HEART & SOUL

HEART & SOUL

Sylvie Simmons

“I think I pretty much lived in a dream world of music and my room. I remember every day after school I would come home and sit in my room and play records and just travel into the music, and learn to play it on my guitar. That was my only concern. I tried to go out with boys and stuff and I always liked them and had crushes on them, but they were all such goons compared with the Beatles and the Stones and the Moody Blues in my imagination.” And Ann Wilson always had a big imagination, big and pure as the voice that brought us such Heart classics as “Crazy On You,” “Barracuda” and “Alone.”

“Nancy and I formed a group when I was about 14 and she was 10 years old—this little child with tiny hands and a big guitar. We always played for free with two other girls from school, for church functions and Youth Sundays at our parents’ church, or for schools when they had their PTA night. The thought of making money never crossed our minds. It was like, ‘We can play? You’ll let us play?’

“I used to be the leader of the group and we’d use our dad’s tape recorder with these baby speakers for our PA, and we’d set up these metal folding chairs and put a speaker on each and we were grooving!

“After that we did a Supremes-style setup, three girls standing at the front with a group of guys backing us up. We were called Rapunzel—this was the psychedelic era and I had very long hair and we had these hand-made posters that showed these girls, one blonde, one brunette, with long hair flowing in psychedelic colors. And then came my first real rock band. It was me and Mike Fisher, in army fatigues with a bald head and his eyes spinning round and around! I was the ‘tough chick singer.' Nancy couldn’t join, my parents wanted her to stay at school—they’d already written me off!— but she had a standing invitation to join any group I’d ever been in.”

They eventually paired to become Heart, a group that went on to sell millions. A magical combination of melody and power that, as Lemmy of Motorhead so aptly put it, “tears your heart out and chops it up in bits! That black-haired chick can really sing and that other chick can really play guitar too!”

It was a combination that couldn’t fail— two stunningly beautiful and musically talented women, fronting a heavy rock band back in an age when female musicians wore white lace and warbled folkie nonsense and “rock chicks” were confined to dressing-rooms to please the boys.

And for a long time it didn’t fail. Heart weathered several serious storms—mostly personnel problems stemming from the boys in the band feeling left out in the cold, or from disastrous romances within the group (Ann’s long affair with founding member Mike, Nancy’s with his brother Roger and later with drummer Michael Derosier, all since gone from the band. Howard Leese, thankfully, stuck around, and Mark Andes and Denny Carmassi were added a handful of years ago)—-but by the beginning of the '80s things looked more washed-out than downtown Seattle in winter! With the release of Private Audition and Passbnworks things looked critical.

“I think what sort of happened,” Nancy explains, “is there was a period—especially when we first happened—in the ‘horrible ’70s' where we did acquire a lot really fast and you get into that whole lifestyle that most groups had at the time. And it came to a point where we really had to re-examine ourselves. You have a commitment to yourself as a quoteunquote ‘artist.’ That was a turning-point we reached with Private Audition along with everything else that was turning around. It was like, ‘well, maybe we’re not making as much money now and maybe we’re suddenly getting in debt’—they sound like weird things to say because most people are always thinking about those things, but it’s easy to forget them if you've had some money for a little while and then suddenly it’s not there. But it’s good for you! Very inspiring! You start poking out of your little self-contained shell.

“Being starving artists never hurts— never! It’s good for you, it wakes you up to what reality is.”

Only reality can be an ugly business, and never uglier than in the music business. The people behind the scenes, record company, management and the like, figured Heart were over and done for and abandoned them in favor of new young bands.

“For example,” says Howard, “we thought our album Passionworks was a pretty good record and was accepted by radio very well, but it didn’t sell very well. We thought our record company didn’t work as hard on it as we did. No one was showing much enthusiasm and we thought we deserved better than that.”

So they found a new record company, found new management, and with a great new line-up they set about recording Heart, which turned out to be one of the biggest-selling albums in the cosmoverse!

That was two years ago. Heart’s most recent album, Bad Animals (“We’re the bad animals! It’s just kind of something that we call ourselves among ourselves! We’re not angels\") looks like it’s doing better still. “We just got our noses down to the grindstone and made better music,” shrugs Howie. “Better records.”

“It got to a point,” says Ann, “where we could just tour and tour and tour our heads off and break our backs and still we couldn’t get anywhere, we were just spinning our wheels. And that’s really frustrating.

“It’s hard to describe what actually turned the key to make us do what was necessary to get going again. I think it was frustration and boredom and,” she laughs, “fear.”

Looking at them now, sitting on the sofa in a swank Mayfair, London hotel, all in black, looks that kill, and their first really heavy-duty major hit single climbing up the British charts, it would be hard to imagine they could be afraid of anything. A gang of marauding spiders? No problem. Killer rats? Why worry. Competition from other female-fronted rock bands? Forget it! Even Nancy—who always came across as “the quiet little fluff of a non-being as she put it herself, partly in comparison to her passionate, gothic big sister, partly because they always gave her the pretty little ballad to sing in the past—looks powerful and confident enough to take on the world with one hand behind her back. Heart as a whole, says Howie, “is on an upswing.”

And if they can come down off it long enough, Ann’s going to record a solo album and Nancy is going to complete the music and script to an ambitious children’s-book project she’s been working on for years and can finally bring to fruition.

“This band is as vital as it can be,” says Ann. “We just like each other more and more.”

“I suppose it’s the old Live For The Moment routine; I don’t know what else to do, so I’ll keep on doing this until it gets really weird! Me and Nance have been together all our lives so I can’t see us coming apart, unless some man convinces her that I’m full of it, which hasn’t happened yet! And if it does, then I’ll go off and use our Dad’s tape recorder on metal chairs again! I have to play. That’s the one thing I know about myself,” she confirms.

And for now Heart is off for another round of interviews and TV appearances and the things that come with success. It’s great to have them back!