The One With Aldacron

A word of warning: this post started out as a brief blurb about a video I found on YouTube, but it turned into a long-winded treatise on my favorite band ever. If you aren’t interested in the (incomplete) history of Heart, skip on down to the awesome concert video.

Prior to 1985, I had never heard of Heart. That was the year they hit the pop rock mainstream with their self-titled 8th album. What About Love, Never, These Dreams, and Nothing at All were all over the radio. I loved the album, but then I sought out their earlier work and loved it even more. In short order, I had all eight albums: Dreamboat Annie, Little Queen, Dog & Butterfly, Magazine, Bebe le Strange, Private Audition, Passionworks, and Heart. I bought Bad Animals upon it’s release in ‘87, Brigade in ‘90, and Desire Walks On in ‘93. Somehow, I missed the Rock the House Live! album in ‘91. Their first compilation album, Greatest Hits: Live, had been released in ‘80 but I never picked it up. In 1988 I saw them in concert for the first time on their Bad Animals tour and would see them two more times on the same tour.

Unfortunately, even though I could get their albums I was in no position to see them in concert anymore once I shipped off to Korea in ‘91. At some point over the years, I managed to lose every single Heart album I had. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but after my Army gig was up I was moving around a lot in the ’90s, generally living with one room mate after another, and sometimes my off-again, on-again girlfriend, in cheap flats to save money. Between my girlfriend kicking me out in the middle of the night (more than once), fellow English teaching room mates getting deported, and US Army room mates getting busted by the military police for black marketing, I was often packing and taking off on short notice. There’s no telling where all the tapes and CDs ended up.

Over the past couple of years I’ve renewed my interest in Heart, trying to rebuild my collection and also get my hands on some of the other work they did, such as their Lovemongers albums and live performance DVDs. On my last trip home I brought back some VHS tapes I had (they were stowed away in my mother’s closet with a great deal more of my old junk) of the music videos from the Heart and Bad Animals albums. All of the albums that I currently have are regular listening on my iPod (out of my Top 50 Most Played list on iTunes, most of the top 20 are Heart songs).

One of the things I’ve always loved about Heart is their sound and their willingness to experiment. They kicked off with a hard hitting Led Zepplinesque sound, with lots of acoustic guitar, mandolin, and flute work interleaving the electric guitars. Private Audition from ‘82 was a radical departure from that sound and, though I think it a wonderful album, a commercial failure. They went for a sort of jazzy, rag-time sound that I think was gutsy, but not a direction their fans expected. The title track is my favorite from that album. Musically, it reminds me of Queen’s Killer Queen. They changed directions again with Passionworks in ‘83. This album was also a commercial failure, but it’s one of my favorites (it also is my favorite album cover out of all of Heart’s albums). They were experimenting with electric drums, but there was also a hint of the sound that would, with the next album (Heart), catapult them to pop rock success. Most of the songs on Passionworks I think are well written, both lyrically and musically, though others consider it one of their two weakest releases (Private Audtion being the other one, of course). My favorite track on that album is a powerful anthem called Allies. It ranks among my favorite Heart tracks.

Once the Heart album was released, the group followed the same formula through to Desire Walks On. In 1995, Anne and Nancy recorded a live, acoustic performance as Heart, without the other band members, with the help of other musicians like John Paul Jones. This resulted in the album, The Road Home. That would be the last album they recorded as Heart until 2003. In the interim, several compilation albums were released: Greatest Hits in ‘98; Greatest Hits: 1985 - 1995 in ‘00; Ballads: Greatest Hits in ‘01; and Essential Heart in ‘02.

The Wilson sisters weren’t idle during that dry spell. They had moved on to form the Lovemongers with longtime friend and songwriter Sue Ennis, Frank Cox, and drummer Ben Smith. The Lovemongers returned to Heart’s roots, recapturing the original sound that first brought them success in the 70s. But they were mostly doing covers. Even so, they put out some great work. The Lovemonger sound is the Heart sound that I love. How many rock groups today use mandolins and flutes? Heart used them a lot in the 70s, but very little of their original work through the 80s and 90s made use of alternative instruments, though the mandolin and flute both made appearances in their concerts.

In 2003, the Wilson sisters made a new live recording as Heart that was released as an audio CD and a DVD, titled Alive in Seattle. It’s a fantastic performance, even better than The Road Home. Finally, 2004 saw the release of a Heart album filled with original work and greatly inspired by their roots, Jupiter’s Darling. What a wonderful album. I can say I’ve been waiting over 20 years for this. I enjoy their stuff from the 80’s and 90’s, but Nancy Wilson is a goddess on acoustic guitar, and along with an accompanying mandolin they have recaptured the essence of their 70s sound (with a cleaner sounding electric guitar than the gritty, analog 70s version).

So I’m a fan of all things Heart and of the Wilson sisters. I’ve been spending some time surfing around YouTube these days, looking for videos I’ve never seen. I’ve found several from Heart, particularly some live performances from the late 70s and early 80s. One of my favorite songs from their early days is Crazy on You, the third track from their 1976 debut album, Dreamboat Annie. It has a fantastic acoustic intro. It’s been so long that I can’t recall if they played it at any of the concerts I saw in the 80s, but I found this video of an awesome performance from the late 70s.

Technorati Tags: Heart, Ann Wilson, Nancy Wilson, Lovemongers, YouTube