Ann and Nancy Wilson Recall Heart’s 1970s Implosion in New Book

Ann and Nancy Wilson weren’t in the original incarnation of Heart, though their presence played a crucial role in the band’s breakout success thanks to Seventies smash hits like “Magic Man” and “Crazy on You.” But much like Fleetwood Mac, they learned that private relationships within a band can erupt into chaos once money and fame enter the picture.

In this exclusive excerpt from the new Paul Rees book Raised on Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola – the AOR Glory Years 1976-1986 (out now via Grand Central Publishing), the Wilson sisters and their former bandmates look back at the tumultuous period around the time of 1978’s Dog and Butterly, culminating with guitarist Roger Fisher’s departure from Heart.

The book also chronicles the sagas of Boston, Foreigner, Toto, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Bryan Adams, Styx, and other mega-selling acts of the AOR era.

Steve Fossen: “During the course of recording the Dog and Butterfly album, we discovered we had a bunch of aggressive songs and a bunch of mellower songs. We decided to put the aggressive songs on one side of the LP and the mellow songs on the other. Mike Flicker was still our producer, and he had a great set of ears, so he could make the best out of everything.”

Ann Wilson: “I think Nancy’s at her best when she’s playing acoustic guitar. That’s always my vote. I don’t think you could call her a virtuoso in the Segovia sense, but she’s an original. She can make a guitar move and come up with parts that are so cool, and so her. That’s when she’s at her most real. She’s not thinking about herself.”

Nancy Wilson: “The greatest God-given gift from above is my love affair with the guitar. It’s my language. It speaks to me, and I speak with it.”

***

Roger Fisher: “A song like ‘Mistral Wind,’ it’s just so powerful and otherworldly.”

Nancy Wilson: “It’s a really perfect example of everything Heart’s good at in seven minutes. It’s acoustic. It’s poetic. And then it’s huge rock. It’s a journey through the lyrics. It takes you through Ulysses’s journey, basi-cally. I love that one. It’s not three chords, let’s put it that way.”

Steve Fossen: “A lot of people consider that song to be Heart’s master-piece. It was kind of the culmination of all we’d done and the things we’d dreamt about. It was a very special song to us.”

Roger Fisher: “Me and Ann were really buddies, and we had great times for a while there. Nobody else in the band more than she and I, I think, had the sense of profoundness of ‘Mistral Wind.’”

Ann Wilson: “For some strange, unknown reason, it seems to be a pre-requisite for singers, and to a lesser degree, a lot of people in groups and artists, they’re the ones who see the world in a different way. They don’t have the same aspirations as other people. They definitely don’t want to marry young and retire. They want to live a life.”

Roger Fisher: “Oh, it got to be tense making that album. Ann and Nance were raised by these two beautiful people, John and Lou Wilson. John was the officer in the Marines, but Lou was the real officer. The way she raised her girls, it was like, if you have a chance to take power, gain rank, you take it. They had that built into their constitution. As Ann realized that she had more and more power, she wanted it just to be her and Nance’s band. That was what was going on.”

Mike Fisher: “In our entourage of employees, some people felt like the combination of the brothers and sisters wasn’t a good thing. We were too powerful, and they tried to undo that actively. There were these forces acting against us during the recording of Dog and Butterfly.”

***

Roger Fisher: “And boy-oh-boy that was tough.”

Steve Fossen: “With Roger and Mike being boyfriends of the stars, they were, can I say annoying? They got annoyingly full of themselves. They just rubbed people the wrong way by thinking they could tell everyone what to do and what to play. It was difficult.”

Roger Fisher: “I kind of helped them with their decision-making by doing really stupid stuff. I’m with this incredible, beautiful, talented woman and I’m out there being unfaithful to her. It was a little bit excus-able in the sense we were all doing stuff like that at that time, but it was convenient to help get me out of the band.”

Steve Fossen: “Roger was not faithful to Nancy. When you’re not faith-ful to somebody, it’s easy for the other person that’s being hurt to say, ‘That’s it, you’ve stepped over the line.’”

Roger Fisher: “I was actually set up one night. I was set up to have sex with these two women. The next day, Ann and Nance found out all about it because it was a setup. That was the big excuse for them to say, ‘Okay, you’re out.’”

Steve Fossen: “When Roger and Nancy broke up, Rog really had a tough time dealing with it.”

Mike Fisher: “Roger actually continued in the band without being with Nancy. They were in the band together for, like, a year. It was a really awful period. For me, it was really heartbreaking to see my beautiful dream coming apart.”

Roger Fisher: “It was excruciating. I was just absolutely heartbroken and then Nancy started going out with Mike Derosier. I had to be around that, and it was so painful. It was just torment.”

Mike Fisher: “I just didn’t feel like I was getting the support from Ann

that I should have gotten. I felt kind of betrayed by her. That’s kind of how we became unwound together. She didn’t really see it happening. I was enduring this heartbreak for a long time.”

Steve Fossen: “Then we came to find out that Mike was straying on Ann at the same time. When he told her she just said, ‘Okay, that’s it, we’re done.’”

Mike Fisher: “Ann and I had bought a couple of places together. One was on the Oregon coast, down at Cannon Beach. The other was a cha-let at a skiing resort up in the mountains. The last time I was with Ann was at the Cannon Beach house.”

Steve Fossen: “Playing the live shows, Roger was kind of on his own island. Then, when we started up the initial sessions for the next record, he was not focused. We would be rehearsing a song one day, come back the next to record it, and he’d have either forgotten his part or made up a new one that didn’t gel with what we’d already come up with. It was hard to make any kind of progress with having to start over every day.”

Roger Fisher: “I’d never have not wanted to have learned those painful lessons. There are things I wish I had done differently, but no regrets.”

Steve Fossen: “We had a meeting. We had this corporate agreement, and we could vote people out. That’s what we did. Ken Kinnear, our manager at the time, he dealt with it for us. He told Rog and Mike what happened and why.”

Roger Fisher: “Mike and I were in eastern Washington watching a band that we loved play. We had a great time partying with those guys. The next morning we were at a restaurant and somehow, we got a call on the pay phone in the front of house. I don’t know how that happened. Our manager told me, ‘Well, Rog, the band got together last night, and they voted you guys out.’”

***

Steve Fossen: “I don’t know how they took it.”

Roger Fisher: “I said to Ken Kinnear, ‘Oh my God, thank you so much.’ It was a huge relief. It really was.”

Mike Fisher: “The fact was that there were all these people behind the scenes that were pushing this, and Ann and Nancy couldn’t see that they were being manipulated. I didn’t want to be part of that at all, so it was a relief to me, too.”

Steve Fossen: “Next thing we knew, Mike and Roger weren’t around. When that happens, you figure you’ve got to move on. We weren’t going to stop and feel sorry for ourselves.”

Mike Fisher: “The dream of what our band could become never really got all the way there. It could have done. It came close but didn’t quite make it.”

Steve Fossen: “At the beginning, it was musicians playing and pulling together. It wasn’t men versus women. Heart had that chemistry. I don’t think they’ve ever had that chemistry again in their band.”

Ann Wilson: “We didn’t have the stamina that, say, Fleetwood Mac had. At that point, we just needed a breather. Everything had got so big and huge. Money, fame, interviews. And all of a sudden, the emotional toll just kind of ate us.”