Review: Kicking and Dreaming

Like millions of other Canadian kids, I grew up thinking Heart was a Canadian band, fronted by two wildly talented Canadian sisters.  

Later on I learned that wasn’t the case. Ann and Nancy Wilson are from Seattle and landed in Vancouver because Ann fell in love with a Canuck who couldn’t easily travel across the border due to a few dodgy incidents in his past. Unable to find musicians to her liking in Washington, Nancy eventually joined her big sis and her band and the rest is rock and roll history.

In Kicking and Dreaming the Wilson sisters take turns telling the stories of their lives and careers, together and apart, with anecdotes from some of the other major players in their musical adventures. Ann, six years older than Nancy, was always troubled by her weight. I remember how during the band’s second coming in the dawn of the video era, Nancy would be in full view in the forefront of the scene while Ann, blurred and effected with stretching and minimizing filters, would sing lead somewhere off to the upper right of the screen, like an appearance by the Great Gazoo in The Flintstones. Ann writes in detail about what it was like to have her weight become the focus of interviews and record and concert reviews, often written by morbidly obese music journalists. Sexism played a big part in the Wilson sisters’ early days. Everyone, it seems, hit on Nancy and commented on Ann’s weight.

The sisters dish on famous bands with whom they shared the concert stage over the years. Some good (Def Leppard, Allman Brothers) some bad (John Mellencamp) and some perhaps closer than they ought to have been, given the circumstances. No spoiler here! The book covers the sisters’ whole lives up until now, including the post-heart project The Lovemongers, when they did and didn’t get along and why and even how it feels for Ann that their only number one hit was sung by Nancy. They don’t gloss stuff over. Of particular interest to a lifelong Heart fan like me is the genesis of enduring rock classics such as Barracuda, Magic Man and Dog and Butterfly. They also had a huge hit that Ann sang her heart out on but I had an inkling at the time that she hated it. It wasn’t written by the sisters and something just told me it wasn’t her favourite. Turns out that I was correct and she loathes it so much she will never sing it again. You’ll have to read the book to find out which one it was.