by Ann Wilson
Ann seemed particularly out of sorts that night. “This is the ultimate irony,” she whispered to me. “It feels like they are sending us up, and I’m not ready to be sent up yet.” It didn’t seem mean-spirited to me, and some of it was hysterically cool. None of the bands could do the songs well, but they all had the right energy. We had to stay until the end, because if we walked out on our own tribute, it would have been scandalous. As soon as the show was over, we slinked out, slightly embarrassed by the tribute.
In March 1990, Kelly Curtis called and left a message on my answering machine that sounded more distraught than I had heard him in the twenty-five years we’d been friends. Andy Wood had died.
Cameron, Ann, and I immediately drove to Kelly’s house. When we arrived, it was as if everyone in Seattle music had gathered there. It was a tragic night, but it was also important. It was one of the first times that a village had formed around the scene, and those bonds affected things in Seattle for decades to come.
All the guys in Mother Love Bone, who would later become Pearl Jam, were there, and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell was comforting them. Cornell told Jeff Ament, “We’re gonna ride bikes, and fucking smoke cigarettes.” Andy’s girlfriend was crying and screaming, claiming his spirit was still in the house. Everyone was just leveled, but they were distraught together. I had brought our dogs, and they shifted the mood. Our three springer spaniels softened everyone’s anger with their licks, love, and sweet faces amid the grief.
Over the next few nights many of the same people gathered at Ann’s house. Her home became a salon of sorts, where up-and-coming bands knew they were welcome anytime of the day or night. There were always guitars around, and you’d see Chris Cornell singing with Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell, or other combinations that rarely happened onstage. Her house began to feel like our parents’ house had when it became a crash pad for our church youth group, but Ann was not the den mother.
Though Andy Wood died when he relapsed, his death didn’t scare people off their own drug use, unfortunately. Stardom had yet to happen to the class of grunge. Nothing had been gained, so many didn’t understand what could be lost.
ANN WILSON
In June 1990 we started yet another tour, our longest ever. We celebrated my fortieth birthday a few weeks early so we could have a party before we got on the road. It was a subdued affair, due to the fact that we weren’t excited about the coming months away from home.
My actual birthday came on the day of a sold-out show in Philadelphia at the Spectrum. That was far more memorable, but not in a positive way. We arrived the day before and both Nancy and I had picked up bronchitis. The hotel doctor prescribed cough suppressant and rest. We were used to propping ourselves up to do the shows. We went to bed and assumed we’d feel better by the next day.
The next day came. Nancy attempted to get out of bed and fainted. I could barely stand and couldn’t imagine going onstage. The combination of illness and exhaustion was too much. We had to cancel the show. Our crew and band were at the venue, and in the pre–cell phone era, Lynn had to call the backstage production office. Whoever answered the phone got a message that the Wilson sisters were ill, and the giant show had to be cancelled.
We made the performance up a few weeks later, but we knew it had been a huge inconvenience for fans who had traveled to the city just to see us. It was one of the only times we ever cancelled a show, but the rest of the band and crew never let us forget it.
To this day, all I have to do is look at Nancy and say “The Spectrum,” and she knows what I mean. It symbolizes not only the cancelled show, but also the end of an era for us, an era of excess. We had hit the wall.
The Brigade tour ended in the fall of 1990, and we took a few months off. But the biggest news of next year came early, in February, with the birth of my first child.
The night she was born, I was in bed with Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains. It was a strictly platonic sleepover—Jerry told me he liked “skinny girls”—and one that was due to inebriation rather than any romantic escapade. There had been a party at my house, and Jerry stayed over because he drank too much, and didn’t want to drive. Jerry wore one of my sleep shirts to bed. He was sleek and lanky, and his long blond hair covered my shirt.
The evening’s party had been typical of many at my home. In attendance were a dozen or so soon-to-be-famous musicians, the cream of the crop of the Seattle grunge scene. Alcohol was consumed, fine food was eaten, and a bit of cocaine was inhaled. Guitars were broken out, songs were sung, war stories were told. The party only stands out for two reasons: A few hours later, my phone rang and announced the arrival of my daughter; and it was the last night I ever did any drug.
The conversation during the party never touched on sobriety. In the heady early grunge years, sobriety was such a foreign concept it was rarely discussed, even as the damage increased around us. But I was at the end of my dance with drugs.
That night a few of the younger guys asked me to tell road stories about the previous decade, what it was like to headline stadium shows, what it felt like to have a record sell fifteen million copies. “What was happening to you guys while that was going on around you?” Mike Starr, of Alice in Chains, asked.
“Too much hairspray and cocaine,” I said. Everyone laughed.
Musicians in Seattle never spoke with the kiss-ass attitude you’d find at an L.A. party. Seattle musicians didn’t lie about liking something they hated simply to get more work, or to network. People were real with you, which was one reason we felt centered at home. So when someone announced, “I always loved ‘Barracuda,’ but I didn’t like your eighties stuff,” I wasn’t surprised. It might have been something Nancy and I could have said. But it was also evidence of a generational divide: The music of the seventies had a powerful nostalgia for those who created grunge, but they held no such affection toward anything from the eighties.
Yet one of the most telling questions that night came from Jerry Cantrell. “How the hell did it go so far?” he asked. “And why did you do those videos?” I could have answered that with the same quip about too much hairspray and cocaine. Instead, I changed the subject.
Jerry’s question was ironic, though, considering where his career was headed. I didn’t answer it because these young men knew nothing yet about the Devil’s bargains that would be handed to them later in their careers. It was similar to the reason my father only talked about his war years with veterans. If you hadn’t smelled the napalm, or the video set smoke machines, you wouldn’t understand.
Early that next morning, with Jerry Cantrell lightly snoring beside me, the phone rang. It was the hospital telling me that the birth mother carrying the child I was to adopt had gone into labor. It was a week before her due date, and I wasn’t prepared, otherwise I wouldn’t have had a party the previous night.
I got out of bed, dressed, called a cab, and left Jerry sleeping soundly in my bed. The cab was my first choice toward a new responsibility. I told myself I was already thinking like a parent.
My house is very difficult to find, and cabs have always had a hard time locating it. I’d given explicit directions on the phone, but I still waited forty minutes for the taxi to arrive. When the driver finally arrived, I insisted he needed to hurry because a baby was being born. I directed him to Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland, fifteen miles away. I suspect English was not my driver’s first language. Once he began racing in speeds in excess of a seventy miles per hour, I quickly realized that dressed in my big coat, he thought I was the one having the baby.
He made the trip in record time, but as we neared the hospital, he was pulled over by the police for speeding. We both tried to explain to the officer the circumstances. The taxi driver kept pointing at my obviously not pregnant torso and screaming in broken English that I was going to have a baby any second, while I kept trying to explain that my adoptive child was due to arrive in the hospital up the street.
The speeding ticket delayed us by ten minutes. The cab driver dropped me of
f in front of the hospital, and I ran inside. I breathlessly arrived at the maternity ward, only to discover that I had missed the birth of my daughter by exactly ten minutes.
I had first seriously longed for motherhood during the eighties. The urge initially felt odd, since during the seventies, I had been diligent never to become pregnant. I was never reckless in that department.
The year we started headlining stadium shows, a powerful feeling of wanting a child came over me. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But it took hold of me, and it didn’t let go.
My first thought was that I wanted to carry a child. I became less careful in my personal life. And, eventually, I tried to get pregnant, in the natural way, with a sweet consenting man. I never once considered that I would raise a child as part of a partnership. I just thought that I would take it on myself, and I’d figure out how to hire help for things I couldn’t do.
When I began to seriously try, and nothing seemed to take, I went to the doctor and had a retinue of tests. When I went back for the results, the doctor sat me down.
“You’ve been trying to get pregnant,” he said, looking at reports on his desk. “You’ve just turned forty. My advice is don’t try. Even if you succeed, you may have so many complications that the results might not be good.” He had a way of explaining it that sounded like lyrics from a song: “Your body is not a landscape that can sustain a pregnancy. Don’t go there.”
Infertility was common in our family. Our mother had three children, but not many Wilsons or Dustins were as lucky. My “landscape” had spoken. “Don’t go there,” it said.
I contacted an attorney who specialized in adoptions, and I applied to a dozen adoption agencies. Every one turned me down. Their rejections were rarely explicit, but it was clear to me that being a single woman, particularly a single woman in rock ’n’ roll, was not what they were looking for in an adoptive parent.
A few times the agencies did offer up their reasoning. “We really are looking for a two-parent situation,” one woman told me. The attorney who was helping me translated that to mean they were looking for “only yuppies, and married yuppies, at that.” They wanted something that was an old-school, solid thing. That wasn’t me.
After so many disappointments, my attorney asked if I wanted to keep trying. I replied, “Well, sure.” Then, just a few days later, I got a phone called from the sixteen-year-old friend of a friend. She was young, confused, and pregnant. She had heard I was looking to adopt, and the idea that her child might stay within the extended family appealed to her.
“I need to think about it,” I told her. Then, with my next breath I said, “Yes.”
It was what they call an “open adoption.” I drove her to all her doctor’s appointments, and we drew up papers in advance that spelled out the terms. But with an open adoption, the papers are never final until forty-eight hours after the birth. The law in Washington gave the mother a chance to reconsider once the child was born, and that was an uncertainty I had to live with.
When I rushed into the hospital that day, after my cab driver’s speeding ticket, I was an emotional mess for many reasons, but that uncertainty was a part of it. It was possible the birth mother would change her mind, and I would leave in a cab by myself. But she didn’t, and the nurses took me into the nursery, and I looked at this beautiful baby girl. “Go ahead and hold her,” a nurse said. “She’s yours.”
She handed the baby to me. I rocked her back and forth for what seemed like hours. I didn’t want to let her go.
I named her Marie Lamoureaux Wilson. She received Nancy’s middle name, and there was never any doubt she was a Wilson. Mama, Dotes, Lynn, and Nancy all came to the hospital, and it was a joyous time. I stayed at the hospital those first two days, during the waiting period. And then Marie really was mine.
When it came time to go home, I wasn’t sure what to do. I couldn’t face being a single mom with a baby by myself yet. So Lynn came and got me, and I spent the first week with her and her second husband Ted. They taught me how to feed, change, and care for Marie. “You are never going to sleep again,” Lynn joked. I thought I had proved my ability to stay up all night partying with Stevie Nicks, and the original Heart line-up, but Marie could outlast the bunch. That sweet baby had stamina.
For many new parents, a child marks the end of their extended adolescence, and the start of adulthood. I turned forty-one the year Marie was born, and she made me care about something other than myself. Alcohol was still a part of my life, but I never again did another line of cocaine. I also started to exercise more. I would swim, do Pilates, and I began to work out with a trainer. I wanted to live healthy for my daughter.
A week after Marie was born Lynn drove us to my house very slowly. We saw no police officers, or speeding taxis. When I walked in, Jerry Cantrell was gone, but I had a new baby in bed next to me. My life had renewed itself.
The birth of my daughter not only changed my life, it changed my approach to songwriting. The first example of that was “Two Black Lambs,” which I wrote at the beach not long after Marie was born. Most of my previous songs had been about romantic love, or friendship. Marie brought a whole new dimension to the way lyrics moved through me, and she made mother-child love part of what drove me artistically. I hadn’t even imagined that would ever be in me, but it just surfaced, and it didn’t let go.
I wrote the lyrics to “Two Black Lambs” in one sitting. Every line of the song came from my life: “I lived on an island of self-control / I was free, and so lonely / I saw you wandering from the fold / out where the weather was stormy / we walked off together like two black lambs.” The chorus was “I breathe you in / I breathe you out,” which was about how I couldn’t get enough of the smell of a new baby. “You needed saving, too,” was one line that was literal, but the song was also about how Marie saved me.
It was only years later that it came to me that an early chapter of my childhood linked to the song. My mother wrote a poem about me when I was going through a particularly difficult time that she titled “My Little Black Sheep.” I hadn’t even been conscious of that when I wrote the lyrics of “Two Black Lambs.” The mother-daughter link, and the imagery of black sheep, was so deeply rooted in our family that I could not escape it, nor could Mama, nor could Marie.
NANCY
A few weeks before Marie’s birth, we had been approached to play at a Red Cross benefit at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre. The first Gulf War was going on, and there was much political debate about the conflict.
The organizers told us it would be billed as a “Support Our Troops” concert. As the daughters of a Marine family, how could we refuse? They initially asked if Heart could play the show, but at that time, there no longer was a band called Heart. We had fired most of the band after the end of the Brigade tour, and we didn’t want to put together a pick-up group just to perform under that name. We also didn’t want to play as the two of us, because that would have been compared to Heart, too.
Ever since we were teenagers, back with the Viewpoints, we had wanted Sue Ennis in our band. We had a long running joke of “come join our band, Sue.” Back in high school, Sue argued she was too shy, but as the years went on, and she helped write many of our songs, her “too shy” argument didn’t hold much water. She had performed with us at countless hootenannies and jam sessions. We told her it was a one-time benefit, “for the good of the troops,” and we pulled her in.
Over the previous decade, we’d become friends with Frank Cox, who on the shyness scale sat directly opposite from Sue. Frank was a natural entertainer, who would don an Elvis suit for a party, or sing anywhere anytime. He had a lot of experience playing acoustically, and his voice meshed well with ours. We hatched the idea of an acoustic, harmony group.
From the first few rehearsals at my farm, it was amazing. We jammed on songs by Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary. We only played a few Heart songs, and those we did in very different arrangements. At that first rehearsal, I grabbed a mandolin an
d played Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore.” The song had been a showstopper when we did a rock version in early Heart in Vancouver clubs, but it was even better acoustic. Sue played keyboards, Frank played acoustic guitar, and Ann played bass or acoustic guitar. Sue programmed a rhythm track into her keyboard, and as a joke we decided to bring a cardboard cutout of Ringo Starr onstage with us.
After all the bloat of the eighties, that very first rehearsal felt liberating. We were making music just for joy, and for no other reason. But there was something the acoustic group gave me that I hadn’t even known was missing. In this new band, I was the lead guitar player. It was challenging in a way that Heart had not been for many years, and it created a new interplay with my sister that reinvigorated me. Lead guitar would take over telling a story, and it gave me a way of connecting onstage with Ann that we had lost during the eighties. There was no one telling us to play hits, or to show more cleavage. It was music created for the same reasons we had made music in the beginning.
Marie was born three weeks before the Red Cross benefit. There was a brief pause, when we all waited to see if new mom Ann might reconsider. But Ann said, “It’s just one night, let’s do it.” She’d already hired a family friend to help her, so we marched on with the show.
A few days before, the promoters called us up with a question “What do we call you?” they asked. We had no idea.
At our next rehearsal, I suggested, “Why don’t we call ourselves ‘The Peace Puppies’?”
“That’s good,” said Sue. “There are so many war mongers out there right now, and that sounds like the opposite of that.”
“Why don’t we call ourselves ‘the Lovemongers,’ then?” Ann suggested. The name stuck.
At the show we followed Artis the Spoonman and Alice in Chains and played six songs. We hadn’t played acoustically in public for years, but the crowd responded more positively than they had on the Brigade tour. It felt intimate, and scary, but also freeing. It was way more fun than Heart. At the end of our set, I turned my acoustic guitar over and showed the audience a peace symbol I had plastered on the back. “Lovemongers,” said Ann pointing to the sticker. “One night only. Better than the Fishmongers.” Our new name was public.
