Heart’s In The Right, Place

Somebody tell me—how the heck can ya dislike Heart? All these years I’ve been rocking and writing away, leading my usual schizo double life, getting picked up and dropped by record companies, eating poor helpless little snails, wearing unchic ensembles—for what?

Since 1976, Heart has been one of the most durable hard-working, hard-rocking, successful bands— featuring two females—ever. Oh, I’d hear them on the radio in college and say, “Yeah, but (sniff) they ain’t no Velvet Underground.” How immature of me—there is no comparison! The Velvets weren’t hard rock nor commercially successful; Heart is on a Led Zep or Van Halen level! My kid brother, a 14-year-old sophisticate, has great taste in rock & metal and digs He&rt—so that’s all I needed to set off on a most pleasant and informative phone chat with Ann Wilson, which went sort of like this:

• • •

What would you like to say?

Oh, I hate that sort of thing. Don’t you have questions? I could tell you about the album, if you want, or about Heart—

/ was just wondering if you had a message for the world today...

Yeah—buy bonds...

• • •

All right; so we hit a minuscule impasse early on: I’d been gearing up for bona fide tripe and giddy folderol, and the amiable Ann desired pointed questions. Pity she be a stranger to my once-singular approach, sorta like an all-rock edition of Lifestyles...

Anyway, I did what I could. Read on for more wit & wisdom from Heart’s Ann Wilson...

TERRORISM IN THE HEART

Although a tentative ’86 tour to Australia and the far East is penciled in for Heart, there will be no stops in Europe in the near future: “We changed our minds about going to Europe for a little promo deal before we knew about all this terrorism. It was just because we wanted to go on a tour of the States instead.”

L.E Agnelli

HOORAY FOR THE U.S.A.

‘‘We’ll take as long as we have to take to tour the country—about five months. We’ll do it, like, in legs.” Each leg lasts anywhere from two weeks to two months, with a few days or weeks off in between. The second leg of Heart’s U.S. tour began in October, and covered the west, midwest and south with openers such as Saga and Autograph. The third leg of the Heart tour finished the job—two weeks in December in the western U.S. ‘‘You can get a lot of gray hairs in the process. It’s really big fatigue time. That’s why we try and make it so we never play more than five nights in a row. We try and charter a plane so we don’t have to sleep on the tour bus with the grinding gears and the chili at the truck stops.”

Not only questionable food, but poison looks pervade the hapless Heartsters in the Heartland: ‘‘So we walk into these hotel lobbies— especially in Texas or in the South— and there are all these people there, kinda conservative, and here are these people, they’re, wearing shades, and chewing this gum, and looking completely wasted—and they stare at us.”

Shocked, I asked what exactly the members of Heart might be expected to be seen in on a long road trip. Did they mean to pile into chartered planes and tour buses in amazing medieval Heavy Metal bustiers and leathers with spikes and unspared gauntlets, et al.? Surprised, I learned that THEY ACTUALLY NORMALLY DRESS DIFFERENTLY FROM THEIR STAGE LOOKS!

Rather, ‘‘We just kind of wear whatever you can fall into when you fall out of bed in the morning. It just kind of comes down to an old pair of trousers, an old T-shirt and an old jacket. Of course, the shades are the most important thing.”

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 39

MUSICAL INTERLUDE ‘‘The music and title—Heart—is as direct and unyielding as the Rebecca Blake photo that adorns the cover.” Thank you Cameron Crowe, who wrote the Heart bio for Capitol. I could never describe it better. Ron Nevison, producer of gibraltars such as Led Zep, the Who and Survivor, hath bequeathed unto Heart a similar depth and crunch usually reserved for—ahem—cock rock.

Y’see, Ann and Nancy are ladies, but tough. They’ve stood by their patented siren vocals and searing leads and power chords from the early ’70s, when even Kiss was unfashionable! The songs from Heart concern the pitfalls and pitstops of love, portraying a world where women may weep, but they usually get back sooner or later. Liberated!

Not only indomitable, Heart is successful: went R.I.A.A.-certified platinum after four months and hit the Billboard Top Ten album charts with two hits (Top Twenty) singles as of presstime, “What About Love” and “Never.”

HOLLYWOOD

Like sister Nancy (who appeared in Fast Times At Ridgemont High), Ann plans an eventual acting career, but the scripts so far have been “all the same kind of role—like Bette Midler in The Rose, or Apollonia-type roles. Actually, a friend of ours is writing a film right now about our relationship (Ann and Nan), and that should be done here pretty soon.”

And how would older sis Ann describe that relationship? “Oh, I’d say it’s more like friends than sisters. It’s without sibling rivalry, and without the petty jealousy that you get with most other women. And with a heck of a lot of humor. You know, it’s just really a good friendship. We really rely on each other— especially on the road.”

BOYS WITH HEART

Bassist Mark Andes, from Firefall, is “a sweetheart”; drummer Denny Carmassi is just “really funny and real real loving”; in fact, “All of the guys are real loving, and they just give us a lot of breaks. They really stand up for us.”

HEART TRANSPLANT

“We started back during the Vietnam War, and this one guy didn’t want to go, so he went to Canada, and he was in our band, so we all went up there, and started in Vancouver, B.C.” Daddy Wilson was in the Marine Corps, so they traveled “all over the place” as tykes, and they “just came to rest in Seattle, because our parents liked it there so much.” Ann and Nancy live in Seattle at present, traveling to tour or record frequently.

“Vancouver is a lot like Scotland or England, on the coast. We just took our little demo around to every label in the whole universe and everybody said, ‘Just forget it! Why don’t you wise up? We’re playing Joan Baez on the radio this week, and who needs you?’” Along came Mushroom Records; the rest is history (or herstory, in this case).

“This band was made up from all those times when you look at the bulletin board of the music stores, and you find guys to start a band with, and one guy finds another and you play some bars, and some guy hears you from the record company, and they like ya and then hopefully they sign ya, and you then make a record—it’s a real band.”

PORTRAIT OF A MUSHROOMING CAREER OF EPIC PROPORTIONS,

A CAPITOL IDEA

“Well, we were on Mushroom, and we had Dreamboat Annie on that label, and we were working on our second record. During the making of that record we uncovered a lot of stuff— like, a lot of money was being siphoned off...A whole Pandora’s box, you know. And so we thought, ‘Well, they did it for us, but we can’t hang around and get used.’ We left, and went into litigation with them, and finally won, and went on Portrait.”

‘‘But, when Portrait folded, they just kind of shuffled us onto Epic. So, we stayed on Epic for a long time—up until just recently, when it came to our attention again that, well, we were not getting screwed this time—just sort of buried. Well, one thing led to another (with Epic) and we just thought, ‘Well, they’re not interested in us anymore, and they’re not getting the records to the record stores.’”

‘‘So, we found Capitol, and these people are really, really excited about the group, and they said, ‘Take as along as you want with the album, go ahead and make it good.’ So we did that, and...here we are.”

FAMOUS LAST WORDS (ANN’S INSPIRATION)

“Well, I think it’s been, just music itself. When I hear music, it just kinda kicks me in the ass.” s 0