Heart’s debut album Dreamboat Annie, released 50 years ago, changed rock ‘n’ roll forever.
Not only did it charge onto the sonic landscape with the galloping force of a runaway Mustang, it rewrote hard rock’s very DNA. Guitarist Nancy Wilson and her sister Ann showed the world that women can rock, creating countless female shredders in their wake.
Truth is, the word “no” has simply never occurred to the Wilson sisters, who continue to lead Heart, a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee that’s sold 50 million albums worldwide. Even a recent health scare wasn’t enough to stop them.
The Current caught up with Nancy Wilson ahead of Heart’s Tuesday, March 3, performance at San Antonio’s Majestic Theatre. The band’s current tour celebrates the 50th anniversary of the album that changed it all.
You’re getting back into the swing of things after a little hiatus, right?
That’s right. We’ve done 72 shows this year, including our postponement while my sister Ann was doing some cancer treatment, therapy stuff, and it didn’t really stop her. She kicked the ass of cancer. And we came back out on the road since last spring, and we’ve been just rolling through the country having a blast with these shows. Right before we started back up on the last run of this tour, she fell and really seriously shattered her elbow. So she’s just being able to get to start back to playing her flute again.
So I don’t want to make all these questions about the fact that you are a trailblazing band for women because of course, I just want to talk to you as a musician. But the fact does remain that you’re considered the first hard rock band fronted by women to achieve commercial success. What does that feel like?
Well, it feels very cool. I think one of the reasons we never focused on our gender was that we started at such a young age. I was nine when I started playing guitar. And we were just tomboys when the Beatles came out. So Ann, being a little older, was already in junior high or high school. But we never thought “women can’t do that or are not supposed to do that.” We just did it, because we wanted to be that. We wanted to be in a rock band. We wanted to be the Beatles. Instead of trying to be girlfriends of the Beatles, we wanted to just be them — to do what they do.
And so later on, in the MTV era of the ’80s, when it all became about imaging and sexuality, that just wasn’t how we were thinking about it as originally [being] tomboys that just picked up instruments. We were punks in a way. We were little gangster girls.
And still, when I go out on stage and I get to play big loud guitar, just turn it to 11 and blast big power chords, I feel like I’m channeling the guys that were my influences, like Jimmy Page, the Beatles, Deep Purple, Bad Company and rock bands that were all guys. There were girls when we were growing up, but they were more rhythm and blues, like Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin or Janis Joplin. And Fleetwood Mac was kind of a soft rock band, not really a hard rock band like Heart can be, though we do a lot of romantic ballads too.
I kind of channel my guy instinct when I’m up on a big stage rocking out. People like Sheryl Crow have said, “You’re really one of my influences to pick up a guitar and be kind of muscular about music.” So, that kind of transformed into more of a female conversation after our initial conversation was a male conversation influencing us. Now we got to influence more girls along the way, which is one of the coolest things of all.
Since you paved the way, who are some fellow female shredders today that you admire?
Well, there’s some really good shredders out there and there’s a lot of really good singer-songwriters coming up, like the girls from boygenius and Courtney Barnett. Grace Bowers is just a class A shredder. Orianthi has been out there for a long time being an amazing shredder.
And so it’s really good to see a lot of women stepping up. Chappell Roan, for instance, is another one. She’s a pop musician, she’s not a hard rock player at all. Except when she does “Barracuda,” she kills it.
You’re from Seattle, and you’ve called the grunge bands that originated there your “Seattle brothers.” You even did a tribute to Chris Cornell at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, performing Soundgarden’s “Fell on Black Days” with his daughter Toni. Were you close with him, and how did you all originally connect with the grunge guys since you’d already left for Canada, LA and world fame by the time they came along?
Yeah, when we got back, it was after the MTV ’80s era. It kind of imploded upon itself when the grunge era started. The Seattle explosion happened right at the turn of the ’90s. So we were happy about it, because we weren’t real naturals living behind the image-making video culture of the ’80s, which was kind of more of an ego-driven, cocaine-driven time than where we came from, which was more of a mind-expanded late ’60s and mid ’70s time.
So, we got home to Seattle thinking that the new kids in town — the Nirvana guys and the Pearl Jam guys and the Soundgarden guys — were gonna hate us, because we were so shallow and so corporate — ’80s video, big hair — that we’d sold out our souls to the whole imaging of it all. But when we came to town, we got back to Seattle, where my best friend Kelly Curtis was managing a band called Mother Love Bone. And Andrew Wood was the lead singer, who ODed right about that same time. And so, because I was the manager’s friend, we all showed up at the house of the memorial for Andrew Wood. And that’s where I met Stone Gossard and Jerry Cantrell, all the guys from Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Chris and Mike Inez. … So, it was a really terrible situation, but it was like meeting the entire rock scene in one night, where we had all of our dogs with us to try to cheer people up, and we all got to know each other and everybody started hanging out together.
It sounds like you all used to have some wild parties. You had a ranch outside of Seattle and you had a New Year’s party and Jerry Cantrell and your sister got real crazy and gave champagne to a horse. Can you tell me more about that?
(Laughs.) Yeah, it was a New Year’s Eve party with a lot of Pearl Jam guys. Everybody had too much champagne. Nobody could drive home that night. So everybody got sleeping bags. We had Eddie Vedder sleeping in a sleeping bag in the basement. But Jerry and Ann stayed up until the morning light. Jerry got a ride home. I woke up and I came down in the kitchen and everybody was still either asleep or gone. But I saw a note in the kitchen with a little tin wind-up toy of an elephant riding a bicycle. The note that said, “Thanks for having us, look at the elephant, and sorry if we gave the horses some champagne.”
I had a stable of horses and they were sipping champagne with the horses. The horses were fine, you know, everybody was cool.
There have been talks of a dramatic film about Heart. What’s the latest on that project?
Yeah, we are getting what probably is going to be our final [screenplay] draft handed to us for the Heart film from Carrie Brownstein from the band Sleater-Kinney and the show Portlandia with Fred Armisen. Hopefully we’ll start casting for that soon. Plus we’re looking at making a Heart album and a Heart documentary at the same time. So we kind of have couple years left in us probably to do a 2027 farewell tour.
And you also plan on scoring the dramatic film about Heart, right?
Oh yeah. You couldn’t keep me away from that project because, you know, I have a lot of instruments. I’ve got a lot of instrumental stuff that’s not just songs with lyrics and singing.
You have experience scoring films such as Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky and Almost Famous. I know that was tied in with your marriage to Cameron Crowe. When you reflect on those projects, is it bittersweet or are you able to look back on those times fondly?
That marriage was a really productive collaboration with Cameron Crowe for many years. And all of the films I worked on were his well-known films, and it was only a pleasure to work on that stuff. It’s right in my wheelhouse to just be a musician and pull out all kinds of wacky instruments and get the mandolin going and play percussion and keyboard stuff. The relationship part of the marriage was painful when it ended, like any marriage ever is. But it was a beautiful part of my growth as a musician, as a person, to be able to do that work.
I know you’ve always been inspired by Led Zeppelin in particular, and it’s part of why you brought your love of the acoustic guitar into Heart’s sound, but when you first saw Led Zeppelin play, you walked out on them. Why?
Oh, yeah. They were a baby band in Seattle opening for a youth festival [in the ’60s]. I can’t remember the exact year. They were just playing a few songs before, I think, the Fifth Dimension. And we were not expecting like a raunchy, sexy guy with low slung jeans. We were shocked because I was probably 12, 11, and you know, Ann was maybe 13, 14 or something. And we were like, “Oh, goodness, look how suggestive.” And even though the girls around us were just screaming, we didn’t get it yet. So we walked out, because it was a little too lewd.
Ann joined Heart first and you joined later. Did you feel like you had something to prove to the guys already in the band?
Totally. I’d never done big, loud PA column-type shows before. I was a coffee shop solo artist and played with a couple of little folky type rock bands around the area when I was going to college. So, I had a huge learning curve, and I was just getting my legs under me as an electric guitar player more than I ever had before too. So, I was nervous and I was just 19. But they were patient, and I got it pretty good pretty fast. I got myself right in there and made the album, which came out in 1975.
Dreamboat Annie, you mean?
Yeah, Dreamboat Annie. It regionally started to be a hit and we were off to the races.
That must have been a cool feeling when it started to take off.
Oh yeah, it was a million thrills to be acknowledged, and 50 years later, we’re looking at a victory lap at this point.
$182 and up, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 3, Majestic Theatre, 224 E. Houston St., (210) 226-3333, majesticempire.com.