by Ann Wilson
Similar crushes were happening all over the base, all over America, and all over the world. It was like a virus among teen girls. But there was already a chasm between us and the other girl Beatle fans. It revealed more about our individual characters—who we became, and what we became—than any facet of our childhood.
I discovered how we were different while playing with neighbor girls that spring. By April of 1964 the Beatles held the top five slots on the Billboard charts, so they were a common topic. I asked these other girls to join our pretend Beatles band. Ann took Paul, I was George, and we asked who they wanted to be.
Only they didn’t buy into our game. “I want to be John’s wife,” one girl said.
“I want to be Paul’s dreamy, gorgeous girlfriend,” announced the other. Ann and I were aghast. If they were going to be Beatle girlfriends, who was going to be the rest of the band?
It was a conflict that would often repeat. The girls we grew up with saw the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones as romantic conquests, their music simply a soundtrack to kissing, hand-holding, to girl-boy love stuff. It’s not that Ann and I didn’t imagine romance as part of our future, because we did, but music was more important. To us, the Beatles were deadly serious stuff, something we studied like scholars, looking for meaning and wisdom.
We didn’t want to be Beatle girlfriends. We wanted to be Beatles. All the other girls gushed about wanting to marry a Beatle, but we felt that lowered the Beatles to something crass and base. We didn’t immediately see ourselves as musicians—that would come soon enough—but it was the music, and not Paul’s dimples that had hit us.
It is important to note that during this time, although there were tremendous female singers like Ronnie Spector, or Aretha Franklin, there were no female Beatles. The Supremes were a powerful vocal group, but men played behind them at every tour stop, and on every record. The thought that women could play instruments, write their own songs, and sing, the way the Beatles did, would have been ludicrous to anyone, maybe even us back then. But the Beatles gave us a glimmer of a dream.
It was an impossible dream for two teenage girls during that time. But, for reasons I do not understand even today, it became a dream that drove my sister like a fire.
For Ann, it couldn’t have come at a more desperate time. Though she was one of the most gorgeous girls you’d ever want to see, she was called “tub o’ lard,” and “fatso” all the time. It cut into her, and me, too. I was her little shadow of a sister, but I was on her team.
I think the pain she felt at school made Ann move inward, and made our relationship closer than the normal bond between sisters. In our house, everything was safe, imagination was allowed, and everyone was accepted and loved. You could leave all that other crap at the doorstep, and you could pretend to be female Beatles, and no one would tell you that was absurd.
And now, with the Beatles inside our home, coming from the hi-fi, my sister and I were closer than ever.
ANN WILSON
I turned fourteen that June, and finally escaped the eighth grade. Dotes returned that summer, as well, and we all moved once again to the Northwest, back to Bellevue. We packed up our belongings, and said good-bye to our family in Southern California. It was time to dust off our shoes again—we didn’t know at the time that it would be the last time we enacted that ritual.
Before we left California, Maudie gave me a present. Our parents tried never to play favorites, but Maudie liked me the best because I reminded her of my dad. She had heard me talk about how I wanted to play guitar, so she handed me fifty dollars for a guitar. It was a tremendous amount of money in that day. Maudie died the next year, but I never forgot her kindness.
Not long after we arrived in Bellevue, I bought a Kent brand acoustic guitar. Armed with my Beatles albums, and a Mel Bay chord booklet, I learned to play all their hits. My parents bought Nancy her own guitar not long after, a cheaper three-quarter sized Lyle because she was small. But she complained that hers was too hard to tune, so my guitar became hers as well.
We both played incessantly, usually Beatles songs, but also folk songs, and other popular hits I loved by Aretha Franklin, or Fontella Bass. We started off playing in our rooms, but soon were all over the house. Lynn had moved out that summer to start college, and so Nancy and I each had our own rooms for the first time in our lives. But the change was only technical because we were always both in my room, usually playing guitar, or singing.
Our parents often had friends over for dinner, and on these occasions we would creep down to the den and put on a little show. We were always well received, but then our mother was also providing dinner. Soon those little den concerts with Nancy and me playing guitar became as common in our house as my mother’s meatloaf.
Almost as important as learning the guitar was the premiere of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night at the John Danz Theatre that summer. Our parents dropped us off, and Nancy and I waited in a long line to get in. Once it was over, we needed to see it again immediately, but we had no more money. So, we lay down on the theater floor when the auditorium emptied between showings. As soon as the lights went out again, we popped back up. We spent all day in that theater.
A Hard Day’s Night cemented our idea that being a Beatle girlfriend wasn’t what we wanted. The movie showed mobs of silly girls chasing the Beatles, and throwing themselves at them. It was very important to us that we didn’t act like that. That would have made us like everyone else, and we thought our fandom went much deeper than any other Beatle fan. And once the Beatles inhabited us, the imprint was so powerful that nothing else could get in: not boys, not clothes, none of the typical things young girls are obsessed with.
To be accepted among other teenage girls, you had to fit into a very defined mold. I couldn’t fit into anything so refined, nor could Nancy. We could act, we could pretend, but we never really fit in.
I started ninth grade that fall and found Sammamish High School more difficult than junior high. Social cliques had begun in earnest, and I didn’t mesh with the jocks, the nerds, the socialites, or the greasers. You were required to take sides, form little groups, and pick between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I liked both, though the Beatles would win any contest, of course.
There had always been a duality in my life, but it increased that year. I had horrid experiences at school, and then I had the imaginative musical world at home with Nancy where we played guitar and sang all day. On the rare times we had friends over the other girls either joined in singing, or sat watching us. Two of Nancy’s friends were good singers, so we often added Sydney Osborne and Bonnie Allen to the mix. There were four of us, and four of the Beatles, so we called this combo our first “band,” although it was really a four-part harmony vocal group. Our den was our only venue, and our parents and their friends the only audience.
In high school, I was an outcast. I thought that further connected me to the Beatles because they seemed like outcasts, too. They had found a way to be cool, to have this friendship among themselves, to laugh at inside jokes, and to do it all while making amazing music. That’s what Nancy and I did with our own band. We decided to call ourselves the Viewpoints.
To me, a girl who struggled with her weight and still stuttered in class, it looked divine to be a Beatle. It looked like a sublime way of survival.
5
Blood Harmony
One warrior lays down arms; another weds.
August 25 becomes a day to live in infamy and navy blue
suits, and back in school a friend meets a friend. . . .
ANN WILSON
Our return to Bellevue also meant our dad was finally retiring from active duty in the Marine Corps. He could have continued on as a part-time recruiter, but with the Vietnam War ramping up, he announced he just couldn’t stomach the military life anymore. He told us Vietnam was a “dirty war,” and he was unhappy with how the top brass was running things. But I think the fight had gone out of Dotes a long time before.
For the f
irst time in a hundred years, no one in the Wilson family was an active-duty Marine. Our grandfather and uncle were dead, and our father had retired. We were all a bit relieved. I had lived my whole life with the fear that our dad would be killed in action. Dotes retired with a rank of major, proud of his service, proud of the men he served with, and of the valor of the Marines. But he was also terrified of what was happening to our country in Vietnam as divisiveness increased.
But even in retirement, the war did not end for Dotes. He still slept with a pistol near his bed. He would often wake up screaming from a horrific nightmare, and try to grab that pistol. Our mom would soothe him, comfort him, and try to bring him back to the reality of our little blue colonial house in suburban Bellevue. She repeatedly took the bullets out of the pistol when he wasn’t looking. He put them back in.
When we moved back to Bellevue, Dotes started taking classes at the University of Washington to get a teaching certificate. By the fall he was doing substitute teaching at a nearby junior high. He was the same Dotes, but as a teacher his whistle had a higher and more joyful pitch than it did when he was a Marine.
But even while teaching English, something he adored, there was a part of Dotes that had been left on the battlefield. When school was done for the day, he drank. Our family code for this was that “Dotes is in his cups again.” He wasn’t a mean drunk, and he still whistled, but you could tell he wasn’t all right. He’d sit and listen to music with these big conical headphones on, protecting himself from the outside world, and trying to find peace inside of himself. The whole family evolved and adapted around his isolation. He was there, but in a way, he wasn’t.
He talked about the wars so rarely that on the few occasions he did, it seemed truly remarkable. Once on Christmas Eve, he told Nancy about that horrible night in Korea he had survived underneath his dead comrade. He said he fell asleep on the battlefield and dreamed of a time he spanked Lynn. He told Nancy that when he awoke from that nightmare, he swore he would never hit any of us again. And he never did.
There was only one time in my entire life when Dotes talked to me about the war. He was deep in his cups that day, and he and I were alone in the house. He told a story of being stuck in a valley in Korea with enemy on both sides. He ordered an airstrike. After the bombs had struck, he marched his men through the valley and witnessed the carnage. Everywhere lay burned flesh that looked like overdone roast beef. More disturbing to him, as father of three daughters, was when he realized some of the dead were women who had been nurses. He went to Korea to fight for his country and for his fellow Marines, but he hadn’t imagined he would kill women in the process.
Dotes had been born into a Marine family. He didn’t choose to be a soldier—it was chosen for him, and, in a way, he was enslaved by it. It was fate that had made him a Marine, and fate that sent him to Guam and Korea. And it was fate that never let him leave.
NANCY WILSON
Our Dad’s retirement from active duty also set our mom free. It meant that we’d be a two-parent household permanently, and that we could make roots in a community. We had lived in twenty different cities, in thirty different houses, but once we moved to the Lake Hills neighborhood of Bellevue the second time, we stayed until we left home as adults. It was the first house that felt like ours. When our dad poured cement for a back patio, we put our handprints in the concrete, and we bought houseplants.
Our mom began to immerse herself into the world around her. She became a volunteer at our schools. She befriended her neighbors. And she decided we would find a church.
The Wilson side of the family was Catholic, though neither of our parents was very religious. Our mom had always been a seeker, though, and read many spiritual books. She felt a church should be less about scripture, and more about taking faith into action. She investigated several Bellevue churches and settled on First Congregational Church. Our mom’s choice would shape our lives in profound ways.
First Congregational was located in the center of Bellevue, and the bell tower was one of the tallest structures on the east side. It had 1,400 members the year we joined, including the mega-developer Kemper Freeman, the owner of Bellevue Square. A charismatic minister named Lincoln Reed led the church. He would preach from the Bible, but his sermons mostly focused on social justice, with little fire and brimstone. His favorite phrase was, “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice, and be glad in it.” He became a close friend to both our parents and was often a guest in our home.
We didn’t attend every single Sunday, but when we did, we always sat in the third row. Our dad often didn’t cooperate, though. When Reed might say, “Please turn to page sixty-four and recite the passage,” Dotes would say, “gobby, gobby, gobby,” over and over again. He’d also “gobby, gobby, gobby” his way through a hymn. It was just one of his many eccentricities.
The biggest influence the church had on our lives was social and political. The church was heavily involved in causes, protests, and petitions. It was a happening church, turning conservative Bellevue on its ear. I always thought that our church was revolutionizing religion, as the Beatles had music. We attended the church youth group every week, and that basement meeting room was the most exciting place in Bellevue during that decade. There were parents involved, but they were hip parents. We’d sit around and talk about pushing against the old ways, and making something relevant. Kids were allowed to smoke in youth group if they had their parents’ permission. It was a place where we were allowed to rebel against the very church we sat in. Both Ann and I came out of those meetings with a sense of great purpose. We had the bit in our mouths after that.
In the spring of 1966, the Congregational Church was also the setting for our sister Lynn’s wedding. Lynn was wilder than Ann or I would ever be, and I think our mom was just happy Lynn was doing one traditional thing. Lynn wasn’t even pregnant, though she would have her first son Tohn the following year.
Lynn’s wedding was a huge deal to our mom. Even though Lynn was the family rebel, our mom latched on to an idea about the perfection of this wedding. She planned every detail for months and sewed all the clothes. She made Lynn a white linen wedding dress with open work Venetian lace sleeves and a flounce hem. Ann was the maid of honor and wore a gold linen dress. I had just turned twelve, and I was a bridesmaid. My mom made me a dress of yellow linen in a flower pattern. And my mother made her own outfit as well: a blue velvet long-skirted theater suit with a matching blue satin jacket with wide-notched collar and cuffs. We all looked like something out of a fashion magazine. My mother’s own wedding had been very simple, so maybe planning Lynn’s wedding was Mama’s way of creating the wedding she had wanted.
It was a candlelight ceremony, officiated by Lincoln Reed. My only real job was to walk up the aisle and stand on the side of the altar waiting for my sisters. But it still felt like a lot of pressure on me at the time, as if my bridesmaid duty was the most important thing I’d ever done.
When Lynn walked up the aisle of the church to where Dotes stood waiting to give her away, I could not stop weeping. I just went to pieces. I don’t think I understood in my youth that getting married didn’t mean leaving the family for good. I still don’t know if my tears that day were joy for my older sister or sadness because I thought “The Big Five” was no more.
ANN
During the summer of 1966 it was announced on the radio that the Beatles would play at the Seattle Center Coliseum in August. I ordered four tickets in the mail for our band the Viewpoints: Nancy, Bonnie, Sydney, and me. It seemed to me that if we were a band, we should go together. Tickets were six dollars. They arrived a few weeks later.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper ran a contest for teenagers to write an essay on “Why I like the Beatles.” Thousands wrote in. My essay won. My picture appeared in the newspaper, alongside the essay, and I won a Revere “Magic Eye” movie camera. It was the first time my name or photo was in print. The essay read in part:
“They have led us
to a new way of looking, acting, thinking and moving; to a new and sensitive way of expressing ourselves in music; to freedom in conformity.”
It wasn’t the first thing I had ever written about the Beatles, but it was the first thing ever published. Starting the previous year, I had started writing long novels that were loosely based on the Beatles. One was titled “April Come She Will.” The lead character was a dashing young Brit named Dusty Kellar who looked like a mix between Keith Richards and Paul McCartney. The female character, based on Patti Boyd or Jane Asher, was called Megan Eastman (Linda McCartney’s maiden name). The male characters would pop into a teashop and say, “Hi Bird.” Another would say, “Right smashing, Dolly Birds.” I drew illustrations for the novels as well. All the girls were gorgeous and fashionable and thin. I showed the novels to Nancy, but no one else.
The day of the Beatles concert, our mom drove us to the show and dropped us off underneath the Seattle Space Needle. She also made us matching outfits so the Viewpoints would look proper that day. Our mom had scoured the paper to see what the Beatles had been wearing at each concert of their American tour. She had seen two different sets of outfits, so that’s what she made for us. One was a military-style tunic, and the other was a navy blue, double-breasted English waistcoat. We had no idea which one they would wear at the show we had tickets for, so we took our chances and went with the English waistcoats. But the Beatles had a third outfit our mom had missed—pink and gray striped suits—and that’s what they had on at our show. If anyone at the concert had asked me why we were dressed so strange, I would have announced that our purpose wasn’t to go dressed as the Beatles, but instead to look like a unified band.
