Crazy On You. Heart. 1976. Mushroom.

 Some of the sexiest American singles released between the years 1976-1980 were by Heart, the Wilson sisters led rock quintet from the Pacific Northwest. The storytelling magnetism of those  environs, and its deleterious effect upon a tightly woven group of inhabitants, has been explicated with surrealist, mythic precision by David Lynch and Mark Frost in their television and film epic Twin Peaks. It’s true that Heart’s musical output goes nowhere near the empyrean heights and depths of Twin Peaks but an intensely experienced female sexuality—both transgressive and redemptive—informs both bodies of work. Heart’s breakthrough debut record, Dreamboat Annie, was a startling success, released  in the celebratory year that America commemorated its bicentennial anniversary. Having just written the final chapters on the Vietnam War and Watergate crises, and a full three years before the Islamic Revolution in Tehran, the country attempted to foster a rare unified state of Cold War relaxation. Via FM radio, Dreamboat Annie’s three best songs went into heavy rotation, disrupting the typically sleazy expression of male dominated sexual hubris that was then the lingua franca of the hard rock lyric. The best of Dreamboat Annie’s ten tracks, Crazy On You, is an uptempo monogamy rocker dramatized by a heightened sense of need that drives vocalist Ann Wilson across alternating moods, from lonely resignation to a bewildered state of sexual obsession. This modulated redux of Janis Joplin’s blues possessed shamanism blasts through hard rock conventions with enough inspired momentum to maximize its allotted 4:53 pop singles count. Once marketed as a female alternative to Led Zeppelin—a crass label that the band easily overshot—Heart recorded notoriously uneven LPs, but a handful of their singles endure because of producer Mike Flicker’s sophisticated, far-sighted grasp of how best to give shape to Wilson’s peerless, full-bodied talents. Her greatest strength, revealed in her band’s early years, was knowing when to excise rock histrionics, an artful scaling back of expression that demonstrated full control of her emotive powers. This may have been the basis of her rapport with audiences, who could count on Wilson to deliver lines like, “I was a willow last night in a dream. I bent down over a clear running stream…and you kept me alive with your sweet flowing love,” without the record sacrificing any of its otherwise outward brilliance. Heart was among the FM rockers who offered preteen Generation X the chance to decide for themselves, through a grueling process of elimination, how we were to go about forming our musical tastes. We often times championed aggression over sentimentality, seeing in the latter an amorphous ambiguity we associated with the outmoded tastes of overly conservative generations. Heart was such a skilled practitioner of the hard rock art that they helped set conventions that would eventually become the self parodying genre “classic rock.” Yet, during the MTV era of the nineteen eighties, Heart pivoted, along with Peter Cetera, Belinda Carlisle, Lionel Richie, among others, from their gloriously inventive pop origins, towards a dull but overwhelmingly popular class of pop music more closely related in style to the subimaginative orchestrations of Andrew Lloyd Webber and David Foster. Heart had begun making music not simply for the preceding generations, but for the saccharine hearted dupes who had ushered Reagan into office. American rock and roll had endured its first serious hobbling. It would be another decade before it could walk properly once more, guided steady, again, by artists from the Pacific Northwest.

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