by Ann Wilson
ANN WILSON
In the fall of 1982, we were on the road when our manager Ken Kinnear called to tell us there was a full-page story in the Seattle Times about how our tour was “bombing.” It ran under the headline “Heart Trouble” and said that Private Audition was a “flop.” It ended with the suggestion that our career was over, we’d soon be a “local band,” but that we should “be thankful [we] had five good years.” Ken read parts of the story to me on the phone, but not all of it. Ken was planning the highly unusual step of running a full-page newspaper ad to contest the many factual errors.
We had never received a bad review in Seattle before, and this article panned a show we’d done there a few months prior. Under a picture of me, the caption read: “The usually spirited Ann Wilson was so reserved that the show never caught fire.”
Patrick MacDonald wrote the piece. He often lazily cited the reporting of rock critics from other cities, instead of doing his own legwork. The piece on us had some of that, but also cited “unnamed” sources. I shrugged it off. I tried to tell myself it came with the territory.
But then I talked to my mother, and she was distraught. She told me the article blamed my weight for our career struggles. I was stunned.
I finally managed to read the whole article. One section read: “The audience . . . may have been shocked by Ann Wilson’s appearance. Often cited as one of rock’s most attractive sex symbols, she had gained considerable weight, emphasized by a tight–fitting black dress that covered her from neck to knee. Perhaps because of that, the usually high-spirited singer was reserved to the point of almost hiding behind other band members. Without her spark, the show never caught fire.”
There had been comments in the press on my physical appearance from the moment our career started. As a woman in the male-dominated world of rock ’n’ roll, I knew it came with job, but it wasn’t easy to live with. Whether it was criticism of how much I weighed, or lustful comments about how “sexy” I was, they were always disturbing because they weren’t about our music. When I was the thinnest in my life, during the first few years of Heart, there were times I was still called “chubby” in the press. You couldn’t be too thin, too young, or too good-looking if you were a woman in music. The standards were entirely different for any man in rock ’n’ roll. John Bonham could go onstage with a three-month beard, unshowered for weeks, fucked up, shirtless, and have the confidence that the only thing that would be written about him was how he played the drums.
As a woman, I lived in a different world. It was a world where I was judged constantly, on and offstage. Patrick MacDonald was right. I had gained weight, although not much at that point, but the show he reviewed was often cited by fans as our most energetic that year. He had the right to think our show sucked, but even if it did, was it fair for him to blame it on my “tight-fitting black dress”?
The article stung because it had upset my mother. But there was another reason it burned: Although I didn’t know many of the rock critics who threw barbs at us, I knew Patrick MacDonald. He was far more overweight than I was or would ever be. Here was an overweight man who felt it his job to suggest that because I’d gained weight—at that point, only a few pounds—I wasn’t good at my job. Furthermore, MacDonald had written a piece just a year before in which he described me as “slim,” though even that story mentioned that I had a “tendency to gain weight.” It was true; I did have struggles with my weight, but Patrick MacDonald had more struggles than I ever would. The hypocrisy was fucking heartless.
I wish I could say this was the last time my mother ever had to feel that kind of pain. I wish I could say that article, or others like it, successfully shamed me into losing weight and or getting the figure that male critics wanted me to have, and, that many times I wanted to have myself. But my issues with weight had been very complicated my whole life.
They would remain so.
After my relationship with Michael Fisher ended, it was some time before I began dating again. I told Circus that year, “The rock ’n’ roll life isn’t designed to keep couples together.” Fans might have thought that I’d joined a convent, but I was far from chaste. I did learn to keep my relationships private because as a high-profile woman in the music industry, I was under a microscope. I learned that lesson the hard way.
I had watched the guys in the band have many casual relationships on the road, so I decided to try it as well. Though I missed Michael tremendously, there was a freedom in being single, and I decided to take advantage of it. I told one magazine that year “I went from my father’s table to my boyfriend’s table without knowing what it was like to be alone. So in one sense, it’s fun to be single for a while.” I decided to explore what that meant. After one concert, the whole band went out to a club to unwind. A good-looking young guy began talking to me. We eventually ended up in my hotel suite for a wild night of passion. It felt great to be alive again in that way.
The next morning, I was going in and out of sleep when I felt a stirring on the other side of the bed. Then I heard my bedmate on the phone.
“Hey, you are not going to believe who I am laying here next to,” he whispered into the receiver. “Yep, the hottest woman in rock ’n’ roll, Ann Wilson of Heart, is in bed with me right now.” He was trying to speak quietly so as not to wake me, but the person he was talking to on the phone was extremely loud, and I recognized this voice: My new paramour was on the phone with the morning shift DJ at the biggest radio station in town. It was a painful way to find out that the groupie-star dynamic was not gender neutral. If a woman had called up the station to announce she’d slept with Steven Tyler, the jocks would have said, “you and twenty other women in every city, big deal.” But for a male fan to bed Ann Wilson was an accomplishment, and worthy of bragging about on the radio, apparently. Humiliated, I threw his clothes at him and kicked my groupie out of my room.
I had a few other brief road romances, some with members of the crew because they were discrete, though they never lasted long. But my first real relationship after Michael came with another singer. There was no power imbalance in this, except for the fact that the man, Ian Hunter, was our opening act.
I had long been a fan of Mott the Hoople, and watching Ian the first night of our tour I could see he was an incredible musician. After the show, we looked at each other, and an intense sexual thing grabbed us both. I never even asked if he was married, and he never mentioned anyone else, but soon Ian was in my suite every night. Kelly Curtis found out when he had to knock on my door with an emergency and found us in the throes. The next day Kelly said he wasn’t sure whether he was more surprised by our romance or the fact that he’d finally gotten to see Ian without his trademark sunglasses. The glasses were Ian’s barrier to the world, and when he took them off, I knew I was seeing the real him.
Kelly’s emergency was one of many we had that tour, which apart from my romance with Ian, was perhaps the craziest, wildest jaunt we ever had. I was single, and drinking a lot, and Kelly was often my co-conspirator. Fire extinguishers would be set off in hallways, televisions would be tossed off balconies, and much alcohol was consumed in hotel lobbies. That night when Kelly interrupted me the emergency was real: Kelly was in the process of being arrested after he had driven the motel’s riding lawn mower into the pool and covered it with all the recliners in the patio. I had to pay for Kelly’s bail. It was one of the many times we ended up with an IOU from Kelly.
It was a few days later, after everyone sobered up, that Kelly told me Ian Hunter was married. That was against everything I believed, but the power of my own unguarded sexuality had me by surprise. It was my first visitation into sexuality without someone leading the way, and it consumed me. I realized that when I had sung previously about “going crazy on you,” I hadn’t understood the half of it.
When the tour was over, we parted, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Ian, and I missed him. I tried reaching him at other venues he was playing at, but failed. Finally, I tracked down his ho
me phone number. I was now the “other woman,” a place I never thought I’d be, particularly considering the pain that infidelity had caused Nancy and me, but I decided I was going to call Ian at home and tell him how I felt. If his wife answered the phone, I was going to tell her we were going off together.
I looked at the phone for a long time. I never dialed. Ian’s number was pinned to my wall for years, before I finally threw it away.
NANCY
In the wake of Private Audition’s sales, our record label put pressure on us to “rock” on our next album. In 1983, we recorded Passionworks in Los Angeles with producer Keith Olsen. The sessions were awash with cocaine, used by all of us, but especially by Olsen. He was hitting his bottom, and he immediately went into treatment when the album was done.
Everything we did in those years had a white sheen of powder over it. There were only a few people on our crew, or band, who resisted. Cocaine was sprinkled over the albums, the videos, and our lives. Cocaine stripped all the humor out of our music. The videos we made were completely without intentional comedy, but were so serious they had an almost comedic feel.
The label wanted us to bring in outside writers to produce hits, and we acquiesced. We did a cover of the Jonathan Cain song “Allies,” and it was released as the first single from the album. It only went to Number 83.
I began to wonder if Patrick MacDonald’s “Heart Trouble” article hadn’t gotten it right and we had truly outlived our expiration date. Only a handful of bands had ever been able to have careers that lasted for more than five years, and we were three years past that.
That tour still did well, however, even though it was accident-prone. Howard Leese sprained his ankle, Ann broke her arm, and even a guy in our opening band Kansas broke a bone. We nicknamed it the “Crash and Burn” tour because of those mishaps, but that could have described our career at that point, too.
Our second single, “How Can I Refuse,” only went to number forty-four on Billboard, but it became a staple of AOR radio and helped the album sell better then its predecessor. But even though Passionworks stayed in the charts for twenty-one weeks, our record label was disappointed.
After seven albums, and with over twelve million records sold, CBS Records dropped us. We were without a label for the first time since we were a struggling band on the Vancouver club scene.
Early that next year we were offered to appear in a coffee commercial for a fee of one million dollars. It was an incredible amount of money, but also an incredible sell-out. With multiple homes, a large crew, and a big payroll, we felt we needed it. We flew to New York and filmed the thirty-second “Coffee Achievers” commercial on a soundstage in Queens. It wasn’t even our music in the background; it was “Hold on Tight” by ELO. David Bowie, Kurt Vonnegut, and Cicely Tyson had also taken the big paycheck, and they appeared in the same commercial with us. It was really bad. It might have been the biggest mistake in our career, but thankfully it wasn’t on the air for long.
In early 1984, Ann and I went to see This Is Spinal Tap at a cinema. With the cocaine, the sleazy “Barracuda”-like promo guys, the multiple drummers, and the unethical record labels, it felt as if we were watching a documentary about our career. When I walked out of the theater, the first thing I said to Ann was “Ouch.”
I had no idea at the time the second act of our career was about to begin, and it would be an even wilder ride.
17
Leave It to Cleavage
A new manager, new record label, and new direction
lead to corsets, smoke machines, and gold records.
“True Blue Lou” keeps a love story alive. . . .
NANCY WILSON
By the middle of 1984, our “Crash and Burn” tour was over, and it felt like so was our career. We did what most entertainers do when things languish: We fired our manager. Ken Kinnear had been with us since 1975, and he’d taken us far, but we were without a label, and, in some ways, without direction. We hired HK Management out of Los Angeles and were set up with a five-foot-two Englishwoman named Trudy Green.
We thought that a woman manager might better relate to us. We were entirely wrong. A journalist once asked Trudy what a nice girl was doing in this business. Her response: “I’m not a nice girl. You can’t afford to be a nice girl in this job. You’ve got to be a shark.” That we understood and respected, but Trudy had more testosterone than most men we worked with. Her favorite expression was, “Sooo sex-say,” as if she were seducing us like a skin magazine photographer. Trudy was obsessed with breasts, and every video or photo shoot we did that year emphasized cleavage.
Our in-band nickname for the tour we launched that year was the “Leave It to Cleavage” tour. For the crew laminate pass that year, they used a photo of Ann and my cleavage side by side. Beautiful, voluptuous, natural breasts were a Wilson family endowment, but we had no idea the Pandora’s box we were opening by putting that on our laminate. It was a joke to us, but it seemed to make the almost all-male crew smirk constantly.
We weren’t naive, but we were lost and no longer trusting our gut. We wanted to please Trudy because we believed that she could right our ship. Any resolve we had left dissolved once we began shopping for a new label, and we struck out. We went to five different labels and were rejected by each one.
Capitol Records was interested, but only if we were willing to cover songs written by others, or if we would cowrite with hit factory songwriters. We agreed, reluctantly, and signed with Capitol. The joke Ann and I made was that we delivered “songs written to order as you require them.” Some of them, as Bernie Taupin once wrote, were songs written “with bitter fingers.”
Capitol brought in cowriters and appointed Ron Nevison as producer. He was brash, arrogant, and highly opinionated. He had had a lot of success making pop records, but he’d also been the engineer for Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. Capitol originally had only hired Ron to produce a few singles, but once we met with him, we decided he was the guy to do the whole album. We were ready to have a strong producer with a vision, even if it wasn’t always a vision we shared.
In one of our first sessions he told me, “The acoustic guitars are so old-fashioned and out-of-date. Can we lose those?” My acoustic was my muse, my wheels, me. Still, I said, “Sure.”
ANN WILSON
Before we began working on our first Capitol album, I was convinced to sing a duet with Mike Reno on “Almost Paradise” for the soundtrack to the movie Footloose. I didn’t want to do it, but I felt I had to. I flew to Chicago for the session, and in my hotel I cut my wrist on a broken mirror.
At the emergency room, I refused painkillers while they stitched me up. It was an era of hard partying, but I had an ironclad rule that before a session or concert I was always completely sober because I never wanted my voice to be compromised. I sang the session in pain. When the track was released, it went to number seven on the charts, my biggest success in years.
When it came time to do the album, there were intense debates between Trudy Green, Capitol’s A&R head Don Grierson, Ron Nevison, the rest of the band, Nancy, and me about what songs to include. Many demos were traded back and forth. Some songs we had to be convinced to try, while others were rejected outright because I couldn’t feel them.
“Never” was one of our best experiences because we cowrote it with Holly Knight. It was one of the few times, along with “All Eyes,” where our songwriting was just as important as the hired talent. We didn’t write “If Looks Could Kill.” It originally had been written for Tina Turner, but she had passed on the song. We grabbed it up, and it worked.
“What About Love” had a more difficult birth. Nancy disliked the demo so much that when it was first played, she got up and left the room. But Ron Nevison kept at us, telling us the demo was just “notes on paper to be worked with.” “You guys have the best fucking voices in music,” he said. “Don’t worry about what the demo sounds like, because you’re going to sing it your way.” We trusted Ron, and he was right.
“What About Love” was one of the first tracks we cut in the studio, and one of the first the brass at Capitol heard. Don Grierson told me that as he played it to a conference room of suits, many of whom had been reluctant to sign us in the first place, the song won them over. “You just positively killed that,” Don said. When I complained that I didn’t write it, he said, “No one in the audience will know that.” We trusted Don, and when we finally played the song in concert, he was right. “What About Love” became, and remained, the showstopper of our live set.
We had reluctantly agreed to try out material from other songwriters, but some of them were great songs. “These Dreams” was a gem that Ron Nevison brought to us. His manager had handed him a cassette that contained two songs by Bernie Taupin and Martin Page, “We Built This City,” and “These Dreams.” The first song went to Jefferson Starship, but Ron had grabbed “These Dreams” thinking it would work for Nancy. It was really a song Nancy could have written herself.
NANCY
Bernie Taupin told me later “These Dreams” had originally been presented to Stevie Nicks, but Stevie wasn’t considering new material then. Ron Nevison didn’t have to work hard to convince me to do it. I knew it was a great song, and being an Elton John fanatic, I loved anything Bernie did.
I did have to fight to do the song, though. A couple of band members complained that it didn’t sound like a Heart song, and I had to fight with Capitol because not everyone was behind the idea of me singing this ballad. The song had trippy words, but they seemed like my words.
We had decided to record the album in Sausalito, so we’d be away from the influences of Los Angeles. During the sessions, we received a letter from the family of a young fan named Sharon Hess, who was dying of leukemia. She had only a little time left, and one of her last wishes was to meet us. She arrived at the studio on the day I was recording the first vocal run through of “These Dreams.” Sharon was this feisty twenty-two-year-old who was courageously fighting this horrible disease. It was also very emotional having her in the studio and seeing such a young life facing death. I had a bad cold that day, and my voice was cracking when I had to hit the high notes of the chorus.
