The Heart hit that was inspired by an intra-band romance
The version of Seattle hard rock legends Heart that audiences know today isn’t the same Heart that was struggling to get attention in the early 1970s rock scene. The band, founded under the name The Army and later changed to Hocus Pocus and White Heart before finally settling on just Heart, was an all-male enterprise headed by guitarist Roger Fisher.
Roger’s brother, Mike, was an occasional early band member and would later be the group’s manager. During a show in the Pacific Northwest, Mike locked eyes with a young Ann Wilson. The connection was immediate, and Wilson soon found herself running away with Mike to Canada along with the rest of Heart, which she soon joined as a vocalist with their chance meeting inspiring Heart’s first hit, ‘Magic Man’.
“I was living at home, going to art college and existing in this very staid, suburban state of being,” Wilson recalled to Rolling Stone. “Then I met a guy [Mike Fisher, early Heart band member and later their soundman and manager] and love just took over. He was the “magic man”. I totally walked out of my parents’ house and away from all the safety and all the assurance and went to Canada to follow him”.
Just like in the lyrics, Wilson’s mother would call her and beg her to come home. “And my mom was not sure it was a real good idea. She was like, ‘You are so young and immature! Do you even use birth control?’ Back then you didn’t talk to your mother about that kind of stuff,” Wilson remembered. “I think I was 21, but I was young for my age”.
“So the song is a story about leaving home. Lines like ‘Come on home, girl, Mama cried on the phone,’ that was real,” Wilson explained. “We used to have these long conversations where she would go, ‘You get back here! You don’t know what you’re doing’. I can remember how upset she was. She had no idea about the reality in the Seventies of girls and boys and free love and whatever, and she just expected the worst – that I was going to end up barefoot and pregnant and would come crawling back home and all that. She was dead set against it. She was formidable. But I won in this case”.
A few years later, Wilson managed to convince her younger sister Nancy to join the band as a guitar player as well. Nancy became romantically involved with Roger, and soon the Wilson sisters and the Fisher brothers became the focal point of Heart. That would last until 1979, when Nancy and Roger split, forcing Roger to leave the band. Mike and Ann broke up as well, and soon Heart was fully taken over by the Wilson sisters.
Check out ‘Magic Man’ down below.
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