Kicking and Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock and Roll

by Ann Wilson

  “It’s not like I’m going to write skinny music, if there is such a thing,” I said.

  “You’re a strong broad, you’re going to get through this,” he said. Hearing Larry King call me a “broad” while I ate a steak, was one of the most surreal moments of my life.

  The lap band worked, and I lost sixty pounds. I made a promotional video for the lap band manufacturer, and did a few interviews with the press. Those mostly went well, though I got annoyed that I was always asked how much I weighed before, and how much I weighed now. I knew that if I gave out details, they would appear in a review of our next album. I didn’t want to be reduced, as I had in my childhood school weigh-ins, to a number.

  I told people I lost four dress sizes. I was also frequently asked, “How bad was it?” It was as if I could quantify the pain of my struggles. I had agreed to this promotion temporarily, but I didn’t want the line “Weight-Loss Spokesperson” next to my name. For years I had been known for my band, and I didn’t want to only be known now for my lap band. I’m glad I made the decision to have the surgery, but the recovery was tough, in more ways than one.

  In early 2002, Nancy had finally softened up on the idea of touring again as Heart. Part of the reason was because, after being off the road for ten years, the expense of fertility treatments, and what Nancy called her “real-estate disorder” (owning several homes), she and Cameron needed the money. Our tour bus once again became a kid zone.

  Compared to our other jaunts, this was a relatively short eight-week summer tour, but it felt fantastic to be with my sister again, playing the music that was our legacy. Howard Leese had finally left Heart, finding a gig with Paul Rogers during our hiatus, but we had put together a new band: Ben Smith on drums, Scotty Olson on guitar, Tom Kellock on keyboards, and Mike Inez of Alice in Chains on bass. Mike brought not only his incredible bass playing, but also a legacy of hard rock (he’d also played in Ozzy Osbourne’s band), and a sardonic sense of humor. Bill Cracknell, who was such a character the series Roadies was based on him, became our road manager. We hired a new manager, too, named Carol Peters. She promised us that she would never tell me to lose weight, or ask us to push our breasts together for photos. Carol is a tiny woman, but forceful, and an embodiment of the old adage, “small hatchet chop down big tree.” She has remained our manager and has played an essential role in every chapter of our success since.

  Carol had warned me that my lap band surgery might get attention when we were touring that year, but I wasn’t prepared for how often it was talked about. It wasn’t something I had done for publicity, but it had the unintended result that people were talking about Heart again in the newspapers, twelve years after our last radio hit.

  Along with fans at our typical after-show meet-and-greets, the lap band company wanted me to talk with potential candidates in certain markets. It was humbling, but also moving to meet these people with incredible challenges. They weren’t necessarily Heart fans. In Houston, one was a scientist that worked for NASA. A select number were what they called “catastrophically obese,” which meant they weighed over seven hundred pounds. Many were in wheelchairs. It was very moving to hear their stories, and it made me realize it was not just a matter of willpower. When you weigh six hundred pounds, it’s not because you don’t want to lose weight, it’s because you are seriously ill. As I accepted these people for their struggles, I was less judgmental of myself.

  I am a feminist, and a proud one, but this country’s obsession with weight is the biggest problem women have ever had. It’s bigger than sexism because it spills over into what women think of other women, and what they think of themselves.

  Nancy and I have often been cited as women who broke through gender barriers in music in an era when few others did. We never took up that cause on purpose—it was accidental, or at best the fate we were born to. We were naive, young, and unwilling to believe that we couldn’t do something just because we were females. I know rock is better for women being in it, but it is a hard life for the female pioneers.

  I lost sixty pounds after the lap band surgery, but the real answer for me was to burn more calories than I consumed, and that meant exercise, and watching my food choices. To this day I maintain my post lap-band weight by following the rules.

  But the greatest victory I found in my lifelong battle with weight was freedom from the external judgment that ruled me for so long. I go with my instinct now, and not my junior high classmates, my mother’s, male rock critics, or even standard of other women. A few years after the lap band was installed, and after I’d lost weight, Patrick MacDonald in the Seattle Times took another jab at me in a review of one of our shows. He described me as “zaftig,” meaning I was Zeppelin-like. By that point, I was long past caring what an overweight rock critic had to say about my body.

  I am never going to starve myself again. I am never going to binge and purge to try to make myself pure. Those techniques worked at one time in my life to make me small, but not in the way I wanted to be small. They withered me. I am no longer a heavy person trying to get good—I am just a person, a woman, and a singer in a band, albeit one with a lap band.

  I learned that being smaller wasn’t worth my soul taking up less space.

  NANCY WILSON

  It was refreshing touring with Heart again, and my life felt full in every way. My boys were with me on the road those first two years, and when I was off tour, I was working on the score to whatever Cameron’s latest movie was.

  In 2001, Cameron’s Vanilla Sky was our second film in a row with Tom Cruise. I found Tom to be a handsome and engaging alpha male. He also reminded me of Roger Fisher, my old boyfriend. Both Tom and Roger had strong jaws, beautiful teeth, wide smiles, and a strong masculine presence. When Tom first met my mother, who was visiting the set, he went up and kissed her. After that day, Mama told everyone she met that Tom Cruise had kissed her.

  Tom once took Cameron and me on a tour of the Scientology “Celebrity Center.” We were fearful he would try to recruit us. Cameron’s hands got sweaty and clammy as we toured the giant building, but Tom never did anything to recruit us. He just smiled, and showed us around.

  We had filmed Vanilla Sky in New York City. For the scene where Tom Cruise runs during a nightmare, we had emptied Times Square. During a break in the filming, I stood in a silent Times Square. A few months later, 9/11 happened and the movie’s nightmare turned real.

  Cameron began working on Elizabethtown next, and he had high hopes for it since Vanilla Sky hadn’t lived up to expectations. He worked on the script endlessly, and I worked on the music.

  While I was working on that score, we decided to make another Heart album, and in the fall of 2003, we began recording, mostly in Los Angeles. It was our first new studio album in over a decade, and I acted as coproducer with guitarist Craig Bartock, who had joined the band. All of the songs were ours, with the exception of one track by San Francisco indie act Chuck Prophet. I had never been the driving force behind a Heart album, but for this one I was on a mission of God. When we needed some extra guitar muscle, I called up Alice’s Jerry Cantrell and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready. Both contributed smoking licks and made the record truly rock.

  We made the album Jupiter’s Darling for a small independent label that later went bankrupt. We traded the big advances we used to get for total artistic control. We didn’t expect the album to sell millions, but it did sell over 100,000 copies, and made it to the Billboard top one hundred. More rewarding was that some critics, and many of our longtime fans, cited it as one of our best in decades.

  Jupiter’s Darling came out in June 2004, and we undertook a summer tour to promote it. We played over sixty dates in Europe and the United States. This was my first jaunt as a mother without my kids on the road, and I found that I missed them terribly.

  We took most of 2005 off from touring so I could spend more time with my boys and with my mom, who had started to have serious health problems of her own. Elizabethtown came out in the fall o
f 2005. It bombed. My marriage with Cameron had worked best when I could support his career, but as his career stumbled, there were hairline fractures in our marriage.

  As adults, we both suffered from a “Peter Pan” syndrome, and neither of us stepped up to the plate in order to gain all the tools we needed. Early in our relationship, he was happy that he’d found someone with a big enough life of their own they didn’t mind him retreating into his work. But after we had kids, it became harder to reach each other. We had tried so long to have children, and when we finally had them, I expected us to get closer, but the opposite happened. We were parents first, friends second, and our relationship got lost. We were both scattered and really busy. We always had busy lives, but once we added high-energy twins, it became chaotic. We needed a manual, or a class, because we couldn’t figure it out. The balance between collaborator, parent, husband, wife, parent, lovers shifted, and, ultimately moved us apart.

  As Cameron and I aged, we also both faced the realities of our parents getting older. His father had died years earlier, though his mother remained a constant presence in our lives, so much so that he dedicated all of his movies to her. But my relationship with my own family was transitioning after Dotes passed. My mom had begun to get more forgetful. At first we thought it was just old age, as she turned eighty in 2003, but later that year she was diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s. Her health eroded quickly in the next two years. She had been a lifelong smoker, and we knew the Alzheimer’s had its grip on her when one day she forgot that she smoked.

  By early 2006, she was going downhill fast. We were booked for a show that month that had been planned for a year, a VH1 tribute to us called “Decades Rock Live.” We were set to play with a slew of bands who would perform Heart songs. On the bill was Duff McKagan, Rufus Wainwright, Dave Navarro, Phil Anselmo, and the remaining members of Alice in Chains, who had agreed to reunite for the event to play with us, one of the first times they’d performed together since Layne died.

  We considered cancelling the show, but Mama’s health stabilized, and Lynn promised to tell us if anything changed, so we went to Los Angeles for the rehearsals. Lynn called just after we left the stage. “Looks like she’s going, so you should get here,” she said.

  Los Angeles had some of its worst thunderstorms in history that day, and every flight was cancelled. It seemed there was no way we could get back to Seattle in time. We decided to try to charter a private plane, and attempt to find a pilot who would be crazy enough to fly into a thunderstorm. We found one, but the air traffic controllers wouldn’t let him take off. Finally, the storm cleared for a moment, and we launched into the air, and made it to Seattle.

  Mama was still holding on when we arrived at the Windmill House with our guitars. Mama was lying on her bed with a picture of the Oregon Coast behind her, and we started singing all the songs she had taught us growing up. We sang her favorites. She loved the Harry Nilsson song “Lifeline” from “The Point,” and also “Think about Your Troubles.” We sang them all.

  She hadn’t eaten for a few days, and her systems were shutting down, but she still had a smile on her face. When I was growing up, Mama once told me something about scientific research on music: That when you die, the last thing to go is your memory of music. When all else is gone, there is still music in your brain. Mama couldn’t talk anymore, but she was lying there in bed tapping her toe to the music we were playing.

  We sang all night long. We were set to fly to Atlantic City that next morning where the VH1 show was to be filmed. It was our highest profile concert in two decades, and though we thought about cancelling, we also knew Lou would want us to go on with our lives. We kissed her head good-bye, and caught the flight east. We told Lynn that if something happened before our show, to wait to call us until we were offstage.

  It was hard to focus on the gig, but it went well. Ann sang “Rooster” with Alice in Chains. Gretchen Wilson sang “Even It Up” with us. Rufus Wainwright sang “Dog and Butterfly.” Country singer Carrie Underwood sang “Alone” with Ann. It was rewarding to hear young talent like Carrie telling us how we’d inspired her (“You were the first example that I saw of strong women in rock,” she told us.), but that night, all the accolades seemed surreal considering the reality we were facing.

  After the concert, Lynn called and Mama was gone. The night she died a huge thunderstorm, probably the same one that delayed us in Los Angeles, rolled through Seattle, and dropped hailstones the size of baseballs. The hail hit the windmill behind Mama’s house so hard the blades started spinning like crazy. Lynn could tell it was near the end, so she put one of Mama’s favorite records on the stereo—a classical piece called “Pines of Rome”—and blasted it super loud. Lynn felt it was the right music to send her off with, as it starts quiet, but gets really big. In the middle of the night, as the music was blaring, the spinner flew off the windmill. And in that moment, Mama passed. That same night, on the other side of the country, we saw the biggest shooting star I had ever witnessed.

  One of Dotes’s favorite sayings, left over from his days as a Marine, was, “If you’re in trouble, or you need to send a message, then send up a flare.” I think the windmill spinner flying off, and that shooting star on the horizon, was Mama sending us a message to always be strong. That storm was Mama’s final fury, her final flare.

  24

  I Can See Russia

  Nancy tries to fit in at the PTA and at a swank Nashville

  party. Cameron and Nancy hit a wall. And finally,

  how a Barracuda bites. . . .

  NANCY WILSON

  We began a pattern that would continue for the next several years, of touring mostly during the summer, when our kids were out of school. We no longer brought our children out for an entire tour, though, just stints of several weeks at a time. During the school year, we tried to be at home as much as possible to create a normal family life. It was a difficult juggling act. Being a mom was harder than I had imagined, and being a rock mom complicated things further.

  Cameron and I had decided to send our boys to a foreign language immersion elementary school, but I started developing phobia about the attitude other moms had toward me. I imagined they viewed me with contempt because I was a fraud and a vagabond. I was shy and nervous around the other moms, and felt out of place. Before any school event, I would spend hours thinking about what to wear. I looked in the mirror, after picking out what I thought was my most “mom” outfit, and wondered, “Who am I?”

  Since I worked nights, I couldn’t always drop my kids off at school, so we used a nanny. I picked them up, but even with that I worried about the perception of the other moms. It was particularly difficult to figure out who I was because this was Los Angeles, where there is a palpable caste system. Within certain groups, you had more power if you had multiple nannies, but within others, any nanny was frowned upon. I didn’t know where I fit in, and just when I began to feel comfortable, we’d go on tour again.

  It didn’t help when at one parent-teacher conference I was told one of my sons was being disruptive. “He’s working on his sense of humor in the class,” the teacher said. “And your other son is drumming during classes, even though he’s getting straight A’s. Can you get him to pretend like he’s paying attention?” I replied in the affirmative. But their infrequent bouts of rebellion at this very proper school were something I secretly savored. My sons were proving to be individuals, raging against the machine. They were not followers.

  Over time, I got to know a few other parents at school, and realized I was judging myself far more than others were judging me. My fears were mostly internal, part of my lifelong struggle to fit in. One thing that helped was when I became friends with another mother who was a stay-at-home parent and who had sacrificed her own desires to support her husband. And then her marriage fell apart. I realized there was no magic formula for building a marriage.

  The tours during the next few summers were some of our best. We went on the road with Cheap Trick,
and Journey, and made friends with those bands. But I always enjoyed the offstage jams on the bus, or at parties, even more than our concerts.

  As our career had evolved, we found ourselves often being approached by other musicians who told us we had been an inspiration, and many of our songs found second acts in television or film. We hadn’t gone into the business for that recognition, but it felt rewarding, nonetheless. Our songs were covered on American Idol, Glee, and Dancing with the Stars. Fergie did a version of “Barracuda” in Shrek, and even Eminem covered us. Our songs ended up in video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero. But it was always the personal interactions with other performers that made us feel best. We did a television show with Katy Perry, who told us the only reason she agreed to be on the bill was because we were on it. Gretchen “Redneck Woman” Wilson became a good friend. Kelly Clarkson called Ann “my favorite singer of all-time.” We met Celine Dion in Las Vegas, and she talked to us so sincerely, and so long, she was late for her own concert.

  Heart had never been a country band, but people in Nashville always showed us tremendous love. I suspect it might be because we are sisters, and the idea of a family band gets more respect in the Bible Belt. I know they also love the idea of a “little girl with a gee-tar,” because even my solo album got airplay there. So when we were asked for the first time if we wanted to attend the Country Music Awards, we agreed. During the telecast, the camera showed us in the audience a few times, which probably made a few country fans scratch their heads.

  After the awards, we went to a party held by MCA president Tony Brown in his Civil War–era mansion. Every star in country was present. I was nervous, so I went to the backyard first, where I spied a few of these ancient gray-haired guys with beards and flannel shirts, probably pickers behind the scenes. One said, “Hey little lady, who are you?”