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

by Ann Wilson

  We went round and round that afternoon. It felt like she was leaving me with this incredible mess of dismantling our thirty-person crew. We had a lawsuit pending—someone had been injured in the crowd at one of our concerts and sued us. We had a ton of bills coming in. We even had The Road Home we needed to promote. I was going to have to clean up all of this mess, and she was going to walk off with Cameron, and have a different career. It felt like a betrayal. I begged with her, I pleaded. I cried. After an hour of heartbreaking words, she still just walked away. Sitting there on my patio after she left, I wondered what Paul McCartney would have done. Should I start Wings? Should I tour on my own? Would anyone want to see me if Nancy weren’t by my side?

  Then I stopped thinking about myself, or Heart, or the slew of people who worked for us, and I started thinking about my sister. I had always been the dominant one in Heart. From the start, Nancy had been dreaming a dream I dreamed first. Because I was four years older, I even had a head start on the language of that dream, its parameters, scope, and length. My dream had no end, but Nancy’s had a stop, or at least a pause.

  I knew she felt she couldn’t breathe, that I was smothering her, that it was all my ambition, and that she was sick of that. She wanted to get out and breathe her own air, and maybe explore her own kind of music, and not be beholden to Heart.

  I could support her decision as her sister, even if it meant the end of the band. I could love her and forgive her. We were family, after all. When you love someone, you forgive, even if a scar remains. Our words had been ugly, but an hour after that ugliness I remembered that my sister and I were more than just Heart.

  NANCY WILSON

  When I left Ann’s that day, I felt like a murderer. I was surprised I’d actually had the courage to do it, but it still felt awful. I wanted to put Heart on hold for me, but in doing so, I knew I was taking the wind out of her sails, too. I knew I was taking food out of the band and crew’s mouths as well. Heart had to be on the road to make money—it was the only way it worked for any us. Ann did not want to hear what I had to say, and I did not want to tell her. It was not fun. It was one of the hardest things that ever went on between us.

  I had started working on scores to Cameron’s movies the year before, and I was deep into fertility treatments. I thought I could be everything to everyone all the time, but that wasn’t working. The demands of being on the road with Heart were pulling me away from the other parts of my life. I was trying to get pregnant, but I was failing at that, and setting up appointments with fertility clinics wasn’t easy when you were in Dallas one day, and New Orleans the next.

  Ann defined herself by her work, which was similar to Cameron. There is almost no other thing they define themselves by. They both are driven, committed to art, and brilliant. Lynn and I had joked since our childhood that we were on “Ann’s staff,” and in a way I found myself in the same relationship with Cameron, but happy for it.

  The previous year, I turned forty, and a panic ensued that I wasn’t a mom. Cameron and I hadn’t discussed starting a family before we married. We had many strengths in our relationship, but talking about important issues was never one of them. We always managed to find time to discuss a new Joni Mitchell album, but our own relationship was the last topic brought up. We had been together for five years before we discussed marriage, and we were married for five years before the idea of having kids was seriously discussed.

  We didn’t decide to have kids at first; we just decided to stop trying not to have them. That was like a lot of our relationship: fluid, loose, and sometimes dysfunctional. All those Joni Mitchell records affected me: I thought true love should be natural, and effortless.

  Because both Cameron and I had jobs in entertainment, we had an unorthodox relationship. But when I wasn’t on the road with Heart, it was more traditional. I became the stay-at-home wife, working in my husband’s world, and making dinner every night. Even when I was home, I hardly saw him, because he was always writing, but at least there was comfort because he was right in the next room.

  It was a creative partnership: He wrote his scripts, but he read me every word, and we discussed every line. Cameron was always dissecting the ways rock and film intersect, and it was exciting to be a part of that. I got to be in an eagle’s nest in Hollywood, and see the process of moviemaking from scripts to editing.

  After Fast Times, I next worked with Cameron on The Wild Life, a 1984 film he wrote. I played a pregnant cop’s wife who found out her husband was cheating when another woman knocked at the door. I wasn’t born to be an actor.

  I first worked on a score for one of Cameron’s films with 1992’s Say Anything. I even went on the road with him to help publicize the movie. My contributions were small guitar bits, but Cameron was kind to point out in our joint interviews that I had added “Seattle” to the sound of the movie. Anne Dudley, of the band Art of Noise, composed that score, and she was a huge help to me. Creating a score meant working with sheet music, and that initially scared me because it was different from anything I’d done with a rock band. But Anne told me to count the measures out, play where I was supposed to, and feel it.

  When we went to the first screening of Say Anything, and I heard stuff I’d played coming out of those speakers, it was an amazing thrill. It felt great to find my sea legs in something other than being in a rock band. I a little off the grid, but I was in Hollywood, and my music was heard inside a movie theater. That felt big time, whether or not I was the director’s wife.

  I had slept with the director, of course. That was my bad joke during those years. It wasn’t a good joke, since there were people working on Cameron’s films with more Hollywood experience, and surely there were resentments because of our relationship. I didn’t have it easy, though, because Cameron was super picky about what he wanted. He would say, “This here doesn’t kill me, and I want something else, so keep working on it.” And he’d be right.

  When Cameron started Jerry McGuire in 1994, he asked if I’d do the score. It was an easy fit because Cameron wanted a Paul Simon–like sound, and that was my whole history. I decided to do it inexpensively because I didn’t want to be the typical director’s wife who expected a big budget for my role. I found a young engineer named Vaughn Verdi, who had a house in Universal City with no soundproofing, or video equipment. I went to Costco and bought a small television with a VCR built in. We’d count the scenes, and press play on the VCR at the right spot, and then I’d play the music. We’d rewind, and do it again. We made the score without syncing. It was so low-tech, it was no-tech.

  I did have really good microphones, and I played my Libra Sunrise guitar, the same one I’d used on “Mistral Wind,” into a sixteen-track reel-to-reel. We wanted it to sound analog, but sometimes we got a more natural sound than we expected. The house wasn’t always quiet, and when the garbage cans would get banged outside, I’d play louder to drown it out. A tree had fallen on the air conditioner so it was broken. Some days it would be 103 degrees, but we couldn’t open the doors or windows because we needed the soundproofing. I was playing my guitar in a sweatbox and trying to keep it in tune. It was so un-Hollywood, and so unprofessional, and so edgy. You’d never imagine that the soundtrack to a Tom Cruise movie was made in that environment.

  It was through Cameron that I finally had my chance to meet Joni Mitchell. We planned dinner at a restaurant called the Four Oaks in Bel-Air. I knew it wasn’t far from her house, because when Cameron and I first dated, we took our picture in front of the gates to her home. And now a dozen years later, I was to meet her. I was so nervous walking into the restaurant that my knees were vibrating. And there, before me, were the actual molecules that made up Joni.

  Joni, however, could not have been a cooler cat. She was drinking a cappuccino, and she was a stellar storyteller. She liked to talk about herself a lot, which was perfect since I wanted nothing more in the world than to listen to her talk. She told stories of her relationships with men, of her wild gypsy girl days, and
how she ran with wolves, so to speak. She knew how to love, and how not have to have ownership of men. When I left the restaurant hours later, I still didn’t have my fill of Joni. I immediately sat down and wrote my old friend Jan Drew, the woman who I had gone searching for Joni with on Sechelt Island years ago. “I actually met Joni!” my letter screamed. Joni was one of the few celebrities I ever met who was more inspiring in person than in my imagination.

  ANN

  Even when Nancy was working with Cameron on movies, she came back to the fold for the occasional Lovemongers gig, or for a benefit. We did a benefit for health care reform in Portland where we met Hilary Clinton, who was then the first lady. Our mom had raised us to be proper young ladies, and she expected us to be able to meet the first lady and present ourselves appropriately. Sadly, our first meeting with Hillary would not have lived up to Mama’s expectations for us.

  It was a hot day, and we were playing outside before a large crowd in Pioneer Park. Our dressing room was a little curtained area in the middle of the street. Our road manager was tackled by the Portland Police, and handcuffed when they failed to notice the credentials around his neck. The event went downhill from there.

  Marie was three years old and in the active toddler stage when she didn’t like her mommy onstage. While we played, she wept, and the instant I came offstage, she was in my arms weeping. My face was covered with sweat from performing. And at that moment, with Marie weeping, Hillary walked into our partition. She looked at me, and then Marie, and announced, “You should get that child out of the sun.” I had been “mom-ed” by the First Lady.

  The year before, I had met Hillary’s husband, President Bill Clinton, but there was no “mom-ing” involved. He was on the docket at a fundraiser at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre, and I’d been asked to come do a blues song. As I was singing, Clinton came and stood on the side of the stage listening, with that Bill Clinton smirk on his face. During my guitar solo, he walked out onstage, and whispered in my ear, “You are real good.” I joked, “You ought to pull out your saxophone, Mr. President.” He laughed and said he couldn’t do that.

  Later that night in the reception line, Clinton pulled me over to him. “What is your name?” he asked. He had no idea who I was. “I’m Ann Wilson,” I said. “You are very, very, very good,” he said. He smelled and looked Washington-tailored, and being that close to him I could feel the power he had over people, particularly over women. He kept saying that I was “very, very, very good.” When he repeated it, he sounded like Elvis.

  A few months after Nancy announced she needed a break, I went back on the road billed as “The Ann Wilson Band.” Howard Leese remained, but the rest of the group was new, including Scotty Olson on guitar, Jon Bayless on bass, and Ben Smith on drums. Musically, I didn’t want it to be “Heart without Nancy,” so we built an R&B revue with a local horn section in every city. Our set included songs like “It’s a Man’s World,” “Strong, Strong Winds,” “Gimme Shelter.” Musically it was rewarding, but the rest of the tour was chaos.

  First, it felt very odd not having my sister on my tour bus. Instead, I had toddler Marie, plus a nanny, Pat, originally from Trinidad, who was large, soulful, and loud in a small space. Pat wasn’t a wet nurse, but on a few occasions, I walked to the back of the bus to find Marie’s head comfortably cuddled in her enormous breasts.

  Not having Nancy in the band had an immediate effect on our finances. When bookers found out she wasn’t with us, the offers came down considerably, less than half in many cases. We were booked at state fairs, military bases, and casinos.

  One of our gigs was in the Dakotas. We drove nineteen hours on the bus to get there, hauling our gear behind us in a U-Haul. The stage was in the middle of a field, and it was pouring rain. When the show was over, and we tried to leave, our bus got stuck in the mud, and we had to be towed out.

  The next show was in Wisconsin. When we arrived, our bus driver took a cash draw, and went on a bender. After our gig, we went to the bus expecting to leave for the next show. We waited hours. Finally, our road manager had to kick his hotel door down to get him.

  I normally have a streak of optimism, but by that point, I felt embarrassed that I’d dragged the rest of the band on this hellish trip, thinking I could tour without Nancy. At one show, a sign behind me read “MARLBORO PRESENTS Ann WILSON.” Every fan I met asked, “Where’s Nancy?” Many of the gigs were on military bases, including Camp Lejeune and Quantico. The officer’s clubs we played were the same facilities that had been there twenty-five years before when I had lived on base. I imagined I had forever escaped the clapboard housing of Quantico and the sound of young Marines marching in the parade fields.

  But without my sister, I was back where I began.

  NANCY

  Even while I was working on film scores, my main focus was on becoming pregnant. It consumed me, but it did not go well. Eventually, I began to take fertility drugs. I took those shots thinking they were going to bring me to the thing I wanted the most in the world, but their effects were severe, and often I was an emotional mess.

  That year the Ann Wilson Band came to Los Angeles, and I went to the show. It felt so very strange to be driving to a concert that Ann was giving without me. Watching her show from the audience, a part of me was sad I wasn’t onstage, but it was also a bit of a thrill. I hadn’t watched Ann from the audience since the days I was trying out for Heart in Vancouver.

  She was just shredding it onstage, closing it down with her voice. It felt so different to be in the audience listening to her amazing voice. It made me want to be in Ann’s band because she was such a good singer. It was like a religious experience.

  We had talked on the phone before the show, and she asked if I wanted to sit in, but my fingers weren’t itching to play. I was so out of practice, and so hormonally challenged that I didn’t want to be onstage and be rusty. I didn’t think she could see me in the audience, but when I went backstage after, she told me she had spied me immediately.

  “It was hard to pay attention to anything else,” Ann said. “My connection with you is greater than any connection with the audience could ever be.”

  22

  The Boys March In

  A Lovemongers album. A princess dies, and so does a

  dream. And the family grows with a different sort of tour,

  on a crazy bus. . . .

  NANCY WILSON

  While Ann was doing her tour, I started a musical adventure of my own. McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica asked if I wanted to do an acoustic show. In March 1997, I did my first solo show in thirty years. It was my college-girl-self, back to the idea that I would play folk clubs, and have that “small but appreciative following.”

  I played a handful of Heart songs, but also Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” and Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You.” Astrid Young, Neil’s sister, and Kristen Barry sang backup on a few songs, but it was mostly just me and my guitar. The gig went so well, Kelly Curtis suggested we release it as a CD. He arranged things with Epic, and it was released a year later.

  And though I wasn’t willing to tip my toe in the Heart waters, the Lovemongers were a different matter altogether. That year we recorded a Lovemongers album for tiny Will Records.

  But most of 1997 was consumed, as was every year that decade, by trying to get pregnant. When one technique didn’t work, I sought out different doctors and cutting-edge technology. It was very expensive and I spent more than a hundred thousand dollars. It was only considered safe to keep doing fertility injections for a short while, but I went way past the recommendations.

  Adoption was also a consideration, though Cameron was mixed on that option. I had always thought I’d have one child from my body, and adopt a second. Infertility ran in our family, but I kept thinking I could beat my age, and DNA, to achieve my goal. I wasn’t willing to rule anything out then—my doctor even brought up the idea of using a surrogate.

  Everything changed in August 1997. I had just finishe
d a round of fertility treatments, and I went to the Oregon Coast with Ann and Sue to recover. The injections had begun to feel metallic, as if there was metal in my blood for days afterward. Each treatment took more and more out of me.

  This time my metal blood had a payoff. I took a pregnancy test the evening we got to the beach, and the results were pink, which meant I was pregnant. The next few days I woke up every morning feeling the hormones of motherhood pouring through my body.

  I always had the deepest dreams at the beach, falling asleep to the sound of the surf. Then one night I dreamed I was pregnant, but the dream shifted, and I was not pregnant. It was the worst kind of nightmare, where nothing really happens, but the emotions of dread and panic are there.

  I woke up in a sweat. The sun was up, and it was morning. I had to clear my mind, so I turned on the television. A news anchor announced that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash. It was a horrible end to a beautiful woman. I went to the bathroom and took another pregnancy test. My dream had been real, and I was no longer pregnant. I collapsed on the floor.

  Ann and Sue came to me. I was distraught. I told them, and I told myself, I couldn’t do it again. “I can’t put that poison in my body anymore,” I wailed.

  It was the roughest day of my life. It was the end of one dream, but it wasn’t the end of me, or me being a mother.

  ANN WILSON

  We told Nancy that the best thing to clear her head, as she explored her options, would be to go on the road with the Lovemongers and play the music she loved. Nancy agreed, and we went on a twelve-date tour in a van in November 1997. We called it the “Don’t Blink” tour because if you blinked, it was over. Still, it was the first time Nancy and I had been on the road together in several years.