstage them, which we did. Our manager got in a fistfight with their manager in a chaotic backstage melee. The concert promoter, Barry Fey, was so embarrassed by Marshall Tucker’s actions that he later went onstage, grabbed a microphone, and apologized to the audience. “This is the worst show I’ve ever done,” he told the crowd.