{"id":632249,"date":"2026-03-04T19:13:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T19:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/632249\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T19:13:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T19:13:14","slug":"ann-and-nancy-wilson-recall-hearts-1970s-implosion-in-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/632249\/","title":{"rendered":"Ann and Nancy Wilson Recall Heart’s 1970s Implosion in New Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAnn and Nancy Wilson<\/a> weren\u2019t in the original incarnation of Heart<\/a>, though their presence played a crucial role in the band\u2019s breakout success thanks to Seventies smash hits like \u201cMagic Man\u201d and \u201cCrazy on You.\u201d But much like Fleetwood Mac, they learned that private relationships within a band can erupt into chaos once money and fame enter the picture. <\/p>\n

\n\tIn this exclusive excerpt<\/a> from the new Paul Rees book Raised on Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola \u2013 the AOR Glory Years 1976-1986 (out now via Grand Central Publishing)<\/a>, the Wilson sisters and their former bandmates look back at the tumultuous period around the time of 1978\u2019s Dog and Butterly, culminating with guitarist Roger Fisher\u2019s departure from Heart. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tSteve Fossen: <\/strong>\u201cDuring 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnn Wilson<\/a>: <\/strong>\u201cI think Nancy\u2019s at her best when she\u2019s playing acoustic guitar. That\u2019s always my vote. I don\u2019t think you could call her a virtuoso in the Segovia sense, but she\u2019s an original. She can make a guitar move and come up with parts that are so cool, and so her. That\u2019s when she\u2019s at her most real. She\u2019s not thinking about herself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNancy Wilson: <\/strong>\u201cThe greatest God-given gift from above is my love affair with the guitar. It\u2019s my language. It speaks to me, and I speak with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tRoger Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cA song like \u2018Mistral Wind,\u2019 it\u2019s just so powerful and otherworldly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNancy Wilson: <\/strong>\u201cIt\u2019s a really perfect example of everything Heart\u2019s good at in seven minutes. It\u2019s acoustic. It\u2019s poetic. And then it\u2019s huge rock. It\u2019s a journey through the lyrics. It takes you through Ulysses\u2019s journey, basi-cally. I love that one. It\u2019s not three chords, let\u2019s put it that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tSteve Fossen: <\/strong>\u201cA lot of people consider that song to be Heart\u2019s master-piece. It was kind of the culmination of all we\u2019d done and the things we\u2019d dreamt about. It was a very special song to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRoger Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cMe 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 \u2018Mistral Wind.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnn Wilson: <\/strong>\u201cFor 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\u2019re the ones who see the world in a different way. They don\u2019t have the same aspirations as other people. They definitely don\u2019t want to marry young and retire. They want to live a life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRoger Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cOh, 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\u2019s band. That was what was going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMike Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cIn our entourage of employees, some people felt like the combination of the brothers and sisters wasn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tRoger Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cAnd boy-oh-boy that was tough.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSteve Fossen: <\/strong>\u201cWith 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRoger Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cI kind of helped them with their decision-making by doing really stupid stuff. I\u2019m with this incredible, beautiful, talented woman and I\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSteve Fossen: <\/strong>\u201cRoger was not faithful to Nancy. When you\u2019re not faith-ful to somebody, it\u2019s easy for the other person that\u2019s being hurt to say, \u2018That\u2019s it, you\u2019ve stepped over the line.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRoger Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cI 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, \u2018Okay, you\u2019re out.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSteve Fossen: <\/strong>\u201cWhen Roger and Nancy broke up, Rog really had a tough time dealing with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMike Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cRoger 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRoger Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMike Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cI just didn\u2019t feel like I was getting the support from Ann<\/p>\n

\n\tthat I should have gotten. I felt kind of betrayed by her. That\u2019s kind of how we became unwound together. She didn\u2019t really see it happening. I was enduring this heartbreak for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSteve Fossen: <\/strong>\u201cThen we came to find out that Mike was straying on Ann at the same time. When he told her she just said, \u2018Okay, that\u2019s it, we\u2019re done.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tMike Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cAnn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSteve Fossen: <\/strong>\u201cPlaying 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\u2019d have either forgotten his part or made up a new one that didn\u2019t gel with what we\u2019d already come up with. It was hard to make any kind of progress with having to start over every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRoger Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cI\u2019d never have not wanted to have learned those painful lessons. There are things I wish I had done differently, but no regrets.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSteve Fossen: <\/strong>\u201cWe had a meeting. We had this corporate agreement, and we could vote people out. That\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRoger Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cMike 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\u2019t know how that happened. Our manager told me, \u2018Well, Rog, the band got together last night, and they voted you guys out.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tSteve Fossen: <\/strong>\u201cI don\u2019t know how they took it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRoger Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cI said to Ken Kinnear, \u2018Oh my God, thank you so much.\u2019 It was a huge relief. It really was.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMike Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cThe fact was that there were all these people behind the scenes that were pushing this, and Ann and Nancy couldn\u2019t see that they were being manipulated. I didn\u2019t want to be part of that at all, so it was a relief to me, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSteve Fossen: <\/strong>\u201cNext thing we knew, Mike and Roger weren\u2019t around. When that happens, you figure you\u2019ve got to move on. We weren\u2019t going to stop and feel sorry for ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMike Fisher: <\/strong>\u201cThe dream of what our band could become never really got all the way there. It could have done. It came close but didn\u2019t quite make it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tSteve Fossen: <\/strong>\u201cAt the beginning, it was musicians playing and pulling together. It wasn\u2019t men versus women. Heart had that chemistry. I don\u2019t think they\u2019ve ever had that chemistry again in their band.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnn Wilson: <\/strong>\u201cWe didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ann and Nancy Wilson weren\u2019t in the original incarnation of Heart, though their presence played a crucial role…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":632250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[29],"tags":[182204,43213,171,156237,4512,975,161296,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-632249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ann-wilson","tag-book-excerpt","tag-entertainment","tag-excerpt","tag-heart","tag-music","tag-nancy-wilson","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116172502420475268","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/632250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}