by Ann Wilson
Afterward, Ann, now holding Marie backstage, said it was yet another “proof of concept” in our career—proof that she and I could do something away from the major label world that had sold us like a brand. It was our “screw the corporate bullshit” move and incredibly liberating.
I had my two best friends in the world—Sue and Ann—playing with me in a band, something that I had wanted since I had been a teenager. I was reunited with my acoustic guitar, and harmony singing.
I imagined for a moment an alternate reality in my life, one where I never traveled to Vancouver, never joined Heart, never played rock ’n’ roll. It was a world where the Lovemongers followed the Viewpoints, where folk music ruled, and where Sue was always in our band. With the Lovemongers, I was playing for the “small, but appreciative audience” I had in my college coffeehouse days. That tiny audience had once been as wide as I imagined my career would ever get.
20
Live from the DoubleTree Inn
The Lovemongers open up for future legends, and Kevin
Bacon approves. Opening act Selena steals the show. A
meteor brightens a star. . . .
NANCY WILSON
The Lovemongers had been meant to be a one-time thing. At the Red Cross benefit, we’d even been introduced as “for one night only, live from the DoubleTree Inn at Southcenter,” which we thought was funny because the DoubleTree was an airport hotel lounge that featured cover bands. The response we got to the Red Cross show was so positive, and we had so much fun, other offers came in, and not from airport hotels.
In May, Cameron asked if the Lovemongers would play at the wrap party for his new movie Singles. It was a private party for the cast and crew, held at RKCNDY, so we said yes. We played a short set, and it seemed to go well, but it was a little odd to be playing on the very stage where we had watched a Heart tribute show just a few months before. After we played, Kevin Bacon came up to me with that big grin of his on his face. “You guys are great,” he said. “I’m an actor, but I want to do what you do instead.”
Another band followed us, but by the time they played, Kevin Bacon and most people at the party had moved to the catering room. I was one of the few who wandered back toward the stage to watch the next band, since they were Kelly’s new project. They had an incredible amount of energy, but the lead singer was so shy he didn’t look at the audience. They were called Mookie Blaylock at the time but would become famous later with a different name. After that night it became Frank Cox’s favorite joke to say, “The Lovemongers opened for Pearl Jam, and wiped them off the stage.” Very soon, as Eddie Vedder found confidence, no one would be upstaging them.
A few years later, Kelly Curtis, who then was more famous as Pearl Jam’s manager than Heart’s one-time publicist, finally was able to pay us back the loans we had given him over the years. He paid us with interest.
ANN WILSON
The Lovemongers performance was so fun we decided we might do a few more shows. We were mixing a new Heart live album then, but we’d decided to take a year off from Heart concerts.
I thought it might be fun to do a club gig, so I called the New Melody Tavern and said, “How would you feel about Nancy and me coming down there and playing?” It held a few hundred people. The owner couldn’t believe his luck and asked if we could do three nights.
Chris Cornell came and sang with us at one show; at another Kris Novoselic of Nirvana was in the crowd. The club was so small that during set breaks we had to towel off in a janitor’s closet.
We had done these shows just for fun, but after they were over, I found myself in a situation I hadn’t been in for twenty years when the club owner didn’t pay us all he had promised. It was a small amount, but the principal of it burned me, and I went back the next day to demand it. Just a year before we had sold out Wembley Arena. Now I had to hassle a bar owner for a few hundred bucks?
We kept having fun with the Lovemongers. Frank Cox had a day job working for the phone company, but he was happy to play anytime and anywhere. We took a few more gigs even a show in New York City. Sean Lennon came to that, and afterward invited us to his apartment. Photographer Bob Gruen and Joey Ramone also came. We had never met John Lennon, but hanging with his son and Joey was the perfect New York experience.
We played quite a few benefits. Our joke was that we became the number one benefit band in town. Nancy and I were paying our tech crew ourselves, so we lost money at every Lovemongers show we played that year, but it was worth it.
It was not a time when we made wise choices with money. We had spent so much on Los Angeles recording studios, we decided we would purchase the Seattle studio where we had done many of our seventies hits. We went in with one partner, Steve Lawson, but we ultimately invested millions to upgrade the facility to state of the art. Our concept was that we could build a world-class studio, and record our albums in a place we owned. Jimi Hendrix had done the same thing with Electric Lady in New York. We decided to call our place Bad Animals, though later it became Studio X.
The only snag was that when the studio was done, we had to charge $1,500 a day to break even. As studio owners, we couldn’t afford to give ourselves a family rate. We did record our next album there, but it would be superstar artists who would keep it afloat over time. R.E.M., Neil Young, B.B. King, Johnny Cash, and soon-to-be-Seattle-superstars like Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam would all record in our studio.
In 1997 we sold our interest in Studio X. We had built the best recording studio Seattle ever had, but we only did one album there. By the time we sold it, we had lost several million dollars on that dream.
In the summer of 1991 the only recording we did was with the performance artist Sandra Bernhard. She and I had become friends, and she had moved into my house briefly. Sandra was a hilarious comic, and lots of fun to hang out with, though she was a nonstop party animal. Because I was a single mom without a man in my life, crazy rumors circulated that I was gay, and perhaps Sandra had heard them. Not long after she moved in, Sandra began to hit on me. I repeatedly told her that I didn’t go that way, but she kept it up until I had to send her packing.
With her outrageousness, Sandra reminded me in a way of another woman who that season began leaving me phone messages. I never knew how Courtney Love got my home number, but she did. The messages were frequent, lengthy, and many times so long they filled my entire machine. I was a night owl myself, but Courtney’s messages might be time stamped at five in the morning.
As to what Courtney wanted, I never could quite piece that together. She seemed to have an important need to connect, and she repeatedly called me “the Queen of Seattle rock, the Queen of female rock, the fucking Queen,” and it was imperative she spend time with me. While it was always flattering to hear from women rockers that we had been an inspiration, it wasn’t recognition we sought. And when that recognition came from Courtney Love, it was hard to know how to take it.
I never returned the calls.
On September 27, 1991, we released our album Rock the House Live. It had been recorded at a date on the Brigade Tour. We left most of the hits off, and made efforts to make it sound less slick than our last few albums had. We included one new song we loved called “You’re the Voice.”
We had incredibly bad timing. Our album came out the same day as Nirvana’s Nevermind, and we got lost in the sea change coming from a few blocks away from our Seattle homes. Rock the House Live only went to Number 107 on the Billboard charts, our poorest selling record in years.
Over the next year and a half, we decided to double down on Heart. Most of our albums had been recorded in a rush, but with the luxury of our own studio, we’d have enough time to make a quality record. This time we wanted to do it our way: We insisted we record our songs. The label gave in, as long as we included “Will You Be There (In the Morning),” another Mutt Lange tune. This time the song came with a caveat: Mutt Lange got to approve our version. The label also insisted we separately sing it in Spanish, so
they could issue that version in Latin America. The song itself was horrible. We did our first run through it, and Howard Leese sent it to Mutt Lange. Lange objected because we’d changed one note.
On the positive side, we had written a batch of our best songs. “Under the Sky,” “Rage,” “Back to Avalon,” “My Crazy Head,” and “Two Black Lambs” were all examples of the kind of harmony we were reclaiming. Having our own studio, even if we were paying the day rate, gave us extended time to craft each track. In the end, the record cost us over a million dollars to finish.
When we turned the album in, the president of Capitol was impressed. He thought “My Crazy Head” should be the first single, and he said they would push it hard for a Grammy. One week later, the president was fired, and Mutt Lange’s song was put forward as the first single. This time the hit-making machine failed: The track only went to Number 39. Every other studio album we’d done with Capitol had been a multi-platinum success, but Desire Walks On became our poorest-selling studio album since Private Audition. In 1993, with grunge dominating the charts, we didn’t even have the attention of music fans in Seattle.
We did another massive tour, and as usual we pulled in bigger audiences for our live show than we did for the new album. We played on Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jon Stewart, and even live on MTV. It was one of the first times we were grateful for MTV exposure. We had put together a new line-up that included bassist Fernando Saunders and drummer Denny Fongheiser. Howard Leese continued as the only holdover from the seventies Heart. Despite the lack of chart success, the band sounded amazing.
But that tour was especially grueling. This was the first time I had attempted to tour as a mother, and that complicated things considerably. The band would travel on one tour bus, while a second carried Marie, Nancy, a nanny, and me. There was constant illness and crying on the bus. Marie would sometimes freak out when she saw people in the crowd screaming at her mom—she thought something was wrong. She said, “You are my mommy, and no one else’s.” The separation anxiety she felt when I was onstage was difficult for everyone.
Capitol had been right about one thing with their strategy: Recording a song in Spanish had given us a hit in parts of the world we had never played. They consequently booked us for shows in Latin America. One we did was a sold-out show in Mexico City, playing to a sea of wonderful new fans.
Then we booked a massive festival in Santiago, Chile. We had never toured within four thousand miles of there before, and it was uncharted waters. The routing for our flights had us go from Seattle to Miami, to New York, and then to Chile. We were doing all of this with Marie in tow, and all our equipment. We were exhausted by the time we arrived.
We were the headliners of a multi-day festival. We had shifted our fashion that year, wearing what we wore at home in Seattle—Doc Martens and army coats. That might have made us hip in Seattle, but in Chile, we were entirely underdressed. We had to follow Selena, who had her biggest hit that year. As soon as her performance was over, the crowd began to walk out even before we played a note. There was still daylight, and we could see the crowd pouring out as we valiantly tried to go on with our show. It was the first time since First Congregational Church in 1968 that we played to a crowd with so many walkouts.
It was the low of all lows. It was exactly the stuff that rock-mares are made of. We had joked at that first Lovemongers show that we were “live from the DoubleTree Inn, one night only.” Staring at the audience in Chile streaming out, it seemed like the DoubleTree might be our next gig.
We had one more album due to Capitol under our contract, and we decided that a live album might shift things. After our Lovemongers’ shows, we were interested in recording “unplugged,” which we thought might become a new direction for Heart. We’d done live albums before, but this time we wanted it to sound fabulous, so we booked the tiny Backstage club in Seattle for three nights in August and hired the best producer and arranger we knew: John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin.
We had met Jonesy before, but the project gave us an entire month with him, and he proved to be a prince among men. He told a few funny Zeppelin touring stories, but generally he wasn’t catty. He wrote charts for our songs and proved himself to be a brilliant arranger. He was one of the most down-to-earth, sweetest guys we ever met in the music business, so much so that at times I’d even forget that he was John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin.
John Paul even sat in with us on a few songs at our concerts. The entire run of shows felt like a breath of fresh air as we explored Heart in the acoustic setting. John Paul arranged some of our most bombastic eighties hits in a way that made them shine. It helped me imagine that a new direction for Heart was possible, and I held out hope our label would feel the same. Capitol scheduled the live album, which we decided to call The Road Home, for the following year.
If there was an upside to what ultimately was the commercial failure of Desire Walks On, it was that it gave us opportunities to record with two of Seattle’s legendary voices. We wanted a male voice to harmonize with on Bob Dylan’s “Ring Them Bells.” Chris Cornell sang it with us at a Lovemongers show, so we asked him, and he agreed. It came out great, but his label wouldn’t let us release it.
I called up Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, who had been a friend for years, and he agreed to step in. He was wearing wraparound sunglasses when he came into the studio, and he didn’t want anyone else in the control room when he sang. The engineer mixed his take with our vocals, and it sounded perfect. Layne had the blood harmony with us, too.
You could see that day, though, that his struggles with drug addiction had taken away part of Layne. He had become smaller and smaller, inside and out, even hunched over. He was little to start with, but when I gave him a hug, I was afraid I might break his bones.
I had seen some of Alice’s first shows when Layne was luminous onstage, whiter than white, as if he was lit from within. It was like he didn’t have a body when he was performing. His voice was the template for what everyone else did after him. A lot of other guys buzzed around Layne like bees. He was full of humor, but serious, too. Sometimes he would look me in the eye, and say, “Ann, exactly how are you really doing?”
As the years went on, he shifted, and by “Ring Them Bells,” his light was flickering. But he would still come to parties at my house then. When his girlfriend Demri was around, Layne was different. He’d lose her, and then we’d have to search for her, and we’d find her curled up in a closet. When she died in 1996, it really took away his essence.
The last time I saw Layne was a couple of years after Demri’s death, when he came to a party at my home. He wasn’t quite yet the recluse he would become in the months before he died in 2002, but it was still rare enough to see him that his presence was the talk of the party. Eventually, the rest of the crowd left, and it was just Layne and me together on a clear summer night. I decided I wanted to swim, and he followed me to my pool. He didn’t get in, but sat there in a lounge chair looking at the sky, sipping on a beer, while I swam laps. He told me that as a kid he had excelled at swimming and diving. “I loved to dive into water,” he said. It was a whole different world in water he said.
Suddenly, a huge meteor went over us. It looked like a bright piece of burning coal, and for a second it lit up Layne’s face. He looked young again, like a kid who loved nothing better than to dive into water. In that moment, there was nothing dark in his life.
“Did you see that?” he said excitedly. “How close do you think that was to us, Ann? Do you think that almost hit us, Ann? How lucky are we to have seen that?”
“It was really beautiful,” I said.
“Do you have any idea,” Layne asked, “how rare it is for a meteor that big, and that bright, to come that close to us? We are really, really lucky people, Ann. You and me.”
21
The Other Half of the Sky
A turning point for a duo. Mrs. Clinton
plays Mom. Plus a very different view from
the au
dience. . . .
ANN WILSON
In the spring of 1995, Nancy called and said she wanted to talk. She was living part of the time in Los Angeles with Cameron, but also still coming up to work on Heart projects. I knew they were trying to start a family, without success. She had also begun to work on film scores, and I was excited to see her find another avenue for her creativity.
I thought she might want to discuss where a new Heart album could go, and how we could follow The Road Home, set for release that summer. It was our last album in our current contract, and there were already indications Capitol may not want to renew. In fact, a few weeks later, after having sold twenty million albums for them, Capitol dropped us.
It was an unseasonably warm spring Seattle day, when Nancy and I met, and we sat on my back patio. The cherry trees were blooming, and little pink blossoms floated by. She sat down and came to the point. “I don’t want to do Heart anymore,” she said. “At least for a while. I need to take a break and put Heart on hold.”
I was speechless. It felt like she had leaned over and stabbed me in the chest with a knife. To me, her announcement was also the end of Heart. For three decades, we had been more than sisters: We had been partners in creativity, business, and a force of two against the world.
Nancy explained she wanted to work with Cameron on more film scores; she wanted to get off the road and put time into starting a family. What she didn’t say, but what I thought, was that she didn’t want to keep coming back to Seattle to witness the withering and dying of Heart. Though we had been a unified force in Heart for most of our history, there had been times when I wanted to tour more than Nancy did, but we’d always gotten over that. This was the first time I had come up against anyone in the band, or in my family, who didn’t believe in Heart. It was particularly hurtful because it was my sister who no longer believed. It was the other half of the sky.