by Ann Wilson
My relationship with Roger was doomed long before I developed a crush on Michael Derosier, but my new relationship didn’t last either. I always felt like I was chasing after Derosier, and I never got anything back. I had begun to feel the tick of my biological clock, and since Derosier had French heritage, as did I, I thought we might make beautiful babies together one day. He was tall, good-looking, and had a French last name. Those were hardly sane reasons to start a love affair, but my hormones were making the decisions for me then.
Even the physical aspect of our relationship was unfulfilling. Derosier had an obsession with cleanliness, and seconds after we were intimate, he would jump up to take a shower. Whereas Roger had wanted me naked all the time, Derosier made me self-conscious. He was more refined than Roger, but maybe a little too much. He was a bit aristocratic and had a lot of sarcasm, which always looks good on young people. But I was twenty-six the year we were together, and soon that aloofness made me think he was a snob. I was vulnerable, and all I got for my openness was pain. We were together a year before we broke up.
In the end, I felt like I had three strikes against me when it came to men. That next fall at Ann’s annual Halloween party, it was Ann who came dressed like a nun, but the costume should have been mine.
With Roger’s departure, there was the matter of what would we do to replace him in the band. Howard Leese ended up stepping into that role, though I took on a few more lead parts. I never seriously considered becoming our permanent lead guitar player, not because I couldn’t play the leads, but because I loved rhythm guitar. It is the lost instrument of rock ’n’ roll, the backbone which is rarely discussed. There is no Who without Pete Townshend’s rhythm, and no Beatles without John Lennon’s guitar. Rhythm guitar is what other guitar players notice, but few listeners do. Musicians appreciate rhythm players, even if the readers of guitar magazines don’t.
But there was also a gender aspect to the decision. There were still so few female guitarists in rock that if I’d become our lead player, it would have shifted even more attention to our gender, and away from our songs. Lead guitarists are almost exclusively males with a strong alpha vibe. Guys are drawn to those flashy solos, although the heart of the song is always in the rhythm guitar. It’s the stuff you don’t necessarily hear, but that you feel, that makes a song work. If I’d played lead, Heart might have been too feminine because the lead player is like another singer, and in our band that meant counter-play with Ann. I was Ann’s harmony, not her contrast. Heart’s strength was always our yin and yang, how the feminine played off the masculine.
Howard Leese was also an exceptional player, and having him handle those duties opened me up to play piano on some songs. Many of our tunes were complicated, built like a Rubik’s cube, and we had a difficult enough time with one less player onstage. We had gone through a major shake-up, and I’m not sure the rest of the band would have supported me as the lead player—plus I was just too timid then. It was the right decision, but five years later, I might have chosen differently.
In 1979, power was still a new concept to us. We were just beginning to feel confident about getting out from under the thumb of the Fisher kings. They were both very controlling, Michael Fisher in particular, and although they wanted only the best for us, the power had to shift if Heart was to go on. Since Dreamboat Annie the public had always conceived of Heart as my sister and me, even when we didn’t think of it that way ourselves.
Before I joined the band, when Heart was a Vancouver club group, Ann would play until two in the morning, and then on the next day, she’d get up wash all the sheets, and make dinner for everyone in the group. Those days were no more.
SUE ENNIS
When Nancy and Roger broke up, the power in Heart shifted forever. Nancy and Ann hadn’t really claimed it before, but with Roger out of the band, and Michael Fisher’s influence on the wane, it was if they were hurled toward it. Heart had always been their band, but now they owned it in ways they hadn’t before.
Nancy already had bought a couple of houses. When she and Roger broke up, she and I moved together into a home she had in Redmond. The house earned the nickname, “The House of the Rising Sun” after we went away for a weekend, and our house sitter trashed the place—it looked and smelled like a brothel when we returned.
The slow split with the Fishers also forever changed the personalities of Ann and Nancy. They had both inherited a sense that a woman’s place is to support her man, her wonderful, elegant, warrior man, which is what they had seen their mom do all those years. And each of them idealized the men they were with, until they didn’t anymore. For years they pushed themselves down to elevate their guy, and they quashed their own sense of self.
That started to change in “The House of the Rising Sun.” And once it shifted, it never went back.
15
Blows Against the Empire
The Wil-Shers come to an end. Elton’s lyricist tries to
seduce Nancy. The Wilsons finally get to meet “Joni.”
And Keith Richards can’t be located, anywhere. . . .
ANN WILSON
The end of Nancy’s relationship with Roger was a significant turning point for Heart, but another shift occurred just a few weeks later. We had begun working on the album we would call Bebe Le Strange. Since Roger had been a cornerstone of our sound, there were plenty who wondered, maybe some even inside the band, if we could still succeed.
We had a band meeting at the end of October to talk about preproduction with Mike Flicker. Michael Fisher was usually at these meetings because he was still running our sound and therefore was still a big part of the group. This time, though, Michael couldn’t make the meeting. Someone in the band made a joke that implied Michael was running around on me. After the meeting, I sat down with Mike Flicker and our manager Ken Kinnear and said, “Michael would never do something like that.” Ken just looked at me silently. Then he said, “Well, he is.” Everyone in the band knew about it, everyone but me, Flicker and Kinnear told me. Years later, Flicker would tell me it was the worst thing he ever had to do in his career.
I asked Nancy. She said someone must have confused Roger and Michael, and that Michael wasn’t like his brother. Michael and I were too tight, she said, living together, and traveling on tour together. It didn’t seem there was time for an affair, other than when he went skiing, or when I went away to write.
I went home and confronted Michael. “Are you cheating on me?” The look on his face said it all. Michael believed in the principle of always telling the truth. It was part of the high moral standard he held himself to, though that standard apparently didn’t apply to being faithful. “Yes, I was,” he said. I asked if he was still seeing her, and he said no. Michael was very honest, even in his duplicity. I said, “Do you love her?” He said, “Yes.” Michael tried to talk his way out of it, but this was one thing I didn’t need to try to understand. We’d been together for nine years, and I thought we had built this beautiful, perfect union. For a time, maybe we had.
In six hours, Sue, Nancy, Lynn, and my mom moved everything I owned out of the house. I now lived with Nancy and Sue in the “House of the Rising Sun.” We were suddenly just as we had been together in high school—three single women.
My songwriting muse had, in many ways, already predicted my break-up with Michael. Just a few months before, I had crafted a song called “Break,” but it could just as easily have been called “The End of the Wil-Shers.” I wrote it at the beach, and when I played it for Michael upon my return, I could see a light bulb going off for him that told him I was unhappy. There was no mistaking how boxed in I felt. I’m not sure whether the song was naive, or unaware, or gutsy, but it was one that I had to scream out and let everyone, even Michael, hear what was going on inside me. When you write an honest song, you often hurt people. “Break” was another example of the song writing me.
When we performed it live on our next tour, I would introduce it with sarcasm: “This is a very sweet
and tender song. I can barely make it through this love song without crying.” Part of it went: “The dust is gathering where I stand / Now I know there’s a crack in this plan / After a while there just ain’t no more magic, man / I got a need, I got to know / Give me the truth who is running my show / Tell them I’m sorry, but I just had to go / My patience ran out / I gotta run / Out of a habit that used to be fun / I just wanna break / Shake it, shake it, shake it off / Take off, break it off / Break, break, break me outta here.”
The photo shoot for Bebe Le Strange produced my favorite album cover. The picture captured us at a moment after I had whispered a secret joke to Nancy. Both the music and the cover seemed to connect with audiences, and it became our fourth platinum album in a row, going to number five on the Billboard charts, and staying on the charts for half the year. Little Queen sold slightly more, but the success of Bebe Le Strange, without either Fisher involved, felt more our own.
Maybe it was our gallows humor, but we released Bebe Le Strange on Valentine’s Day, 1980. The album also earned us some of the best reviews of our career. We wouldn’t have wished our break-ups on anyone, but they helped create a juicy back story. “Healing a Broken Heart,” one review headline read. Critics loved songs like “Down on Me,” “Break,” and “Even It Up,” which were often cited as examples of us finding fire again. As a songwriter, seeing a critic quote a line you really felt, like “I don’t want to burn it all, no, but this axe she, she got to fall,” from “Even It Up” felt rewarding, as if I had connected with the audience.
One of the only publications that panned the album was Rolling Stone. Just a year earlier, female journalist Ariel Swartley reviewed Dog and Butterfly by writing about how that album represented “blows against the empire,” meaning against the male-dominated world of rock. But when male Tom Carson tackled us a year later in the same publication, our music was now “cock rock without the cock.” To Ariel Swartley, we were “fresh and welcome,” but to Tom Carson our approach was “the same as on all previous Heart records: Mix together enough styles simultaneously, and maybe you’ll be mistaken for an original.” While different critics often have contrasting views, the number of times sexual organs were referenced in our reviews was truly extraordinary. In the Rolling Stone Record Guide, Mikal Gilmore wrote, “Take Ian Anderson and Robert Plant, endow them with mammaries, and you have the essence of Heart.”
Though Rolling Stone panned the album, they still featured us on their cover that spring. The headline was lurid as usual (“Rock’s Hot Sister Act”), but the article was a fair and detailed examination of our roots. The writer convinced me to take her back to my old high school, and to the house we grew up in. Our Lake Hills home was still empty, two years after our parents moved out, and it was eerie to visit. My mom was quoted about my break-up with Michael, and as usual Lou didn’t mince words: “Michael used to walk her out every night [on stage]. I wonder who will walk her out now?” Nancy addressed our new singlehood by announcing, “We’ll be each other’s keepers.” We had always had been.
Daisann McLane wrote the Rolling Stone profile and, thankfully, left out the usual references to our sex appeal. But the issue was not without a sensationalistic element. The photographer Annie Leibovitz had been assigned to shoot the cover. We were on tour in Biloxi, Mississippi, and Annie wanted to photograph us on the beach, as an update to the Dreamboat Annie cover. We arrived, and there were alcohol and drugs aplenty. As the shoot went on, she asked if we’d pull our shirts down a bit so she could get our collarbones. Then she asked us to pull them down farther, and we said no. Then she said, “Ann, your top is reacting with my lighter meter, so would you mind taking your top off?” I took my top off, and put a towel over me. Then she claimed the towel was messing up her light meter. Our tour manager Dick Adams was standing holding this big sheet so that no one else on the beach could see us. Finally, after Annie’s nagging, I took the towel away. Though it was framed on the magazine so you couldn’t see, in the photograph of us on the cover of Rolling Stone I’m topless. I’m not sure why I agreed to it. Maybe it was the rebel in me, maybe that fact that Annie had shot so many artists I’d respected, or maybe I just wanted to get off the hot beach.
The topless pictures were not enough for Annie Leibovitz. In the middle of the night, there was a knock on our hotel room door. It was Annie with a bottle of vodka, a tray of cocaine, and her camera gear. I should have just gone back to bed, but I let her in, and we had another photo session. She was obsessed with getting us naked, but the best she got that night was us looking tired in rumpled clothes.
The next day, I had second thoughts. I had allowed myself to be sexualized, and it was exactly the opposite of what Heart represented. I think part of it was that because Annie was female, I trusted her not to objectify us, which had been a mistake.
We asked Annie to destroy the film. She refused. A behind-the-scenes brouhaha ensued, and the matter ended up in court. Though a judge wouldn’t order the photos destroyed, he decreed they be stored in a safety deposit box that could only be opened with two keys, one in Annie’s possession, and one in ours. She couldn’t get to the photographs, and neither could we.
My topless photos are still there today in that safety deposit box. I’ve long ago lost the key.
NANCY WILSON
I never took my top off for Annie Leibovitz. Maybe I remembered when my mother slapped me when Lynn’s husband shot me naked all those years ago. But though I wasn’t actually naked on the Rolling Stone cover, the photo might not have been the best decision for a newly single woman. It was the first time since we’d been stars I’d been single, and there was unwanted male attention in every direction. Some of it even came from legends.
The same month as our Annie Leibovitz photo session, we were invited to Elton John’s birthday party at Le Dome restaurant in West Hollywood. We had met Elton a couple of years before, backstage at one of his shows. I thought about telling him the story of how when I’d first moved to Vancouver I had to beg on my knees for the money to buy a scalped ticket to his concert, but I was so nervous that all I managed to do was to shake his hand. We heard someone call Elton “Eo” backstage that time, and Ann named her next dog Eo after Elton.
The invitation to Elton’s birthday party was a dream come true, but the event itself was surreal. Elton had purchased an interest in Le Dome, and he wanted to show the restaurant off, so the lavish spread of food and drink was fit for a king. The party was filled with movie and music stars, including Sean Connery, who impressed us more than anyone else. The news that I was single seemed to bring attention from all sides, and I had two of the Eagles, Don Henley and Glen Frey, flirt with me that night. But the one gent who was attached to my side all night was Bernie Taupin, almost the guest of honor considering he was Elton’s songwriting partner.
Elton, of course, couldn’t have been more gay, though he wasn’t out at the time. Bernie, however, was extremely interested in women, and that night extremely interested in me. He may have been married at the time, but that certainly wasn’t stopping him. Bernie was convinced that getting me high was the key to seducing me. He repeatedly pulled me into the bathroom, telling me he had to talk to me about songwriting. Then he’d pull out of a vial of cocaine from his suit pocket and dump it on a mirror. I kept saying, “no thanks,” but Bernie kept tapping the glass vial to get the coke to come out. Only he’d already snorted all the drugs, so his vial was empty. We’d sit down, and two minutes later he’d be pulling me into the bathroom again, having remembered he had another vial in his other pocket. Only it turned out that vial was empty as well. This went on until Bernie had pulled empty vials from every pocket of his suit. He still tried to seduce me. It was always hard for me to know how to handle such delicate situations, as I wanted to be polite—maybe one day Bernie and I would write a song together, I thought—but I was not a pushover.
Thankfully Kelly Curtis grabbed me. “We have to get out of here,” Kelly said. Kelly was having romantic problems of his
own. Elton’s manager, John Reid, had a crush on Kelly, and though Kelly kept insisting he wasn’t gay, John Reid wasn’t listening. Reid had been Elton’s boyfriend for the first part of his career.
When Kelly had just been a neighbor kid I met because I gave him guitar lessons in my suburban home, I’d taught him how to play Elton’s “Sixty Years On.” Just ten years later, we were in this fancy West Hollywood restaurant, at Elton John’s birthday party, with the “Sixty Years On” lyricist trying to seduce me with cocaine, while Kelly was putting off the advances of Elton’s lover. It was a shift in our lives that seemed almost impossible, but it was true.
As Kelly took my hand, we fled the restaurant looking like two actors in a horror movie running from a monster. But our movie had a twist: As we ran onto the Sunset Strip, a giant billboard loomed over me. It was the cover of Bebe Le Strange, and my own face, fifty feet high, was looking at me, as if to ask, “What are you really running from, Nancy?”
We flew out of Los Angeles the next day to start the Bebe Le Strange tour, which would be our biggest yet. We played all over the world, to sold-out crowds in almost every market. We came off the tour feeling exhilarated, but that soon dissipated in December 1980 when John Lennon died. It destroyed Ann and me both. John’s death was the greatest tragedy that ever happened to rock ’n’ roll, but it felt personal to us, and I couldn’t help but think of us sitting in front of Maudie’s tiny black-and-white television watching the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. Because we were women, we’d always had increased security concerns. John’s death changed the way we interacted with fans and increased our isolation, and that of every rock star. Ann and Sue Ennis wrote the song “Angels” a few days after John was shot. It was Ann’s way to reclaim some of the love that during that month seemed gone forever.