How Cool Are: Heart
Sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson formed the core of the group Heart, a group that originally didn't have either of them in it.
As always, Wikipedia has the dime store tour of their history; origins, highs and lows, hits and breakups, disasters and comebacks. There's nothing new that I can add to that.
So, I won't try. What I'll do today, gentle reader, is try to give you an idea of what Heart means to me.
If you are young, you probably only know about Heart as the soundtrack from those cruel, shameful atrocities that are the Swiffer Wet Jet commercials. While What About Love was never one of my favorite Heart tracks, it deserved much better treatment than that.
If you are a bit older, 20's maybe, you might know about Heart because of Ann Wilson's weight.
If you are my age, though, hopefully you remember the Heart that existed before What About Love, before These Dreams, before Alone. Before all that power ballad candy ass pop crap.
I remember being just a kid, riding around in my sisters 1976 VW Bug, and listening to groups like The Pretenders, Styx and Heart.
I remember Heart scared the shit out of me.
See, when I was a kid, women were scary. I mean, throughout the history of mankind, the opposite sex is always scary when you hit puberty. Everything is new, different, awkward and just plain frightening. But, growing up in the late 1970's, this was especially so.
This was the real breakout moment for women, especially women in music. Women were empowered, loud and rocking out. Obviously singers like Janice Joplin and Grace Slick gave a feminine soul to rock and roll at least a decade earlier. But this new batch of female vocalists were different. This wasn't peaceful hippy love that women were singing about, this was aggressive, dominant, powerful and physical.
We had gone from You Can't Hurry Love by The Supremes to Tattooed Love Boys by The Pretenders, with Chrissie Hynde singing, "I shot my mouth off and you showed me what that hole was for, yeah"
That would scare the shit out of anybody.
So there I was, riding around in that Bug, with it's NORML sticker on the back bumper, listening to Heart sing about Barracudas and Dogs & Butterflies and Magic Man. And I thought, "Who are these women? They look hot, but they give off this aggressive vibe that my pre-pubescent mind just can't process. What's going on here? Shouldn't women be soft and fluffy and cuddly? I think these women are going to hit me, then laugh."
Heart were one of the first bands I ever listened to where I was introduced to the sound of an empowered, dominant woman's voice. I'm sure if I had listen to The Runaways, also introduced in 1977, my head would have probably exploded.
So, Heart holds a special place in my heart. There are a 1,000 reasons to like Heart: Nancy Wilson is a virtuoso on the guitar, Ann is a world-class songwriter, their music continues to hold fast and even improve with age.
But for me, Heart defines the sound of a very specific time, both for the world and for myself. Heart is a soundtrack-of-my-life group, probably the one group who opened the biggest doors in my mind, and also probably one of the last of the great "Classic Rock" bands.
Heart successfully mixed sensuality and dominance, submission and forcefulness, hard and soft, loud and smooth - Heart showed more variety in everything they did than most other bands at the time put together.
And how cool is that?
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