Photograph by Jeremy Danger
Nancy Wilson doesn’t spend much time or energy looking back at the 50-plus years she’s played music with her older sister, Ann, in the rock band Heart. Frankly, she’s too busy. But she was generous enough to chat about that path and how it affects her life today during a recent Zoom call from Las Vegas, where the current “Royal Flush” tour picked up after a break for this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in November.
Heart plays the Andrew J Brady Music Center December 8 as part of the two-year tour that coincides with the 50th anniversary release of Dreamboat Annie, their 1975 debut album. The singles “Magic Man” and “Crazy on You” announced that a female-fronted rock band from Seattle could compete with the era’s big boys. And unlike many groups that splashed onto the scene over the years and quickly disappeared, its longevity might be the sisters’ proudest accomplishment.
“That’s the coolest possible outcome of doing this life’s work,” Wilson says about seeing another generation (or two) in the audience who are familiar with Heart’s classic tunes. “From the time The Beatles played on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, it was a calling. We went to the music store like zombies: ‘Must have guitars.’ Then we devoted the rest of our existence to making music, forming bands, learning to write songs, and how to be proficient players. So to see kids play air guitar on ‘Barracuda’ is a wonderful compliment for us, because we started our musical journey as fans.”
Wilson, 71, returned to the Rock Hall induction ceremony stage twice last month. (Heart was inducted in 2013.) She played with Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke, the only original member of the band on hand, and Joe Perry of Aerosmith on “Feel Like Making Love.” Then, after Seattle homies Soundgarden were introduced, she accompanied Toni Cornell, daughter of the band’s late singer Chris Cornell, on “Fell on Black Days,” a performance that brought tears to the eyes of people throughout the audience in the arena and on televisions at home.
“I was a super fan of Free (the previous band of Kirke and singer Paul Rodgers) and Bad Company,” Wilson says. “Those guys were original gangsters of rhythm and blues, English by way of American blues rock. I was right in my element, and it was a million thrills to do that with those guys.”
She calls the Soundgarden segment “especially poignant” because she got to hang out with “all my brothers from Seattle,” including guitarist Kim Thayil, drummer Matt Cameron, and bass players Hiro Yamamoto and Ben Shepherd from Soundgarden, guitarist Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains, guitarist Mike McCready from Pearl Jam, and Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl from Nirvana.
Wilson, who has 25-year-old twin sons from her first marriage to journalist and filmmaker Cameron Crowe, still feels lucky to do what she does. Some dates on last year’s tour were canceled by her sister’s cancer diagnosis and treatment. The band will play six dates after Cincinnati, break for six weeks, then resume in mid-February. The schedule seems to energize the musician rather than tire her.
“I’ve had a life well-lived, because music is such a unifying thing,” she says. “Music saves our lives every day. It’s my life every day. I lay my soul at the feet of music. I’m good at it, and it’s my only skill. I’m thrilled to do it as long as I can.”
Photograph by Jeremy Danger
You started playing in the 1960s, made your name in the ’70s, and had to navigate the ’80s and the advent of MTV when people said you could make more money if you looked more glamorous. You famously said, “We don’t need more money.” It’s one thing to say it, and anther to do it. Do you still feel that way?
You feel like you have quite enough, but it was never really about money either. And I think today’s world is a scary time with that perception of the billionaires that they can’t get enough so they have to take everybody else’s. Corporate greed has gone off the scale.
When you’re performing, you have a slightly different perspective because the spotlight is on Ann most of the time and she certainly commands the room. Can you sneak a peek at the audience to see how it responds?
It’s really a wonderful aspect I get a chance to do because I’m not blinded by the main spot all the time. I absolutely get to check out the faces and see the reactions and see people crying when she sings “Dog and Butterfly,” for example, or see an older guy with his wife and they’re singing along to “Alone,” which might have been their prom song or something. It’s just so cool how the songs themselves are the soundtrack to people’s lives. And there aren’t any other Ann Wilsons out there.
There are tribute bands where there’s no original members. But we have two original members, and we’re still roaming the Earth. And I see a lot of younger people who crave the authenticity of classic rock. I think there are younger musicians concentrating on that, doing the homework, doing thousands and thousands of hours of practice. I love the girls from Boygenius (Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus). You see the sisters in HAIM (Danielle, Este and Alana), who are way more rock live than they are on record. And Chappell Roan is a great performer, great singer/songwriter. She’s got a really solid rock band I got to play with. They’re all girls, which is so cool.
You don’t have an opening act in Cincinnati, but you have had an eclectic mix on this tour: Squeeze, Todd Rundgren, Lucinda Williams, Cheap Trick. People pay good money to see each of them alone.
We want to stick with authenticity. That works out for a band like us because our songwriting borders on the poetic a little more than the average rock band. We like to bring poetry along with people like Lucinda Williams and Todd Rundgren, who are the thinking man’s rock people, authentic music people.
You covered Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle for Evermore” at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opening concert in 1995. Then you famously played “Stairway to Heaven” at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012. But there is a story that you walked out on the band the first time you saw them.
They were just way too sexually charged. It was 1969, I was 15 and with Ann. They hadn’t broken big yet in America, so we didn’t know who they were. They played a small venue in Seattle and were opening for the Fifth Dimension. Pop radio, right? We were like, “Oh, my God, that guy (Robert Plant) doesn’t have a shirt on!” His jeans were so low, and you couldn’t miss the innuendo with all of his gyrating. We were just shocked.
Then (guitarist) Jimmy Page pulled out a violin bow and he had this theremin thing, and he was going, “Woo, woo, woo.” It was spooky and sexy, oh my God, lions and tigers and bears, oh my (laughs). So we kind of had to leave the premises, not even having an idea of what we were walking away from.
Safe to say your opinion changed over time. What did you think when you were asked to play at the Kennedy Center?
Well, there was no way that we wouldn’t do that. We would climb or crawl across the Gobi Desert. We were on tour, so had to get a private jet to D.C. in time for the one rehearsal the night before the show. It was icy cold in December and my hands were frozen, waiting for the car to take us to rehearsal. When we went into this big rehearsal space with all the choirs and the bands and woodwinds and horns, it was like, “OK, go.”
I’m playing the (acoustic) beginning of “Stairway to Heaven” by myself, with my hands frozen solid, and I couldn’t quite pull it off. And the guys in the band were like, “Oh, this is not gonna go well.” I was like, “Don’t worry, I’ve just have to get my fingers warm first.” Then they said, “We can shadow you. You could kind of air guitar it.” And I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” I just had to be warmed up when I started he next night. In the show it was a thrill of a lifetime.
When it was over in real time, did you have any idea of the response? Could you see Plant, Page, and John Paul Jones in the balcony?
We knew we did a good job. We knew we did it right. My husband Geoff (Bywater) was standing on the side of the stage with Lenny Kravitz and a bunch of other guys watching the screen. And they could see shots of the audience, but we couldn’t see anything that was happening in the room or on the balcony, least of all, so we had no idea. We just felt good. We were like, “We got through this, we made it to the other side without screwing it up.” It felt right. There was nothing rushed or anything like that. We didn’t stumble once. And so it was just such an honor. And when it aired, I think it was before Christmas a few weeks later, we saw what everybody else saw. And then we were in tears, we were like, “Oh, my God!” It was like, you know, my arm hairs are going up now thinking about it (laughs).
It was super wonderful to honor those guys. Each of them came up at the Governor’s Ball afterward. Jimmy Page told Ann and me, “You guys did a great, great job, you did wonderfully. You played that so well.” And we were like, “Oh, my God.” I think I said, “Thank you,” but was just having trouble believing what was coming out of his mouth, for me, such a devotee of his. It was just everything. And then Robert Plant walks up and he goes, “You know, I’ve learned to hate that song, but you guys nailed it because people just don’t do that song well. But you guys totally nailed it.” Then John Paul Jones, who we knew from producing our Road Home album, came up and he was always the gentleman, ever the wonderful, fabulous person, and just thanked us as well. It is one of the highlights of our lives.
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