The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has officially announced their 2024 nominations. These include Mariah Carey, Cher, Eric B. & Rakim, Foreigner, Kool & the Gang, Oasis, Sinéad O’Connor, Ozzy Osbourne and A Tribe Called Quest. If inducted, it will be Ozzy Osbourne's second appearance i…
Sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson were among millions who watched the Beatles’ historic performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Feb. 9, 1964. How many music-artists-to-be were “born” that night?
Sixty years later, Ann and Nancy are still rocking, and they are leading the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band Heart for its Royal Flush Tour across the U.S. Heart is being supported on the 2024 reunion tour by another Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group, Cheap Trick.
“It’s really a good time for us to do this while we’re still young,” Nancy Wilson said in a Zoom interview with the Tulsa World ahead of a tour stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “And, relatively speaking, we are still pretty young because we’re able to do it. Doing anything else, I don’t know what that would be. So, like Paul McCartney says, this is my work. This is what I do. And it’s so much fun to do it. Aside from the travel, it’s really fun to do the shows. It’s a trade-off for the travel part, but our fans are just really loyal. They’ve stuck it out all this whole time — and their kids as well, now. So it’s fun for the whole family to see Heart.”
Well, it’s really hard to imagine not having seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in ’64 at the age of 9 and being possessed to do music and guitars. But I think we would’ve always gone into music one way or the other because our family is very musical. We all had choir and harmony singing and barbershop quartets and small ensemble choir groups, and even aunts and uncles and grandparents (in music). We just had to have ukuleles and pianos. The guitar and the rock band thing was just a natural extension of all of that musical food that we grew up being nourished with.
Your sister Lynn, who is not in Heart, was she into music as well?
Well, she’s being the oldest. She’s eight years older than me. She got married and had a kid very, very young. She was 19 at the time, before I was even old enough to play clubs where Ann was old enough to play. But we sang a lot with her. She came out on the road with us. She sang a lot of background vocals on many of our albums with us. We had this, you know, blood harmony thing. And then she was our wardrobe lady (editor’s note: Lynn has costuming credits on IMDb) ... all through the ’80s and was our videographer at the time. So she documented all of the trouble we were getting ourselves into. And we’re still in touch. We’re still, the three of us, leaders of our family, the Wilson girls.
In hindsight, what was the big break?
It was getting fired from a really bad dinner club — a disco dinner club, a dance club, in Canada called Lucifer’s. We got an offer, basically simultaneously, to go to Montreal and open up for Rod Stewart, whose opening act had gotten sick or had to drop out for some reason. So it was like something in a film. It was like a movie script or something. It’s like, oh my God, Rod Stewart’s opening act (can’t perform). And somebody knew somebody who told somebody, “Well, Heart can make it. They just got fired from Lucifer’s.”
So we took the train two days across Canada and opened for Rod Stewart, where the new single “Magic Man” had already started to play on the radio. So when we played “Magic Man,” they knew the song and they lit up their lighters. And we didn’t know that they even knew the song yet, but we were like, “Oh my God, this is actually happening.” So it was quite a life-altering first-song moment on a first-time-ever big stage.
That had to be great exposure.
Very great. We opened up in Canada for April Wine, we opened for ELO, we opened for ZZ Top ... and all kinds of bands. We opened for the Beach Boys in the States, and we would do festivals with The Eagles and on and on. The first album just started rolling out and offers kept coming and there was no stopping for like two years.
Your first four albums went platinum, and the fifth album went gold. Was immediate success a good thing?
It was such a good thing. I wasn’t completely surprised, somehow. Maybe that’s an egomaniacal thing to say, but there was like a destiny and a feeling of destiny involved with all of that, from the Beatles forward and musically either way, like we said. But (success) was like “Well, of course.” Ann’s voice is so undeniably special and wonderful and one of a kind, you know? It’s a gift from above, basically. And I was just hellbent on being a guitar player. So the two of us together, we could be a band — just even the two of us. So we had this informed-by-the-family — musical family — natural talent to just move quickly through and become confident at our craft really young, and to make bands and go out and play clubs and just learn the ropes and do the thousand hours of practice and all of it.
After those early albums went gold or platinum, a couple of albums didn’t sell as well. Then, in 1985, Heart blew up all over again with the self-titled album “Heart.”
There’s an old saying, I guess, that the average lifespan of every rock band is five years. So from ’75 to ’80 was our life span, and we started kind of falling off the grid a little bit and redefining and trying to figure out our new identity. Every five years, the style will change, and of course the ’80s was a huge style shift with all the new technology that was being invented and keyboards and layers of synthesizers and production techniques. So we kind of rallied our workmanlike ethic — our work ethic, our military precision work ethic — back together and got new management, got a new record company, put on the costumes and made an album with outside songwriters for the first time. And that was the fashion of the time.
Was MTV good for you, or it didn’t really matter?
It was definitely indelibly good, even if it’s a comedy now to see some of the hair and some of the costumery of all that. But, you know, I wanted my MTV. We all wanted MTV, because it was hard to get cool rock videos anywhere for a long time before that. And so when it was all about music, it was so exciting, and it kind of disintegrated into not about music at all, eventually. But, at the beginning of MTV, it was very exciting. And you could just leave it on all day and discover new music. “Wow. Tears for Fears! Oh my God! I love that band!” You could just discover music all over the place.
I cheated and looked at the set list for this tour. Is there an art to picking a song to open the show?
Oh yes. The whole sequence is a big art. I love the sequencing of songs, like when you make an album, for instance — side one, side two and the journey that you go on. But a live show — and it’s 100% live, what we do — is really an interesting little journey to take because, as rock fans, you go see your favorite artists. Like, we got to see Led Zeppelin. We got to see The Who. We got to see Elton John. We got to see Pink Floyd and Wings. And we saw The Beatles actually one time. And it’s like the arc of a story that you tell through the (show), so you want to come out sort of guns blaring, normally. You don’t want to come out too introspective, like navel-gazing. You want to come out with like, hey, let’s rock.
I made a sign. People always asked us “How did you do that? When you were in an era of males dominating all of the business things, how did you kind of get permission to actually get out there and get in front of it?” I say, “We didn’t ask. We didn’t need any permission. We just did it.” So now I have a sign that I made in my hotel that says “Permission to Rock.” And so we do a little warm-up thing before the show, and the audience gives us permission to rock. And then we come out and we rock. So it’s just kind of a fun conversation to start. And then it’s sort of like we come out and “We don’t need no stinking permission to rock. We’re already rocking.”
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has officially announced their 2024 nominations. These include Mariah Carey, Cher, Eric B. & Rakim, Forei…
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Nancy Wilson, left, and Ann Wilson, right, of the band Heart perform as Heart is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during the 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony.
Nancy Wilson, left, and Ann Wilson, right, of the band Heart perform during the 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. Heart and Cheap Trick, also a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band, will perform Saturday at BOK Center.