by Ann Wilson
We toured several times with Lynyrd Skynyrd, who were sexist, too, but with mellower good-old-boy overtones. One night there was a knock on my hotel room door in the middle of the night. I mistakenly opened it without looking, and Artimus Pyle, Skynyrd’s drummer, did a somersault into my room. He dashed to the balcony—this was in a high-rise hotel on an upper floor—and squatted on the railing. I tried to coax him back, saying things like, “There’s some real sweet music here in the bedroom. Come check it out.” And he’d respond, “I’m fine here.”
This act went on for far too long. I tried to distract Artimus with fabulous things I claimed were inside the hotel room. “Artimus, you wouldn’t believe what’s on television here! Dancing chickens!” Finally, he came back in, and I managed to push him into the hallway and lock the door. He kept knocking on it all night, but I knew not to open it. I looked through the peek hole once, and he was still right up against the door.
Another night, Nancy and I were in a room together, and I again made the mistake of opening the door without looking. Again it was Artimus, but this time he had a young boy he pushed toward us. “I’ve got to go see this guy about something,” Artimus said. “Ya’ll are women. Can you watch my son for a short while, ma’am?” Apparently, since we were the only females on the tour, he figured we were perfectly suited to be babysitters. He ran away before we could speak, so we took the boy in and ordered food for him. Artimus said he’d be back “real soon,” but hours went by, and we eventually put the poor kid to bed. Finally, Artimus returned the next morning with a hangdog look on his face. “Real sorry, missus,” he said. When his son left, we couldn’t tell if the boy was disappointed that Artimus had returned late or that he’d come back at all.
That incident was only a few months before Skynyrd’s tragic plane crash, which killed Ronnie Van Zandt and five others. Artimus Pyle survived, but barely. The legend was that Artimus ran to a nearby farmhouse for help, but when the farmer saw the blood all over him, he took a shot at him. Artimus left the band after the crash, but he had other legal problems later. In the coverage of his other issues, the press dug up much of Pyle’s past, but our little tiny tangents, as babysitter and counselor squad, were overlooked.
We had a more pleasant experience when we opened some European dates for Queen that year. They were the ultimate English gentlemen and quite a contrast to the Southern yahoos. After one show in Edinburgh, they invited us for dinner at a fancy restaurant that was off an alley near Edinburgh Castle. It had no sign out front, you just had to know what ancient wooden door to knock on. It felt like it had been there for five thousand years. We sat down at a long table covered with fine champagnes, including a rare pink Dom Perignon, and many delicious dishes. Brian May was sweet on Nancy and spent the whole night chatting her up.
In the middle of the dinner, down the candlelit table in this ancient brick cavern, came the booming voice of Freddie Mercury. “Ann, oh Ah-NNN,” Freddie bellowed in his unmistakable voice. It sounded so odd to hear my name spoken by one of the true greats in rock. The rest of the table stopped talking, and there was silence. “Ann,” Freddie said. “Who is the real ‘Magic Man’? It’s me, isn’t it? You meant me, didn’t you, Ann?”
14
Ocean upon the Sky
A visit to San Francisco results in one of Heart’s best-loved
songs. Dotes’s health takes a turn for the worse.
The original line-up of Heart implodes amid flying guitars. . . .
NANCY WILSON
With the huge success of Little Queen the pressure was on to follow up with another album quickly. We decided we would take the train down to Berkeley, where Sue Ennis was getting her PhD, and convince Sue to become our formal songwriting partner. Grad school was so intense that one of Sue’s schoolmates had committed suicide, and we imagined we were saving her. In truth, we were also saving ourselves.
Sue was living in this little apartment with a roommate. We brought our guitars and went into Sue’s tiny bedroom, and began to play. I did a riff I’d been working on, and Ann and Sue both said to play it again. We worked on it for an entire day, and it became the intro to “Mistral Wind.” Heart fans often cite the song as their favorite, and it’s mine as well.
We didn’t finish the song before we had to leave for some tour dates. So we came back a few weeks later and rented the penthouse of the Mark Hopkins hotel. It had a commanding view of San Francisco, but we were there for the grand piano. For three days we tried to come up with something. We only ate room service, and we even insisted that the staff leave our food at the door and not disturb us.
The intro I’d written on that last trip was dissonant, and we still weren’t sure what the song was about. But as we sat there looking out over San Francisco, I said we were like a sailboat without wind. Sue then told us about the crazy mistral winds in southern France, and lyrics started to come together. It frequently worked that way. We would struggle for days trying to find an idea, or a groove, and then in moments a song would coalesce. Through the course of “Mistral Wind,” a storm comes over the audience, until they are washed to the shore. To me, the song always represented how once you’ve tasted excellence, you can’t ever go back. “I have always held the wheel,” part of the lyrics go. “But I let the wind steal my power, spin me ’round my course, my nights run by like hours.”
When we came to record “Mistral Wind” later in the studio, Roger Fisher and I combined our forces, but the electric guitar riff two minutes into the song was strictly Roger’s creation. Ann always called that one musical line the song’s “Devil’s interval.” After we recorded it, she said Roger and I combined “into one guitar machine, together,” and I think she was right. It was one of Roger’s greatest riffs, and it was part of the signature of the song.
“Mistral Wind” became a cornerstone of our live show. It was one of only two songs we’ve ever played that had the power to summon the weather (the other was the Who’s “Love, Reign o’er Me,” which once started a monsoon). Once we were playing “Mistral Wind” somewhere in the middle of America on a perfectly calm evening, when a wind gust hit the stage and lightning struck. We didn’t know whether to stop or forge ahead. We played on. Then a torrent of rain came down but stopped the moment the song ended. Everyone in the band, wet from the rain, stood there looking at one another with the hair on our arms standing up. I turned to Ann and said, “That couldn’t have just happened that way.”
“Straight On” never started hail, but it also came together from another one of our writing retreats with Sue. When we brought that tune into the studio, we told bass player Steve Fossen to imagine “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and to marry that beat with the Eagles’ sound. We were never a funk band, but we had spent so much time as a dance band in the early days, everyone could get with that groove when needed.
“Dog and Butterfly” was written one day when the three Connies were sitting in Ann’s house in Bellevue. Ann looked out the window and saw her dog Moffa chasing a butterfly. She started on the lyrics. The three of us later went to Lake Washington, sat on a picnic table, and wrote the rest. It has always been one of Ann’s favorite songs, one of the few she thought was perfect. We decided it would be the name of our next album. Some of the lyrics went “we’re balanced together, ocean upon the sky.” Moffa inspired the song, but those lyrics were also shaped by how Ann felt about Michael Fisher. For me, though, the “ocean upon the sky” line always felt like it was more about my relationship with Ann. We were balanced together, ocean upon the sky, always had been, and always would be.
Michael Fisher was jealous of the friendship of the three Connies, particularly when Sue and I took Ann away for extended periods. But when we came back to him with “Dog and Butterfly,” he softened. “Okay,” he said. “Keep doing that. Go write some more of those.”
Roger had less of a problem with us going away, which I should have seen as a sign, but it was one of many warnings I ignored. We were so busy with our career, the
re was little time to sit down and talk about our relationship. The band always seemed to have a bigger life than our individual selves.
Dog and Butterfly came out in October 1978 and sold a million copies the first month. It stayed on the album charts for the better part of a year. It would eventually go on to be a triple platinum album, our fourth multi-million seller in a row. The album also earned us some of our strongest notices. In a rave review in Rolling Stone, under the headline “Silk onto Steel,” Ariel Swartley called it our first “great album” and noted that “Mistral Wind” was a stunner. The review ended, “Heart knows what it wants, and exactly how to go after it.”
ANN WILSON
While we were on tour in 1979, we had a distressing phone call that shaded the success we were enjoying. Our dad was in the hospital, after a stroke. Mama hoped he would recover, but Dotes was never quite the same. Neither were we.
Even with his war wounds, Dotes had always been in generally good health, and he was so big and strong we thought he’d always be there. He’d had some dental work done that month and was taking antibiotics, when he got the flu. His regular doctor was out of town, and he was prescribed a medication that interacted with another he was on. He had a stroke and stopped breathing. Mama tried to give him CPR, but too much time passed before the medics arrived, and he’d lost oxygen to his brain. He spent several weeks in the hospital, but even with extensive physical therapy his teaching career was over, and so was his ability to walk. He’d spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, unable to do much of anything for himself.
He was able to communicate to us, though his speech was difficult for anyone outside the family to understand. Underneath, we knew he was there. Once he got out of the hospital, he listened to music on headphones and soon learned to request a beer. With so few joys left for him, none of us wanted to deny Dotes his cups.
We initially brought in caregivers and tried to pay for full-time assistance, but Mama would only accept an occasional helper. She had imagined they would travel in their retirement, but that was not to be. She insisted she be Dotes’s primary caregiver, and that became her life. Back in March of 1942, she had gotten his proposal letter on Marine Corps stationary—“This command loves your command”—and nothing, not even a stroke, was going to stop her from being faithful.
Dotes’s accident wasn’t something that was going to stop the Big Five from being a family, either. We took him to restaurants, and he attended our concerts whenever we played in Seattle. Few in the audience knew that the man in the wheelchair accessible area was our dad. For years we had a tradition of having dinners every Sunday whenever we weren’t on tour, and those didn’t stop just because of his stroke either. And every time a new album of ours arrived, we’d play it for him, our first fan. Dotes would listen, look at us, and give the big thumbs up. It was the only review that truly mattered.
Eventually, there were also troubles within the band. Nancy’s relationship with Roger fractured when his philandering ways became more obvious. By that point, drugs were commonplace in the music scene and common among the members of Heart. Partying might have started out fun, but many decisions were made that didn’t look so joyous in the next dawn.
It was embarrassing to everyone that Roger was so open about his dalliances, and it was particularly embarrassing to me, since he was with my sister. I was infuriated, not only for Nancy, but because it was his own incredible recklessness that made things get so out of control. If he was going to be an asshole, he should have been a private asshole, and not one in the middle of the whole band.
I loved Roger like family, but there was a basic misunderstanding we had with him. He didn’t understand that when we wrote those lyrics about fidelity, and love, we meant them. A lot of people in the rock world, and even in our band, never paid attention to the lyrics. But when “Dog and Butterfly” spoke to the ocean and the sky, there was only one ocean in that song, and only one sky.
NANCY
The year just seemed to get crazier and crazier, as we toured behind our hit album. When the tour took us to New York, a promoter suggested we might want to check out Studio 54. “Can we get in?” I asked. “You can get anywhere now,” he said. We soon discovered it was as decadent as we’d heard. There were secret rooms everywhere, with lusty stuff happening left and right. We were eventually led downstairs to private offices where piles of exotic drugs were spread out. It was the age when the music industry was shifting from the marijuana that dominated Seattle, into a world of cocaine and more. I turned down the offers. As we tried to leave the club, we literally ran into a completely wasted Liza Minnelli. When she saw our road manager Dick Adams trying to get us out, she threw her arms around him and said, “Hey, do you work for me?” He didn’t, but being the good egg he was, he also got her a car before she fell over.
Not long after that we went to Japan for the first time where screaming hordes of teenage girls chased me everywhere trying to grab my hair as if it was a talisman to them, shouting, “Non-Sea.” It was as close as I ever came to living out the scene in “A Hard Day’s Night” when the Beatles are chased by screaming throngs of girls. When we escaped, we snuck into a department store and bought kimonos.
My relationship with Roger was transitioning, but Japan was a brief reprieve for us. Everyone in Heart partied in those days, but Roger partied more than anyone, and he was really rolling high that year. There were many nights during our relationship when all I wanted was a little peace and quiet, but I couldn’t find it. He was hyper already and didn’t need to medicate, but in Japan he couldn’t find anything to medicate with, so his old self returned.
When Roger was sober, there we times when I felt a deep sweetness from him. He was always writing poems for me, though I never knew if they were strictly for me or for girls in general. His poems always had a feel as if they were written for “sexy girls that I like.” He was simply unable to be monogamous, and after a time that made me move away emotionally.
That fall I developed a crush on our drummer Michael Derosier and told Roger I couldn’t see him anymore. Roger had been unfaithful to me so many times that I felt justified in my feelings for Derosier, and vindicated. But it was the stupidest thing I have ever done—getting involved with someone else in our band, thinking Heart could still continue as a musical unit after that. It was ugly, and it got uglier still.
Roger did not take the news well. He was angry, hurt, and he told me that all the other women he’d been with hadn’t mattered to him. None of that swayed me. I was completely infatuated with Derosier, and I wasn’t with Roger anymore. We were a band of six including my sister, and in short order I’d been involved with two of the four men. When I told Kelly Curtis, he rolled his eyes. “This is so incestuous, it’s crazy,” Kelly said. “This has disaster written all over it.” Kelly was right. I was now bunking with Derosier on tour, but anytime the entire band was together, it was uncomfortable for everyone.
Some of the tension between Roger and the rest of Heart was musical. We were under such intense pressure to keep cranking out hit albums that when a studio session didn’t go well, fingers were quickly pointed, and usually at Roger. He was a brilliant live player, but when he had to play one part over and over, he often folded, particularly if he was partying. During one session for Dog and Butterfly, each band member had headphones on for playback on one song. Roger walked in late and examined how everyone had set their headphone mixes, and he became angry. “You all turned me off!” he said. It wasn’t meant to be hurtful, but his erratic playing was confusing all of us.
I tried not to mix our professional and personal relationships, but I’m sure I failed. I know I wasn’t a good friend to Roger in that period. I should have said, “take some time off, go work on yourself, and I’ll be there to help you when you want the help.” But I didn’t say anything at all.
It all came to a head at one show in Oregon. Roger was clearly on something that night, and his guitar kept going out of tune. He later told Behi
nd the Music it was heartbreaking for him to be with “this beautiful gifted person next to you, who is in love with the drummer.” I know it was hard, but I never understood how Roger, who was repeatedly unfaithful, could know anything about “heartbreak.”
The show ended with Roger smashing his guitar. Backstage he threw part of the guitar at me, and it whizzed by, just missing my head. Roger later claimed that if he had intended to hit me, he would have, and that he was in control. From what I witnessed, he seemed out of control, and, at that point, so was our band.
I had left college to move to Vancouver to join Heart when everyone lived in one tiny house together and ate meals of brown rice as a communal family. Now our band was partying at Studio 54, smashing guitars onstage, and screaming at each other. Heart was falling apart, and there were times it seemed it was all due to my relationships.
A few days later, there was a band meeting where we voted on whether to kick Roger out of Heart. He had helped form the band, so we knew it was a serious decision. I was also aware that if we kicked Roger out, we were seriously complicating Ann’s relationship with Michael Fisher. But Michael had been a leader who always taught us to put the whole of the band above any individual. In the early days, Michael Fisher might have insisted that he produce Heart, but he ceded that, knowing that Mike Flicker was a better choice. Michael might have insisted that he continue on as the band’s manager, but he knew that for the good of his relationship with Ann we needed an outsider. So when it came to the matter of whether we should vote out Roger, Michael Fisher’s stewardship was on all our minds.
The vote was unanimous, and Roger was out. Steve Fossen had been Roger’s best friend for fifteen years, but even Steve felt it was best for Roger, and for Heart. Roger ultimately made it easier for all of us when he started telling everyone he was the one who had broken up with Heart because he wanted to start another band. And maybe he did. But in October 1979, Heart became a five-piece for the first time since I had joined.
