by Ann Wilson
Sharon fell in love with “These Dreams.” It was a transcendent, ethereal song, and it touched her as it had touched me. We cut the final vocals a couple of months later, and my cold was long gone. At first Ron Nevison joked that I needed to “get sick again” to sing it, since my healthy voice didn’t have the rawness of the first run through. He convinced me to allow him to use the original where my voice cracked. It wasn’t perfect singing, but it added emotion.
On the album notes, I decided to dedicate “These Dreams” to Sharon. Every time I sing it, I think about her. She died only a few days after we finished the final mixes. She was buried wearing a Heart T-shirt and cap, and with her favorite guitar in her arms. It’s just the way I’d want to go out.
We had trouble coming up with a title for the album once we were done. Capitol had an idea: We could just call it Heart since our band name had never been an album title. It was what many groups did on their debut record. With a new label, and a new sound, in a way Heart was also a bit of a debut. We didn’t love the idea but we went along with it. The album was completed in the spring. At the start of June we held a listening party in Seattle. We had no idea what to expect. The album could be a rebirth, or the final nail in the coffin of our career. I told one reporter that if it didn’t pan out, “we were probably going to have to do something else.” It was make, or break.
Jimmy Page happened to be in town, and someone from the label dragged him to the listening party. He was really messed up that night, and it was hard to see one of my biggest idols barely able to stand. It gave the whole evening an ominous feel. But in the end, the crowd loved the album.
The same month as the listening party, “What About Love” went out to rock radio. It was a hit. Within a few weeks it crossed over and charted on the pop charts, and became our first top ten hit in five years. When the album was released, it quickly went up the charts. It would go on to sell over five million copies in the next year alone.
Just a year before, Ann and I had been adrift in our career, without a record label. Even I had questioned if Heart had passed our expiration date. Our first success had been so rooted in the Fisher brothers, in the original line-up of the band, and in the seventies. We had wondered if we ever would break free, but when Heart became our biggest album ever, it felt like we had new life without baggage.
Just a year earlier, John Cougar had suggested that we’d be smarter to become his opening act. Cougar, now going by Cougar Mellencamp, also had a huge record in 1985 with Scarecrow, which I thought was his best. But when I followed the Billboard album charts that fall, a small amount of satisfaction came from the fact that Scarecrow never went higher than number two.
It was always right behind Heart, our first number one album.
That August, while we were in Los Angeles filming the “Never” video, our mom wrote a letter to a friend about us. Reading it years later, it was fascinating to me that even when we had a number one album, my mom was still handling many of our business and financial affairs, and working with our fan club. She often answered our fan mail. Her letter gave insight into the madness of my life, but also the sweetness that was our parents’ relationship. It read in part:
“Any mail sent to Nancy’s house has slight chance of ever being read by anyone. She is so very seldom at home, and the piles of mail and papers become so high in her absences that she usually brings them to me in a box to process and collate for her in order of importance and time value.
“Meanwhile John and I continue to live our full and growing life; hating the disability, slugging it out with wheelchairs and all of that, but still making our own small waves in our own direction. All is well.”
Our mom had wanted to travel, but instead she was full-time nurse for our dad. We helped get paid assistants, but Mama was adamant that she was going to do most of the care giving. Her meticulousness was also in the letter. She chastised herself on its sloppiness: “I just noticed I’d left out some letters in words. ‘If neatness counts, its curtains for Lou.’ ” She also plugged our album, as if getting one more person to buy it might save the day for Ann and me.
That was “True Blue Lou.” It was no exaggeration to say she was our biggest fan.
ANN
The runaway success of Heart surprised our family, the record label, and even us. Few bands had ever managed to have a second act in a different decade, but we did. I was thirty-five years old when Heart came out, and Nancy was thirty-one. We were hardly teenyboppers in a business that was dominated by youth.
Still, the renewed success came at a cost. We had made a deal with the devil, in that we were singing songs we didn’t write, and the devil had been right: They were hits. The success put us on a slippery slope. We’d had our first number one album after following the advice of others. And that was a path we stayed on for some time. Things got dizzier, tighter, and more surreal until after a while our feet weren’t touching the ground. We were hanging on a meat hook.
In the mid-eighties, labels believed making videos for MTV was integral to success. In the next few years, we made nearly a dozen videos, each one more ridiculous than the next, and every one a small step away from what Nancy and I wanted to be. As the hairdressers and costume designers came in, the image we projected to the world was less and less our own. Apart from an obsession with cleavage in the videos, we sported stiletto heels and hairstyles that had to be carefully coiffed. I turned to Nancy during one shoot and asked, “How big do you think our hair can get?” However big it was, the video producers wanted it bigger. When our natural hair wasn’t big enough, they added extensions. If we didn’t look like porn starlets, the directors weren’t happy. In one video, Nancy rode a horse (better to bounce her breasts). Our joke about the videos was that the name of our band was now “Heart, Featuring Breasts.” We were constantly complimented on our excellent boob jobs, when we hadn’t done any work and didn’t appreciate the fact that our bodies were being marketed as part of our branding.
We always had an appreciation for fashion, and there was a sense of costumery to our videos that was occasionally fun. But the images on the screen became bigger than the real people, and it was the video images fans wanted from then on. If we didn’t look like that carefully constructed video clip, with corsets and hair and boobs, people were disappointed. It was hard to move, or even to breathe in those outfits, and it was particularly difficult for Nancy to play guitar when she was sent onstage with stiletto heels. In the seventies, I often wore ballet slippers onstage, and they helped me remain fluid. Many of our seventies outfits were natural fabrics, often made out of suede, which moved with you. But eighties’ clothes were synthetic and had no give. Additionally, our hair was teased up so high it often felt as if we were wearing helmets onstage. Our hair was so heavy that, I felt weighted down by it. I had turned into a singing statute.
Most of the songs on the Heart album became hits first on radio, and then the videos built on that. But as the album continued to have legs, and as MTV’s power grew, videos became more important than radio. We spent a fortune on the videos. Though the record label advanced the costs, they ultimately came out of our royalties. Budgets mushroomed upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a three-minute clip. And as the directors, stylists, choreographers, and hairdressers increased, we’d be on a set with a hundred people all telling us what to do. It was no longer our show. Our own videos increased our objectification a thousand percent, and it was our fault. “Purple Rain” had been a huge influence on the video industry, and we looked more like Prince’s band than the Heart we once had been.
I found myself on many video sets listening to dozens of people talk about me as if I wasn’t even there. They talked about how to make me look younger, prettier, but mostly they talked about how to make me appear thinner. It became an obsession with everyone involved with our video productions. One day I overheard a video producer remark, “If only we just had Ann’s face and Nancy’s butt, we’d have the perfect woman.” My younger s
elf would have walked out of the studio upon hearing that, but by the era of MTV excess, those comments came so often, I just sat and listened to them insult Nancy and insult me.
As with many who struggle with weight, the ten pounds I had tried to lose the previous year had turned into twenty I’d gained. I wasn’t rail thin, but I was fine with my body. Still, everyone around me acted as if I was betraying them when I gained a pound. Management, executives at Capitol, and sometimes my own bandmates told me that it was unacceptable. The crazy thing was, the more successful we became, and the more we toured, the harder it was for me to make healthy choices. Once the album hit, we didn’t have more than two days off for almost a year. We were in the studio, on video set, or onstage every single night. I never ate much until after the show, and then, in the wee small hours, I ate and drank too much as a way to cope with the stress. Having a number one album only made my struggles with weight more difficult.
Critics began to constantly review my weight rather than my singing in our performances. And even when they did review my singing, the fact that I had gained weight made them shift the metaphors they used for my voice. One review linked both stereotypes: “Where she once strolled the stage as a raven-haired siren, now Ann Wilson was a shrieking gargantuan who sang histrionically.”
My weight had nothing to do with my singing, with our songcraft, or with my ability to move onstage, but in the MTV-dominated industry, our video directors in particular acted as if how I looked was the only challenge Heart faced as a band. They shot me standing on a box in one video while the camera looked up at me; in another they used expensive postproduction effects to shrink the image size. There was so much smoke in another video, which they thought would take five pounds off me, that it took them six hours to get the “air” right before we were even asked to come to the set. It was crazy, and it increased into a spiral of dysfunction.
The shackles of video didn’t just bind me: My sister also felt the pressure. That ratcheted up considerably in early 1986 when we shot a video of “These Dreams.” Though blessed with a different physique than me, Nancy felt she wasn’t thin enough. The stylists around us constantly compared me to Nancy, but Nancy was herself compared to every fashion model or younger video starlet on MTV. One video director told Nancy that everything about her was perfect except her “huge thighs.” He told her, “you really have to do some work on those thighs.” Every aspect of our bodies was open to discussion, or improvement, on the video stage.
On March 22, 1986, “These Dreams” hit number one on the Billboard pop charts, the first Heart single ever to reach that pinnacle. We were elated. And no one was more elated than Nancy. In the wake of that success, many asked if I was jealous that it was a song my sister sang that became our first number one. The truth was I had been disappointed that “What About Love” and “Never” hadn’t reached that mark. The success of everything Heart did, though, was shared by Nancy, me, and the rest of the band. It was never a competition, no matter what people on the outside thought. We shared the same blood harmony, and almost every song Heart recorded included a vocal mix of both of us somewhere in the song, as did “These Dreams.”
When “These Dreams” had first surfaced, I had tried to sing a verse of the song, but it didn’t work for my voice. Later on in our career, I did sing it a few times when we did karaoke in a bar, but it never was right. Once onstage, when we were bored and trying to shake things up, I tackled it again, but I had to change the key to get through it. It just didn’t break with my voice the right way.
It was Nancy’s song from the start.
As 1986 continued, our tour never seemed to end. In ten months, we had played 148 concerts, plus countless days of travel, interviews, or video shoots. When we arrived in Japan that summer, we were greeted by hordes of fanatical fans wherever we went.
On tour that year, we felt imprisoned by the fame that a hit album and videos had created. Before MTV, people only knew what we looked like from our album covers and concerts, and it was still possible to live a normal life. We could go out, go to the gym, or go for a walk in a city on the tour.
But a hit video, and a chart-topping album, made it virtually impossible for Nancy and me to go anywhere without being swarmed. As soon as we’d play a show, we’d retreat to our hotel room and order room service. We no longer called them hotel rooms—we called them “our cells.” The guys in the band had enough anonymity that they could eat out, or go see another band. But even when Nancy and I went to the hotel lobby, there would be fans, paparazzi, or people who wanted something out of us. Our road managers were afraid for our safety and hid us under assumed names with guards at the doors of our suites. We also had death threats that year from crazies, and we had to have bodyguards.
It was a time when we should have been enjoying our success the most, and yet we were living the lives of recluses. Many celebrities before and after us have felt this isolation. I was grateful for our success, but living this way was very hard. Our only post-show entertainment was watching old movies in our hotel room. In our luggage, we carried a VCR, VHS tapes like Gone with the Wind, needle-nose pliers, and wire cutters. We learned how to splice our VCR player into any hotel television. Other bands would get huge bills for the televisions they threw off balconies. We had damage bills, too, but ours were for cutting the wires to our hotel televisions so we could hook up a VCR.
When I recorded that very first single in 1968, “Through Eyes and Glass,” I had waited in vain to hear my voice on the radio. Now my voice was on nearly every station, and a video of me in a tightly bound corset was on MTV every hour. I had thought fame would make my life bigger. Instead, it had shrunk my world.
I found myself with my sister, stuck in a hotel suite with our needle-nose pliers and our favorite VHS tapes, alone.
18
Junior’s Farm
A Gone with the Wind wedding competes with million-dollar
offers. A sheen of white powder blows through the halls.
And the Gherkin Pickle Wagon awakens even the dead
in Germany. . . .
NANCY WILSON
It was while we were in the middle of our crazy world tour that I began planning my wedding to Cameron Crowe. We had seen each other over the previous year whenever we could. Cameron had sold a couple of scripts, but the only thing he had directed by then was a Tom Petty music video and documentary called Heartbreaker’s Beach Party.
It wasn’t easy planning a wedding while on tour. We decided on a low-key affair to be held at Ann’s Seattle house, but my work life kept conspiring to complicate things. The Heart album stayed in the top ten for six months, and offers kept pouring in for us to play that summer. Only a few days after we had settled on a wedding date, we got our biggest offer ever for the date I had planned to marry. It was nearly twice as much for just one concert as our dreaded “Coffee Achievers” commercial. I turned it down. We had made a lot of money the previous year, and we didn’t have to say yes to everything. Saying no to that show was one of the most satisfying things I ever did.
Our wedding was July 27, 1986. It was not a big affair, but in the tradition my mother had taught us, it was elegant. We held it at Ann’s house, with an outdoor sit-down dinner beforehand. The ceremony began at eleven p.m., when the only light came from hundreds of white candles. Ann was obsessed with Gone with the Wind at that point, and no electricity was used during the ceremony. We scattered six hundred roses—in my favorite color, “dusty rose”—around the house. Garlands of flowers lined the staircase, which looked like something Scarlett O’Hara would have waltzed down. White champagne was served before the ceremony, and pink after. Ann, Lynn, and Sue were my bridesmaids. On Cameron’s side, there was Neal Preston, Joel Bernstein, and Cameron’s mother and father.
We moved inside for our vows and said them before Reverend Lincoln Reed from the Congregational Church. Cameron used Dotes’s Marine sword to cut the wedding cake.
There wasn’t much time for a honeymoon. We
spent the night in a Seattle hotel, and then headed to the Oregon Coast for a week. On our honeymoon, we wrote a bunch of humorous songs together for a project we were calling “Blue Seattle.” It seemed like the start of a romantic and creative partnership. I had spent so much of my life walking on the Oregon beach, but now I was taking the same journey with a husband.
We didn’t make a big deal out of our marriage in the press. Unlike some entertainers, we never marketed our relationship. We had separate careers in slightly different industries, and we didn’t want to become a Hollywood power couple.
Being married didn’t stop the machine of Heart, and mere moments after the honeymoon we were planning our next album. In a month we were in intensive band rehearsals. In some marriages, my career would have been a problem, but Cameron was also constantly writing, so the separations weren’t an issue. He was working on the script for Say Anything during this time.
Heart’s last record had been so successful that we decided to have Ron Nevison return as producer. He and Capitol had been searching for more songs for us, and having a number one album helped pull in several A-list writers. Diane Warren contributed “Who Will You Run To,” and Holly Knight and I wrote “There’s the Girl.” Since the big singles last time had been from outside songwriters, it was harder for us to get our own songs considered. Still, we contributed “Bad Animals,” written with the band, and “RSVP” and “Easy Target” we crafted with Sue Ennis.