Dreamboat Annie. Dreamboat Nancy. The Seattle sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson: one shreds with her voice, the other sings with her guitar. (The poet Louise Glück wrote, “Of two sisters / one is always the watcher, / one the dancer.” Not in this family.) Their co-written 1975 song “Dreamboat Annie,” from their band Heart’s debut album of the same title, speaks presciently of “riding on the diamond waves,” but they could not have known how sparkling and how high those waves would be.
During Heart’s triumphant Radio City concert on April 16 — Ann had only recently “kicked cancer’s ass” — Nancy recalled that the late Eddie Van Halen once told her, “You play pretty good guitar for a girl.” In the ’70s a female guitarist in a hard rock band was an anomaly, and so was a frontwoman. (The sisters wrote “Little Queen,” Ann said when introducing that early song, to tell “what it’s like to be a baby band and be different.”) But Nancy’s stellar playing paired with Ann’s extraordinary vocals — both of them ranging from lyrical to explosive — won hearts, with a small h, all over the world.
Fifty years after its debut, Heart — only the Wilsons remain of the original band — is still wowing audiences, currently with the Royal Flush tour. This despite another setback for Ann; she’d broken her elbow and so had on a sling, but was also in a wheelchair for extra safety (definitely no stage-diving…). Even in a wheelchair, Ann, who wore an elegant black dress and velvet jacket, has a commanding presence; she is a rock ’n’ roll elder statesperson, if that’s not an oxymoron. (The original Heart band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.)
Just as the Wilson sisters possess a similar beauty, they have the musical advantage of sibling harmony, a natural closeness in timbre.
In between the dramatic opening song, “Bébé le Strange,” and the driving encore, “Barracuda,” the seven-piece band revisited many of the hits, along with more recent fare: Nancy’s guitar instrumental “4 Edward” (yes, Van Halen), from her 2021 solo album, You and Me. They also covered Led Zeppelin’s “The Ocean” and “Going to California,” with its poetic mandolin lines and an especially nuanced vocal from Ann, as well as David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.” The latter came on the sexy heels of Heart’s “Straight On,” with a talking bass line by NYC’s Tony Lucido leading into the infectious guitar and conga riffs of the Bowie classic. (Speaking of sexy heels, it was fun to watch Nancy kick and jump in her over-the-knee boots that zipped all the way up the back.)
Ann, known for her expert control and multi-octave range, had also told the audience she’d developed a cough that we might hear in her voice. I did, occasionally. But she was able to maneuver around any difficulties, putting across the emotion and essence of the songs — or using the problem to her advantage, the notes still soaring but with a growly punch (as with “Let’s Dance”). I’d noticed from recent recordings that Ann’s voice has more grit anyway than it used to, not a bad thing.
It wouldn’t be Heart without testaments to womanly lust, most notably “Crazy on You” (a song for our time: “What you gonna do when everybody’s insane?… / Let me go crazy on you”) and “Magic Man” (“He got magic hands”), featuring the magic hands of Nancy, who performed a complex acoustic guitar intro, and of Ryan Wariner and Paul Moak, with searing guitar-lick trade-offs.
And it wouldn’t be Heart without power ballads. Nancy, with surreal hot-pink and blue lighting and a glittering effect behind her, took the lead vocal on “These Dreams” — a song co-written by Bernie Taupin and Martin Page and turned down by Stevie Nicks — as she did on the recording, sometimes drawing on an edgy facet of her voice. Toward the end, a shaker marking the backbeat behind her, she did an unexpected high-note run that brought applause from the crowd, already on their feet. Other ballads included “Love Alive,” with its flute and feast of guitars (the fourth guitarist was Ryan Waters), those lights suggesting a green and pink psychedelic waterfall; the tender “Dog and Butterfly,” with Ann’s sweet tone turning wary on “The world’s getting colder”; and a thrilling “Alone” / “What About Love” pairing — the music, with its sweeping synth line, somehow entering one’s bones and the audience joining in on the recurring lyric, “What about love?” (Another appropriate question for our time.)
Just as the sisters possess a similar beauty, they have the musical advantage of sibling harmony, a natural closeness in timbre. But their personal harmony suffered a blow after an incident some years ago involving both of their families, and for a long time they were estranged. When touring together, they kept “sanctuary zones” offstage so they could remain separated. The two have since reconciled, and at one point, looking at Ann, Nancy said, “I hardly know how to express my love for my sister.”
One of the last songs was “Sand,” which, as the Lovemongers (a side project of the sisters), the Wilsons wrote in the ’90s for Ann’s gardener after he died of AIDS. (He’d taught her children about “the circle of life,” she said.) Ann sounded strong singing “Goodbye, my friend,” with Nancy’s more delicate voice backing her up. As they sang those words, green, vaguely leaf-patterned lights caused the backdrop, curved folds of fabric, to take on an Edenic effect — paradise reclaimed.
Postscript: The concert included an interlude in which fantastic Heart drummer Sean T. Lane was alone on the stage with what he calls The Bike. Composed of what appeared to be a circle of many drums and god knows what else (a real bike? … impossible to tell), it enabled him to create unearthly sounds, or perhaps what really angry birds or as-yet-undiscovered sea creatures might utter. Maybe they’ll make their way into a Heart song.
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I’ve got nothing against Cheap Trick or Squeeze, opening acts for some of the Royal Flush tour dates, but how lucky was I to bask in the stage presence of Heart’s Wednesday opener, the Americana singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams. Like Ann Wilson, Williams had experienced a major health issue, a stroke, in 2010. Because of this, she can’t play guitar (her left hand was affected) and walks haltingly, but she’s been touring a lot and sounds fantastic. At a City Winery show a while back, she said that a friend told her she sounds better since the stroke, and I had been thinking the same thing. Her delivery seems smoother, with a slightly richer quality, while keeping that only-Lucinda raw energy.
She kicked things off with “Rock ’n’ Roll Heart” (in case you had any doubt that she has one). Her terrific five-piece band provided the cut-through-steel guitar licks — lending veracity to her song “Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings” — and superb harmonies that her songs call out for. Never one to shy away from pain and mortality, she sang about two deceased friends: Tom Petty, in “Stolen Memories,” and singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, in “Drunken Angel,” with its visceral details (“taste your sweat”), plaintive harmonica by Doug Pettibone, and a shattering question — Foley was killed during an altercation in 1989 — “Why’d you let go of your guitar?”
Other hits Williams did included “Change the Locks,” in which she purported, as David Sutton’s bass pulsed underneath her vocal, to be able to change the tracks under a train to elude a former lover. (That’s a superpower, I silently told her, but your real superpower is your ability to write such lyrics — well, she is the daughter of a poet, Miller Williams, who read a poem at the second inauguration of Bill Clinton.) She also performed the crowd-pleaser “Joy,” which Ann Wilson would later, in thanking Williams, call “very, very, very down and special.” Ann commented, however, that she didn’t think Williams, who says in the song, “I’m gonna go to Slidell and look for my joy,” would find it in the small Louisiana town.
She might find it in London, though, where she recently recorded her new album, Lucinda Williams Sings the Beatles From Abbey Road. For the lead single, Williams has wrapped her southern sensibility around George Harrison’s exquisite “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” When she movingly did the song at Radio City, I immediately thought of her own guitar(s) missing her deft touch — or the reverse. (She’s reportedly optimistic about being able to play again.) Guitarist Mark Ford made the ending solo his own; while it didn’t sound like a guitar weeping, as Harrison’s friend Eric Clapton somehow conjured, it was exhilarating in its pathos and dexterity. And drummer Brady Blade pumped his part up from Ringo’s version — this is where I noticed he had a Ramones T-shirt on.
Williams’s encore song was also a cover, Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World.” The term “free world” suddenly gave me pause, since our freedoms are clearly under threat. But the rockin’ part was definitely true. Williams thanked us (she’d also thanked her crew) for giving the band “a chance to rock your collective minds,” a perfect description of the communal show experience we’d just had. And she left us — as everyone stood and cheered, and she crossed the stage with the help of a stagehand using a small flashlight — with these words as well: “Don’t give up the fight.” She never has. ❖
Mary Lyn Maiscott has conducted interviews, covered the arts, and written personal essays for the Village Voice, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, and New York Woman, among others. She is also a singer-songwriter whose latest digital single is “Mild December.”