#nancywilson #heart #rockfileradio
Nancy Lamoureaux Wilson (born March 16, 1954) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, actress, and producer. She and her older sister Ann are the core of the rock band Heart.
Nancy Wilson was born in San Francisco, California. She is the youngest of three sisters (Lynn, Ann and Nancy), who grew up in Southern California and Taiwan before their US Marine Corps father retired to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue.
On February 9, 1964, when Nancy and Ann watched the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show, she and her sister instantly wanted to be like the band. In an interview she said, "The lightning bolt came out of the heavens and struck Ann and me the first time we saw the Beatles on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' ... There'd been so much anticipation and hype about the Beatles that it was a huge event, like the lunar landing: that was the moment Ann and I heard the call to become rock musicians. I was seven or eight at the time. ... Right away, we started doing air guitar shows in the living room, faking English accents, and studying all the fanzines."
Two of Nancy's friends who could sing joined Nancy and Ann to form their first music group. Calling themselves the Viewpoints, they were a four-part harmony vocal group. Later that year, Ann bought her first guitar, a Kent acoustic, with money given to her by her grandmother. Nancy's parents soon bought her a smaller guitar, but since it would not stay in tune, Ann's guitar became Nancy's too.
While a senior in high school, Ann joined a band. Their drummer knew a country songwriter who needed a band to play on his songwriting demos, so the band got the gig to play on three of his demo songs. During that session, the engineer allowed them to record the song "Through Eyes and Glass", which Nancy and Ann had written. The engineer had his own record label, and liked their songs enough that he offered to make up five hundred copies "for a few bucks". Nancy's and Ann's first single appeared on the B-side of the country track titled "I'm Gonna Drink My Hurt Away". It was credited to "Ann Wilson and the Daybreaks," which was not the name of the band, and it omitted Nancy as co-songwriter. Later they got back about 250 unsold copies of the record.
Ann had known of guitarist Roger Fisher and bass player Steve Fossen from their work in several bands, such as the Army, when she answered their advertisement seeking a drummer and a singer. She impressed them with her vocal skills and, within an hour, Ann was a member of the band they now named Hocus Pocus.
In June 1971, Roger's brother Michael came to see the band play. Michael was living in Canada to avoid the draft, and had sneaked over the border to visit his brother. He and Ann were smitten with each other and after "the better part of a year", Ann left the band and moved to Canada to live with Michael in his cottage. Michael had always wanted to manage his brother's band and eventually Steve and Roger also migrated to Canada – in late 1972 or early 1973 – along with a drummer and keyboard player.
The newly reformed group considered going back to Hocus Pocus, but decided on Heart and one afternoon Michael, the band's manager, drew a logo with a heart embedded in a stylized H, which subsequently became the group's logo.
While Ann was in Canada, Nancy started college and sought someone to play with, but never found a regular musical partner and was restless. In the fall of 1972, Nancy moved to Forest Grove, Oregon to attend Pacific University. The next year she transferred to Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, hoping the bigger city would invigorate her more.
By then, Steve and Roger had moved to Vancouver and had reformed as "Heart". Each time Nancy "went north" to visit her sister, Ann was trying to get Nancy to join the band. Nancy began to think of transferring again, to the University of Washington in Seattle where in-state tuition fees were less. She wrote to a friend outlining her situation, and asked if she should join the band. The friend replied with an emphatic "YES, YES, YES".
On her next visit to Ann, Nancy asked if the band would include more acoustic songs if she joined. Ann responded "that's why I want you to join". Nancy left school in mid-1974 and joined Ann and Heart in West Vancouver.
Nancy recalls that "some of the guys" in the band were resistant to her joining, and insisted she audition by sitting in periodically. She was given the assignment to work up the introduction to the Yes song "The Clap". She learned it, and the next night after playing it with the band at a tavern, she was officially made a member of the band.
source: wikipedia
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