by Ann Wilson
“I’m Nancy Wilson. I’m with a band called Heart. We, uh, we’re from Seattle.” There was no recognition on these guy’s faces. I might as well have told them we were the Von Trapps. But they had some pot. “Hey, little lady, want some?” one old guy asked.
“Okay, if you insist, just a tiny bit,” I said. I hadn’t had pot for ages, and this was some mellow stuff, like sixties pot. It was exactly the right kind. Suddenly, I was loose and free. I went into the house, and there were a slew of guitars in the center of the room. Our road manager Bill Cracknell told me later that Tony Brown always wanted his parties to turn into jam sessions, but they rarely did. I’ve never seen a guitar I didn’t want to play. I picked one up, and started into Elton John’s “Country Comfort.” My pot-smoking friends joined in, and so did my sister. I started walking with the guitar, and gesturing to everyone to “come on.” Sheryl Crow grabbed a guitar; George Strait, too. Soon enough it was a superstar jam session with Vince Gill, Clint Black, Michelle Branch, Reba McIntire, and many more. I love hootenannies, but this was one of the best.
At home my life was less harmonious. It started to be a crisis. The distance between Cameron and me had only increased with the demands of work, parenting, and financial pressures. The hormones of being a woman and a mother in my fifties, had contributed too, as had losing both my parents. I needed partnership, but I couldn’t find any. And he needed partnership in his way, and couldn’t find it from me.
I thought we would overcome those challenges, and maybe with counseling we might get some tools. I wasn’t ready to give up hope. But Cameron wanted to separate, and that’s what we did in 2008. We’d been together twenty-seven years. It was devastating.
It was the end of our marriage, but also the death of my dream of being married to a writer. When I met Cameron, and he wrote that first letter romancing me, I thought my soul mate would make me his muse. But that first letter was one of the only times he ever wrote me. There had been notes on the kitchen counter, or “I love you” in lipstick on the mirror, but I had imagined a very different life than the one I now found. I know some of it, maybe much of it, was my fault.
I had spent years listening to Cameron read me every line of his movies as he meticulously crafted them, and we pored over them together. Those words on paper had moved me, as they had moved millions of theatergoers, with their humor, poignancy, and ever-lasting belief that love could conquer every obstacle put in its way. Ann may have been one of the few who wasn’t swayed by those lines. She later told me that Cameron admitted that his male characters were always saved by the female ones.
My marriage dissolved without cute banter from a script, without the poignant turn of a phrase that a John Cusack–type character might have uttered, and without the female character, even the “Beautiful-Girl-in-a-Car,” able to save it. Our final days were very unromantic, and much like other stories of divorce. In the end, it looked and sounded very different from the lines spoken in a Cameron Crowe movie.
I moved to a nearby neighborhood with the aid of my girlfriend Julie Bergman, who helped me through the grieving for years to come. Cameron and I quickly became better parents living in different homes than we had ever been under the same roof. He was a great father, and we became first-rate co-parents. The move wasn’t as devastating to our kids as I had imagined. They adapted quickly. Much of what I had struggled with was my idea that Billy and Curtis should grow up in a house that looked much like mine did in Bellevue, with Dotes down the hall listening to music, and Mama always there for us. That wasn’t to be their life, but there was more than enough love for them.
We were separated for two years before I formally filed for divorce. Perhaps I was holding out hope that we might find our way back together, but it didn’t happen. When I filed for divorce, I knew it could get in the press, but I wasn’t prepared for what happened when it suddenly became a news story, and everywhere I went people were asking me about it. We were playing a show that night, and I barely made it through.
When I’d walk through an airport, total strangers would shout out, “Will you marry me?” Just like many of the sexist, or sexual, comments we’d gotten over the years, it was too intimate and inappropriate. It was also terribly embarrassing.
When I first auditioned for Heart and sat in with my sister’s band back in those Vancouver cabarets, I never imagined that I was signing up for a life under the microscope. Seeing my personal failures highlighted in the press was a price of fame, but it was a steep cost.
I learned another lesson about the price of fame in September 2008. Ann and I were in our dressing room getting ready for a show that night. The television was on in the background, and we were watching the Republican National Convention. Like the rest of America, we wanted to see how John McCain’s pick for vice president, Sarah Palin, did on the national stage.
As the speeches progressed, I was putting eye shadow on in the mirror, when I thought I heard our road crew playing “Barracuda” at soundcheck. But I wasn’t on stage, so this wasn’t soundcheck. I looked up, and “Barracuda” was coming from the television. Sarah Palin was walking on stage as our song played.
“Whaaaaaaaaaat!”
It felt as if a crime had been committed against us. This was not happening during some tiny out of the way campaign stop—our song was on every single network in the country, being heard by millions. We were suddenly thrust into Republican politics. Our cell phones immediately started buzzing.
Kelly Curtis called first. “Unfortunately, it happens all the time,” Kelly said. “You should issue a statement.” Just a month before McCain had used Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” in an attack ad on Barack Obama, and Browne had sued. There had been similar incidents with Van Halen, and even our old tour mate John Mellencamp. Kelly told me Sarah Palin’s nickname when she played high-school basketball was “barracuda” because of her aggressive style of play.
Kelly had me call Pearl Jam’s publicist, to prepare a statement. “We are fucking insulted by this,” I said. My quote went out over the newswires.
The next day, “Barracuda” was played again at the convention. Our “Barracuda” had become Palin’s theme song. It was soon being used on newscasts to introduce segments on Palin. We disagreed with Palin on every single one of her policy stances, but that was beside the point. We were musicians, not lobbyists, or spokespeople for any one party. As entertainers, we saw music as a joining force. Onstage we sang, and didn’t preach. Now we were singing behind a preaching Sarah Palin, whether we liked it or not.
We had our attorney Don Passman write to the Republican National Committee. Don told us that ultimately there wasn’t much we could do. ASCAP had granted a blanket license to the convention. We issued another statement: “We have asked the Republican campaign publicly not to use our music. We hope our wishes will be honored.”
I was unnerved. I told Entertainment Weekly, “I feel completely fucked over.” I clearly couldn’t speak about it without dropping the F-word. We issued yet another statement: “Sarah Palin’s views and values in no way represent us as American women. We ask that our song ‘Barracuda’ no longer be used to promote her image. The song ‘Barracuda’ was written in the late seventies as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women (the ‘Barracuda’ represented the business). While Heart did not, and would not, authorize the use of their song at the RNC, there’s irony in Republican strategists’ choice to make use of it.”
It seemed like a no-win situation for us. The more we complained the more Republican bloggers blasted us for what they thought were our politics. Even a liberal paper, Seattle’s The Stranger, made fun of our request to the McCain campaign. They rewrote it as an expletive-filled rant titled “Up Yours, You Old Fart!” It was hilarious, but unfortunately it went viral on the Internet with many thinking we had written it.
And then, out of nowhere, something good happened from something awful. There was enough discussion about
“Barracuda,” that people began asking, well, what was “Barracuda” really about? The song had remained popular on album-oriented radio, but its meaning was never discussed. Because of Palin, DJs were calling to ask us to explain what we meant with the song. It forced us to talk publicly about our personal values, which we had never done before. We ended up on CNN one night with Joy Behar (followed by Ann Coulter, of course).
I wouldn’t wish this situation on my worst enemy, but it sent up a flare. It made the song matter in a way it hadn’t mattered before. It became a controversy, and in a strange way, even an ugly controversy was renewed purpose. We never addressed it onstage, but each night we went out to take “Barracuda” back. It gave us a reason to rail against something. It also gave cause for some very humorous headlines, like the one in Slate, “Will McCain’s ‘Heart’ Stop?”
I’m not exactly sure how long Palin’s campaign used the song, because I couldn’t bear to watch. Just a week after the convention, Tina Fey skewered Palin with her Saturday Night Live sketch, and her comment “I can see Russia from my house.” By the time Palin sat down with Katie Couric, it was over for her. Many cited questions about Palin’s qualifications as the main reason McCain lost. Palin became a toothless “Barracuda.”
Around the time Tina Fey portrayed Palin on Saturday Night Live, a spokesperson for the McCain campaign issued a statement about the Fey’s imitation. They called the skit “disrespectful in the extreme.” Those were just the words I was looking for that night in the dressing room after hearing “Barracuda” coming from the television.
25
Hope and Glory
Ann does a solo album and faces darkness within. Ann
kisses a fish on the lips in Canada on the “Zamboni Tour.”
Nancy catches “the Seattle Music Disease,” and her
guitar suffers. . . .
ANN WILSON
The previous year, the greatest dream of my childhood came true when I finally met Paul McCartney. It included little of the magic I had imagined when I was a girl because this wasn’t the “smile and a wink” Paul of my teenager novels. “Hi Bird, would you fancy a cup of tea?” would forever remain the voice of my fictional Paul, but it was not the voice of the real one.
The meeting came about when Paul was on tour, and playing in Portland. The concert promoter said Nancy, Sue, and I would be able watch the soundcheck. We thought we’d be the only ones, but there were a couple of dozen others who had won the privilege through a radio station contest. Nancy joked that we were “the other contest winners.”
Nancy had met Paul briefly when Cameron asked him to write the title song for Vanilla Sky. After Paul’s soundcheck, Nancy stood and announced, “Come on. I’m going to introduce you.”
As we marched to the stage, I could already recognize the glassy look on Paul’s face: It was the one I often had in the middle of a long, exhausting tour. Paul was onstage talking to someone else, but Nancy interrupted him. “Hi Paul, it’s me, uh, Nancy, remember of Nancy and Cameron?” He looked at her without recognition, but politely shook our hands, and we quickly exited. It was less that we met Paul, or talked to him, because we really didn’t, but we did shake his hand.
The concert itself was more a thrill because we escaped into the church of the Beatles—the very thing that had saved Nancy, Sue, and me when we were teenagers. Back then, I had wanted nothing more in life than to meet Paul McCartney in the flesh, but in the end the real Paul meant less to me than the one who had been onstage at the Seattle Center Coliseum in 1966. That Paul had helped forever change how we thought about ourselves, and helped us imagine that we could be musicians.
At our soundcheck meeting, I had said a total of two words to Paul McCartney: “Hi, Paul.” There hadn’t been the opportunity to thank him for the inspiration, for that essential gift, but he had heard that story a million times before. It was significant only to us, only to the dreamers.
In 2007, while Nancy was living in California, I recorded a solo album, Hope and Glory. The album was mostly covers and featured duets with Elton John, Alison Krauss, k.d. lang, Shawn Colvin, Wynonna Judd, and Nancy. It was an honor to work with those greats, but also rewarding in that it gave me a chance to cover songs I had grown up with, like Jesse Colin Young’s “Darkness, Darkness,” and the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.”
I recorded Hope and Glory with producer Ben Mink, and that next year Nancy and I began working with Ben on a new Heart record. One of the first tracks Nancy contributed was “Hey You.” The song had a great chorus, but she hadn’t finished it. She had crafted two different endings One was an “I love you” finale, and the other was “Have you had enough of me?” When she and Cameron divorced, she went with the latter.
It had been hard to watch my sister go through such pain. Cameron had been the first real man Nancy had been involved with. Her whole life she had been in love with the idea of love, and to her the divorce was the loss of an ideal as well. Together we immersed ourselves in our new album, with music providing the healing it always had.
By 2009, as we were working on the album we would eventually call Red Velvet Car, I was in need of healing myself. Though I had stopped drugs when my daughter was born, my drinking had steadily increased. The lap band actually made things worse because it while it stopped me from enjoying eating as I had before, it didn’t stop the absorption of alcohol, so my drinking accelerated. They warn you against overdrinking with lap band, but I ignored those warnings. Over the years, I built up layers of protection around me, and I often built them with wine. I never drank before we performed, so I never felt I had a real problem. Later, I heard from those around me that they were most worried at times when I wasn’t working, when those controls weren’t in place.
In November, when we were off tour, I collapsed one day, passed out. I woke to find then ten-year-old Dustin over me saying, “Mom, are you okay?” I said I was fine, but I wasn’t. I hadn’t even had that much to drink, but my body was telling me I had gone too far.
My sisters were alarmed. Lynn and Nancy made an appointment with my doctor, and they went with me. My doctor conducted a number of tests. She calmly showed us my liver results, and tried to explain it in scientific terms. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, so she put it directly: “If you keep drinking,” she said, “you are going to die.”
Within my family, I had always been compared to Dotes because of our body types, or the fact we were the only brunettes in the Big Five. But he and I had both self-medicated, and so did our grandparents. I remember Dotes once getting up and telling me that he couldn’t understand anyone who woke up and said, “What a wonderful day with the birds chirping and the sun shining.” It was later that I realized he didn’t feel that way because he woke up hung over.
In some ways, mine was a classic story: I was a sensitive and shy person, who had gone into the entertainment business. It was an intense industry with many parties, and often I thought I couldn’t face things without medication of some sort. Once I stopped drugs, it was easy to think I had gotten past that, but alcohol was a constant, and I was spiraling downward. Nancy was going through her divorce, my daughter Marie had just left home, my parents had died, and I had gone through menopause. Every one of those things seemed intolerable that month, and I drank my way through them all. I went down into the ocean like a plane.
There had been times when people had warned me about my drinking. My mother, Sue Ennis, Michael Fisher, and a few others had shaken their fingers at me. But I’ve always been rebellious, and if somebody told me to do something, I usually did the opposite. Even after witnessing Andrew Wood, Kurt Cobain, and my friend Layne Staley die, I still didn’t understand the power of my own demons. But when you get to the other side of it, and realize you are an Alcoholic with a capital “A,” that illusion is stripped.
People in recovery call it hitting rock bottom, and that’s what happened to me. There was only one way this situation would turn out if I continued, and t
hat meant not being alive. I had seen rock ’n’ roll casualties—we had opened up for the Rolling Stones—but I always thought it would never happen to me. I thought I was made of steel, and I could handle anything. Looking at my doctor holding my liver results, and the alarmed faces of my sisters, I realized many of my beliefs were fallacies. In the band, and in the family, I was Atlas holding up the world, and if I went down, much would sink with me.
I found out later my family and crew had already talked about an intervention. They had even built a break into Heart’s touring schedule with a stint in treatment in mind. Ultimately, they decided I might rebel if they chose that, and they were right. The motivation had to come from me. It was awful, and it was terrifying, and part of the reason I wanted to stop was simply because I saw the idea of treatment as more humiliation, and something that would take me away from singing, my life force.
By the time I got home, word had spread, and the elves were in action. My assistant, Sherri Anderson, and Dustin’s nanny, Roxanne Harris, had already cleaned all the alcohol out of the house. It was probably not an easy task. It was a good call, because in those first tenuous days I might have slipped.
I never went to a twelve-step meeting or into treatment. But I did get support from friends, family, and bandmates who had gone that route, so I knew the language. One of those friends told me that as time went on, the whisper would get quieter. I did go to therapy, which aided in understanding the things that drove me to isolation, and the roots of my drinking.
I’m still cautious. I call ahead before a tour, and have the hotel minibar emptied before I get there. There’s always alcohol backstage at any rock show, but it’s not in my dressing room and not on my tour bus. I didn’t get sober for everyone else; I did it for myself. In that way, the very stubbornness that stopped me from looking at my issues for so long has helped me. I know some around me thought I would fail, but I am stubborn enough to want to prove them wrong. And I remain so.