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

by Ann Wilson

  “Fanatic is fantastic,” Elton said—Elton John, Captain Fantastic himself.

  ANN WILSON

  At the same time we were working on Fanatic, we were also compiling our first boxed set, Strange Euphoria. It included three CDs, one DVD of a 1976 live performance from Pullman, Washington, and even a bonus CD of five Led Zeppelin covers offered through Amazon titled Heart: Zeppish. I was a bit wary of putting out the Zeppelin CD, since we didn’t want to get swallowed up as a band that covered Led Zeppelin all the time, but that bonus CD gave us a chance to release some of the material we’d recorded with John Paul Jones. That seemed like kismet.

  We’d been working on Strange Euphoria for over a decade, imagining it, drawing up song lists, and refining the design. When it was done, the fifty-one tracks offered our first full career retrospective. We had decided to include several previously unreleased songs that challenged some of the basic assumptions listeners had about Heart. Songs like “Strange Euphoria” and “Boppy’s Back” had humor and lightness to them, which was always a big part of us but rarely made it on record. Musicians constantly cut up behind the scenes, and we have lots of outtakes of Nancy and me cracking wise and being funny. It felt liberating to put some of those tracks on the set and to give a wider spectrum to our songwriting process.

  The set also included the very first record we ever made, Through Eyes and Glass, cut when we were teenagers backing a country musician. Copies of the few forty-five singles that were sold in the day have gone for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Hearing that song again made me think about how seriously we took our music. Even as kids, we were railing against people who were posers, just faking it. More than a little of the Heart catalog was shaped by our early experiences growing up in the First Congregational Church, where we learned about righteousness. That personal authenticity has always been ground zero for us.

  The title song “Strange Euphoria” was always one of my favorites. We wrote it with Sue in the seventies, when we were all feeling euphoria after some herbal help. But the title also summed up the feeling that music has given us from the start, a euphoria that can’t quite be explained—an absolute crazy high.

  There were many moments in 2011 that felt like we were cycling back full circle to our early roots, and deciding to write this book was part of that, of course. I had always thought one day we would tell our story, and in a 1979 interview with Picture magazine, I even predicted it. “I hope I never grow up,” I said, “but, if I do, I hope I have enough money to travel so I can try and get young again. I’ll probably write down what happened to me and publish it. I think people would find it interesting to know what went into Ann Wilson.”

  We mixed part of Fanatic in Studio X, the studio we once owned. Again, we were back where we began because we had recorded so many of our early hits—Little Queen, Dog and Butterfly, and Bebe Le Strange—in that building. The millions we invested in the studio remake had served it well, and to hear our new songs in that space was thrilling, and an emotional renewal. I could still remember the controversy, back when Mushroom had placed an armed guard outside of the studio as we finished and mixed Magazine in a marathon session, probably prepared to shoot me if I messed up a single note on purpose. Heart was a unified band then with a singular mission, and it felt like us against the world, which, of course, it was.

  Over the years, we lost touch with some of the early band members. There have been twenty-seven members of Heart over the years, besides Nancy and me, and not all of us were close, though many became extensions of our family. Howard Leese played with us for twenty-four years, and we always stayed in touch with him. Though Howard wasn’t in the very first Vancouver incarnation, he was running the tape machine at Mushroom that day when I cut our very first demo, and from the moment he joined the band the next year he was an absolutely essential part of Heart. When Heart went on hiatus in the nineties, Howard had to find other work. He was quickly snatched up by Paul Rogers of Bad Company, and has played with him ever since. He deserved to be picked up quickly because he is such a fantastic player.

  Ben Smith has had the second-longest tenure, playing drums with us for over twenty years and counting, and he’s the only non-Wilson to be both in Heart and the Lovemongers. Guitarist Craig Bartock has also been with Heart for ten years and counting, which rivals the tenures of Denny Carmassi and Mark Andes, from the eighties.

  When we played the Backstage with John Paul Jones in the nineties, Roger Fisher, Michael Derosier, and Steve Fossen all came to the show and visited with us. Since I had gone to see Led Zeppelin with those guys, it seemed appropriate,somehow. Fossen and I always got along well. I played with Steve for so many years, starting back with Hocus Pocus, and we had an intuition with each other, onstage and off, and a shared sense of humor.

  Our dealings with the men in Heart with whom we’d had relationships have always been more complicated and filled with a wide range of emotions. Nancy’s ex, Roger Fisher, went on to have seven children. When Roger lost two of his children, one as an infant and another as a young adult, it was a heartbreaking turn of events for us as well. When his daughter Alisha, who had been born when we all lived together in Vancouver, died a few years back, it was a deep grief we all felt. because she had been part of our extended family.

  For years after our break-up, I had almost no contact with Michael Fisher. Though we never married, we had a complicated split, with many painful emotional and financial details. I heard he had married a couple of times and had many children. He continued to work in the music industry, developing state of the art speakers, doing what he did so well, and providing PA systems to venues.

  One day in 1991, when we were working at Bad Animals, I was walking into the studio, carrying Marie in my arms—she was a baby then—and there was Michael walking out. I hadn’t seen him in over a decade.

  “Hi,” he said. “Who is this?”

  “This is my daughter, Marie,” I replied.

  Michael wanted to know how I’d gotten Marie, whether I birthed her or not. I told him I had adopted.

  “Wow,” he said, looking at Marie. “I had no idea. That’s so great. She’s beautiful.”

  We only spoke for a few minutes, but Michael told me he had several children—he would father eleven in total. I know both he and Roger are good parents.

  The last time I saw Michael was just a few months after that random studio run in. Once again, I was walking into a venue through one door, and he was walking out another, carrying part of a PA system. We just shot a look—in true Ann and Michael form—and it was a soul-melding look across a room. No words were spoken. No words needed to be spoken. The silence was molten.

  In the past few years, we have rekindled a friendship through email, like many old friends eventually do. Michael and I sometimes discuss parenting issues through e-mail. I feel that he is a wise and confident patriarch. After all the time that has gone by it feels like once again I am saying “hello” to a person I was once so close with. I was twenty-eight years old when we broke up, and he was only a couple of years older, so we were both kids. I hold Michael no ill will for the actions of his youth, or for his fiery passion. There was power in that passion, and it fueled many of my songs, it fueled Heart, and it fueled me for a time.

  This thing we all built together—all twenty-seven members of Heart—has had a life beyond anyone one of us. But as different players have moved through the band, the thing that has remained constant is Nancy and me. We have tried to remain true to the thing we created so many years ago. The words we come up with, the feelings we share under the name of Heart, are just as sincere as they were in the Dreamboat Annie days. To us, and we can only hope to our fans, they are just as meaningful.

  In May 2011, Nancy and I traveled to Vancouver with this book’s cowriter to go back and visit the places we’d lived and worked in our early days. We’d been in Vancouver for many shows in the subsequent decades, but we’d never returned to our old haunts, and I couldn’t remember the addres
ses. I emailed Michael Fisher, and with his encyclopedic memory, Michael provided the exact locations.

  Once we began driving into Vancouver, I hardly needed an address because I could smell my youth. In downtown, we passed the former clubs where we’d made our mark: the Cave, the site of Heart’s very first show, and Oil Can Harry’s, where I’d had the surreal experience of singing “Stairway to Heaven” while Robert Plant walked through the club. Vancouver was now a thoroughly modern city of skyscrapers, with none of the hippie vibe it had in 1971. I could still remember the excitement I felt moving there as a young woman, as if a whole new world was opening up. I still have “landed emigrant” status in Canada, a nation that became my second home for six years. I could legally move back today if I wished.

  Once we left downtown, and headed over the Lion’s Gate Bridge toward West Vancouver where many of our rental homes had been, time seemed to stand still. We passed a grocery store. “That’s where I shopped for the entire band, with five dollars, trying to buy enough food to keep us alive for a week,” I announced sentimentally. In the parking lot of that Safeway, I had backed into a pole, and damaged the bumper of Heart’s van. I had been afraid to go home and tell Michael Fisher, thinking he’d go crazy at the damage to our hard-earned new investment. But Michael had forgiven my fender bender. Perhaps he had a sixth sense that soon after our van would come to a far worse fate when it collided with the moose that nearly killed me.

  Within moments we were driving up the hill toward Inglewood Avenue, taking the same route I took as a young woman when I went to Vancouver to be with Michael. Had I really hitchhiked from the bus station, getting a ride from a stranger? Had I really walked the last few blocks up what now seemed like a steep hill, carrying my guitar, and a backpack full of my clothes? Had I really been that young, that innocent, that full of possibility, that possessed by longing?

  The big Tudor house, once full of naked hippies, was gone, and two modern homes had replaced it. We peeked around one, and I saw the spot overlooking Lassen Creek where Michael’s round house cottage had stood. The cottage had been demolished, but a gazebo had been built in its exact location.

  Lassen Creek was idyllic the day we visited. Forty years had passed since I had first arrived, but other than the new homes, the setting was the same. One of the only changes was that Sarah McLachlan now lived across the road, in a regal gated mansion. That the home of the woman who started Lilith Fair is fifty yards from where I wrote all our early songs seemed like sweet justice.

  And though the visit brought back a flood of memories of my early romantic life, of the start of Heart, of our five-year plan, my strongest memory was of the music. It had been sitting outside the cottage by the creek, where I had written those Dreamboat Annie songs that in the decades since had taken on a life of their own. I had stood in these woods, with a soul full of love, and played my flute, accompanied by the sound of the gurgling brook. In that earlier version of Ann, those songs had existed only as a glimmer of a dream in a young girl’s imagination. I had sung their words countless times onstage, but for a moment that day in Vancouver, they came to my lips as spoken words, without melody, a credo of sorts: “Cold, late night so long ago, when I was not so strong, you know.”

  I hadn’t written the songs back then, even though many came straight from my life, from my diaries, from my phone calls with my mother, from my nights of passion with the first man I loved. I hadn’t written the songs back then because I never do.

  The songs had written me.

  The year we started working on Fanatic, I turned sixty-one. My daughter, Marie, had a baby the year before, and I became a grandmother. My passion for music remained, and remains, as alive, and as young, as my granddaughter, Niobe. Almost as soon as Fanatic was done, the songs to follow started to write themselves in my head, and I don’t think that will ever stop.

  When Fanatic was completely done, and I began typing up the official song lyrics to submit to our music publisher, I discovered themes that seemed to reoccur in all our work. The strongest thread was the wild romantic heart in flames, something that has been with me from the start, but if the songs weren’t about adult love, they were about the love between friends, or family.

  Some of those familial themes were probably were ingrained in me even before I ever wrote a single song, and they showed up again on Fanatic. In “Dear Old America,” struggle of growing up in a military family was apparent. The lyrics went, “When I get back, I’m gonna own this town / Shine that medal and wear that crown / Fall on my knees and kiss the ground / Dear Old America.” Even years after Dotes and Mama had passed, the legacy of our youth and of the Marine Corps echoed in everything we did, along with our dad’s post-traumatic stress disorder. Just because the person is gone, does not mean the bell stops ringing. In that way, songwriting is a bit like therapy too, just as it is part of the ritualized passing down of the family story.

  When I was writing some of the songs for Fanatic, I felt as if I was shaken to my core, wide open to the muse. It was as if I’d been struck by lightning, just like when I was a young girl. That certainly was true of “Rock Deep (Vancouver),” a song we wrote after our visit back to Inglewood Avenue. “Seattle in the rearview mirror,” it began, and then chronicled our early story. “I still can see you sleeping,” the third verse went, “in a bed of moonlight seeping / and I remember crying / ‘cause I knew the sun was rising.”

  The final verse grabbed an image similar to the photograph on the cover of Dreamboat Annie: “A young girl with a burning heart / stares down at the big ships anchored far below / and she knows where she is going / ’cause her very soul was glowing / and in this gentle harbor / she don’t need to go no farther / rock deep.”

  To me, this last album feels more Wilson/Wilson than ever. The bond between Nancy and me grows deeper each year. We are more experienced women, and grown-up women, and mothers, and I am a grandmother. But at our core, we are as we have always been: Fanatics about love, art, truth, and the belief that we can do anything together we set our minds to. We write our own story our own way.

  I remain a fanatic about music, about the power of love to heal, about Heart. When I’m onstage and I look over at my sister, I see not only a mature woman with a guitar, I see the child within Nancy, and the child within me. I see both of us on the floor with our heads propped up on our hands, in front of a tiny black-and-white television, watching the Beatles, and imagining a future that at the time was beyond imagination for girls of our generation.

  But ultimately, I am more a fanatic of Nancy Wilson than anything else. I always have been, and always will be. I need only look over at my sister—onstage, or off—and know she is a fanatic of me.

  Photo Insert

  ANN: To our mother, this letter from our dad asking for her hand in “eventual marriage” was the most romantic thing she owned.

  (1942, courtesy of the Wilson family archives)

  NANCY: At the Hannah Dustin statue in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Hannah was the original axe woman of the family.

  (2008, courtesy of Julie Bergman)

  ANN: In the Hannah Dustin family tradition.

  (1980s © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS)

  ANN: Nancy and me in our parents’ car in Taiwan. Our dad was stationed all over the world, and we followed.

  (1956, courtesy of the Wilson family archives)

  ANN: On a camping trip with “the Big Five” plus one more. Mama, Nancy, me, Lynn, Grandma Dustin, and Dotes.

  (1956, courtesy of the Wilson family archives)

  NANCY: This is Ann and me, performing for our friends.

  (1966, courtesy of the Wilson family archives)

  NANCY: Our mom and dad on the way to a Marine officers’ ball. He was dashing; she was gorgeous.

  (1960, courtesy of the Wilson family archives)

  NANCY: Another one of “the Big Five”: Ann, Dotes, Mama, Lynn, and me — this time with our dog Trumpie. Taken when we were living in Bellevue, Washington.

 
(1970, courtesy of Roger Keagle)

  ANN: Doing some serious hanging out in a hotel room with Nancy in the early seventies.

  (Courtesy of the Wilson family archives)

  NANCY: One of our first Heart promo photos, from the early seventies.

  ANN: The promo photo for one of my first bands, Hocus Pocus. Back row: Nick Etchoe and Chris Blaine. Behind me, Gary Humphries and Roger Fisher. Next to me is Steve Fossen. I would play with Fisher and Fossen for the next decade.

  (1972, courtesy of Roger Keagle)

  ANN: The first photo of Heart, in Vancouver, B.C. Left to right: John Hannah, Roger Fisher, Brian Johnstone, me, and Steve Fossen in the early seventies.

  ANN: Michael Fisher and me on a train in Japan.

  (1976, courtesy of Kelly Curtis)

  ANN: Backstage with Queen in 1978.

  (Courtesy of Kelly Curtis)

  ANN: First class! Bebe Le Strange, 1980.

  (© 2012 Neal Preston)

  NANCY: On the wing of our first plane. Roger, Steve Fossen, Howard Leese, Michael Derosier, Ann, and me.

  (1979, courtesy of Kelly Curtis)

  NANCY: March 25, 1980. I am on the way to Elton John’s thirty-third birthday party at Le Dome. A billboard with our album cover on it looked down over the restaurant.