GREAT APES: These Dreams 💜

🛌🌙

It’s a lugubrious Friday morning here in New York City — a featureless gray sky; cold, damp air; the East River and the Hudson lying there slack-jawed and stunned — and we’re guessing it’s not much nicer wherever you happen to be, good, bespectacled (or naked-faced) Reader. So here’s a mug of hot tea for your ears — a radiant, life-giving antidote that you can pour right into your ears, like some kind of idiot who doesn’t know how to drink tea.

Let’s discuss…

CHRIS: Our readers won’t know this, Keith, but whenever somebody starts in with a story they want to tell you, you put your hand an inch from their face, order them to “STOP,” and then more politely request that they “set the scene.” So allow me to do just that. The year is 1984. Heart, a San Francisco rock band whose early career in the ‘70s boasted significant hits like “Crazy On You” and “Barracuda,” have fallen onto hard times. Their last two releases — Private Audition (1982) and Passionworks (1983) — failed to yield a single and FLOPPED, and CBS Records has dropped them. Newly signed to Capitol, the pressure, Keith — are you listening? — is on. Enter “These Dreams.”

Martin Page and Bernie Taupin were an unproven songwriting team in 1984. Both knew success from other projects — Page with his band Q-Feel, and Taupin with Sir John (that’s Mr. Elton to you!) — but their alchemy as a pair was untested. They wrote “These Dreams” with Stevie Nicks in mind, and they must have been confused and scared when she turned it down 😕 (I can’t find any documentation of their emotional state when Stevie Nicks turned down “These Dreams”). Anyway, it got passed along to Heart, and while “members of the band” thought it was a cheesy bolus of suck and didn’t want to use it, Nancy Wilson loved it. What about Ann, the Wilson sister who actually founded Heart with guitarist Roger Fisher and bass player Steve Fossen? Again, the historical record lacks resolution, but we can intuit that Ann, too, thought “These Dreams” was a room-temp plate of anteater terrine, for Nancy recorded the lead vocal, despite the fact that Ann was the band’s lead singer. 

What a gamble! Could it work? Would it pay off? Is Crom a just god? We know that he is not! Would he punish Nancy Wilson’s valiant willingness to fight for what she believed in by scuttling Heart’s debut for Capitol (another classic Crom kick to the teeth)? Before I answer that question — because I know that at this point you’ve actually forgotten whether Heart did or did not go on to be a famous band — let me sprinkle on a little more drama.

Sharon Hess, huge Heart fan, was just 22 when her leukemia prognosis turned grim. Somehow — I curse historians’ inattention to these important details! — word reaches Heart that Ms. Hess wants nothing more for her final days than to meet her favorite band (Heart; Heart is the favorite band). A studio visit is arranged. Hess shows up, and what’s getting laid down to tape? Some bullshit guitar solo? Another shit-hot, bullshit drum fill? No, dude — why would I include this in the story if it weren’t Nancy Wilson’s vocals for “These Dreams”? It is Nancy Wilson’s vocals for “These Dreams”! But… what will Sharon Hess, longtime listener, think of the band’s radical turn toward pop? Will she curse Heart for their betrayal, lift her leg and piss on the recording desk, and storm out of the studio, puncturing guitarist Howard Leese’s Corvette’s tire with a butterly knife as she hobbles toward the closest bus stop?? 

Would Sharon Hess have accidentally stuck the HANDLE of the knife into Howard Leese’s tire??? How????

Keith, Sharon Hess loved “These Dreams.” She flipped. She told Nancy she should sing lead more often (I bet), and (probably said) that this song was gonna be a hit. Nancy’s eyes (no doubt) welled up with gratitude, even as she stared daggers at her faithless bandmates, and she and Hess (might have) embraced.

As mentioned above, Crom is an asshole of a god, and Sharon Hess died only days after the final mixes were completed for Heart, the self-titled album that would contain “These Dreams” along with the singles “What About Love” and “Never.” “These Dreams” was dedicated to Sharon Hess in the album’s liner notes, and when Heart released it to radio in early 1986, about six months after dropping the album and two other singles to warm but not overwhelming acclaim, they scored their first number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Heart’s career was revitalized, they had tons of cocaine money again, and Nancy Wilson married future-famous director Cameron Crowe (in July of ’86, just four months after “These Dreams” hit number one!). 

What do you make of it, dude? 

KEITH: Well, man. I don’t KNOW what to think, here. I’d assumed that Heart's initial reaction to the song was simply their act of resistance to a perceived “sell-out” move. Not only did the song represent a shift toward sugary pop radio, but (crucially) it was a song-for-hire. Their earlier hit singles — “Magic Man,” “Crazy On You,” and “Barracuda” — had been written by the Wilson sisters (with an occasional hand from other members of the band); I can imagine that accepting that your own compositions aren’t sufficient to save your band from commercial oblivion is a very hard pill to swallow, indeed.  

But let's take a look at the other Top-Ten singles from the record, namely “What About Love,” “Never,” “Nothing At All.” All slot right in with "These Dreams,” sonically: mid-tempo, synth-heavy, far-removed from their former classic rock sound. Only their fifth single, “If Looks Could Kill,” which landed at a comparatively-low #54 on the Billboard charts, hearkened back to their days as a (relatively) gritty guitar rock band.  But importantly, Chris, NOT ONE of these songs was written by a member of Heart (only “Never” features a tacked-on, third-place co-writing credit to “Connie,” the umbrella moniker for the songwriting team of the Wilsons and their longtime collaborator Sue Ennis, but given that those artists collaborated on other songs in which they are each credited individually, one gets the suspicion that the deployment of the “Connie” credit indicates minimal contribution). So, the band only really chipped in on writing about half of the record, all of which were songs destined to live solely as album tracks.  

All of this is to say that if the problem the band had with the song had nothing to do with the poppy new sound or their lack of personal authorship, then it means Heart flat out thought “These Dreams" sucked. They thought it was worse than “If Looks Could Kill,” which I’ll go out on a limb and say is not a very good song. It kinda sounds like a tired Mötley Crüe tune, which in this one case I DO NOT mean as a compliment. So their publisher brought in “If Looks Could Kill” and “These Dreams,” and the band listened to them both and thought, "'These Dreams' is worse."  Chris, something was wrong with this band. 

I did some follow-up research on your question regarding Sharon Hess’s inexplicable access to the inner-workings of the Heart enterprise, and I learned that Hess didn’t simply rely on the band’s famously good-hearted-if-also-stupid-about-song-choice character. Savvily, she also came bearing a gift — a handmade blue acoustic guitar that she’d crafted especially for Nancy. "So what," you sniff, you callous wretch.  “She’s Nancy Wilson, guitarist in a wildly successful guitar-based band. Surely she’s got dozens of guitars. Hundreds, probably. Maximum, one-thousand, but that’s still a LOT of guitars, and many of them are likely of the acoustic variety. What does she want with another guitar, especially one made by a fan who, probably tellingly, none of the relevant literature bothers to mention was a skilled luthier?” The answer, Chris, is that she kinda seems like she was a nut for acoustic guitars as gifts. In the Wilsons' memoir, Kicking & Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock and Roll (what, they couldn’t get a co-writer for that title?), Nancy recounts her 1979 meeting with Eddie Van Halen. After the Nancy and Ann rejected the Van Halen brothers’ very courtly offer to engage in a familial four-way at their hotel, Nancy got the wise idea to distract EVH by chatting him up about guitars. He complimented her on her acoustic guitar work, admitting that he himself didn’t own one. He’d NEVER owned one. Nancy was aghast, and declared that she (well, her manager, but still) must buy him one, on the spot. Apparently, though, it was midnight and rockstars are idiot children who don’t know things like guitar stores aren’t op

en at midnight. So, she gave him one of her own. Chris, she HAD TO GIFT AN ACOUSTIC GUITAR. Lady was nuts for the acoustic, it seems. And so Hess, probably knowing this about her hero, played her like another acoustic stringed instrument.

The fiddle, Chris. She played her like a fiddle.

Artist’s rendering of the handmade acoustic guitar Sharon Hess gave to Nancy Wilson when she visited the studio in 1985.

I also learned in my research that, in later years, Nancy Wilson often encountered producers who were disappointed by the clarity of her beautiful voice. When they begged her to deliver the wonderful rasp that she sports in her “These Dreams” performance, she was forced to admit that she'd had a cold on the day she recorded “These Dreams,” and couldn't replicate that vocal tone at will. Chris, think about it: this was Nancy’s first-ever lead vocal on a Heart song, a song they all hated and didn’t want on the album, and they made her record the vocal on a day when she had a cold Well, Nancy got the last laugh I’d say.

Or, Chris, did they know that a sore-throated Nancy was a Nancy at her vocal best?

CHRIS: Fabulous research, Keith. My head is swimming with thoughts, most of them tunas and porpoises and yes barracudas (¡Ha!), but one is a great white shark: Did Nancy Wilson kill Sharon Hess??? Your trenchant dig revealed that Nancy had a cold the day she sang “These Dreams” — that the cold, in fact, was maybe a gift from Crom, because Crom's gifts, even as they have value, must come with serious drawbacks. And so she had this case of Crom’s cold, and it gave her vocals that golden rasp, the rasp that shipped a million units, but it also infested her body with billions upon billions of viral particles (probably a rhinovirus — can you find out please?); in particular it positively saturated her respiratory droplets with the pathogen, and whenever she touched her itchy face or her watery eyes with her hands, she slathered them in writhing virus; and we can’t be mad at Nancy for any of this — she’s a MUSICIAN, for chrissakes, an “idiot child” as you mentioned, one with a college degree, sure, but probably in physics or cosmology, not epidemiology, for god damn chrissakes. SHE HAD NO IDEA IN HELL ON THAT DAY THAT SHE WAS A WALKING, CROONING VECTOR. All she knew is that she loved this Page & Taupin number, and that since the band had decided to agree to Capitol’s politely-phrased but menacingly-delivered suggestion that outside talent be brought in for the new record, she wanted “These Dreams” on the album, or at least in the running, but Ann — she could be such a fucking pill — was refusing to sing it, calling it (maybe) “the most demented thing I’ve ever heard,” so she, Nancy, would have to step up to the mic, even though she was <<cough cough>> sick as a bat in a vaccine lab. 

And in walks Sharon Hess. Late-stage leukemia Sharon Hess. Immunocompromised Sharon Hess. Sharon Hess whose bone marrow, instead of generating healthy white blood cells, is spewing leukemic blasts. I don’t think it’s too much to suppose, Keith, that on the day she visited Heart in the studio, Sharon Hess could have caught a cold by reading about one in the newspaper. Hugging Nancy Wilson? Whom she had just gifted a sweet blue guitar, practically mandating an effusive (physical) thanks that upended conventions of personal space? Such a hug would have been tantamount to playing with a loaded gun. Playing Russian roulette, I mean, and with half the chambers loaded. 🥺

A lighter moment that I actually enjoy imagining came in August of 1985. Heart has released their self-titled album for Capitol, and lead single “What About Love” has given them their first top-ten hit in over five years (it went to #10 in the US, #14 in the UK). Not only that, but they’re about to release “Never,” a modestly more rockin’ tune that, as you said, the Wilson sisters at least had a hand in writing, via their “Connie” guise. “Never” would go on to chart at #4 after it dropped on August 29th, a fantastic result for Heart, but I’m betting that throughout that month and even into “Never”’s successful run, the band’s attention was on another song entirely: Starship’s “We Built This City.” “We Built This City,” you see, also came out in August, and rocketed to #1 on the US charts. And “We Built This City” was written by a little songwriting duo I like to call — I admit rather formally — Martin Page and Bernie Taupin. Heart had an ace up their sleeve, as Nancy had been telling them for over a year — through the demo writing and the meetings with Capitol and the song-shopping sprees and the months of recording and Sharon Hess’s funeral — shouting at them sometimes, “This song is a hit, damn you all!” They had an ace card — Nancy knew it all along — and it wasn’t “Never,” or “What About Love,” and it sure as hell wasn’t “If Looks Could Kill.” It was “These Dreams,” and I bet it was a WHOLE MOOD in that band throughout August and the ensuing months, as they watched another Page & Taupin tune shit all over radio, and they wondered whether their own Page & Taupin song could also — oh god, please — bring them at last that brass ring, a #1 hit… And they cursed themselves for having let Nancy sing it (what the fuck had they been thinking???), and maybe they should have changed the name to “These Dreams of Mine," or “These Are Some Dreams,” or “These, Your & My Dreams”??? But it was too late, Keith, and of course you and I both know how the story goes. 

And we may hope, perhaps with good cause, that Sharon Hess now sits at Crom’s left side, and shares his feast, and perhaps, these many years later, has even assumed his throne, if Crom has grown too weary to rule, and is actually the deity to whom we should all now be praying, though we know she is unlikely to answer, and that if she does we may dislike what she has to say. 

Power polling results…

In a recent post concerning The Mighty Power Ballad, we conducted a small poll, the results of which JUST MIGHT SHOCK YOU…

…

…

Feel that? The pressure, pushing in on your from all sides? Along with the sudden cold sweat and the tingling scalp and the burning fingers and toes? Everything seems hyper-real, etc?

That’s the tension, friend. You are immersed in it. At some level, you’re terrified of these poll results.

Calm the fuck down. It’s not that big a deal. We built it up too much. Anyway, here’s how you voted…

On the question of who is the greatest power balladeer in all of human history, you said… Heart, actually. By a pretty big margin! 46% said Heart, 23% Bon Jovi, 20% Aerosmith, and just 11% went for REO Speedwagon. Interesting! (Did these results inform our choice of songs for today’s edition of Great Apes? Perhaps maybe!)

On the question of whether Tesla’s “Love Song” is worth a damn, you asserted… that it is not. Although it was pretty close. If any members of Tesla are reading this, know that it really was pretty close. 58% of you said the songs is bad, and 42% said it’s good. 🤷‍♀️

On the crucial question of whether, when all is said and done, power ballads suck… you did the right thing and said that they sure don’t, 88% to 12%.

And given the proposition that We Are Scientists should record more original power ballads… you rejected the proposition, though by a thin margin. 56% of you do not want us recording power ballads, 44% do. Not the kind of evidence we can act on. We will have to ask Crom for answers.

Have a great weekend, and for goodness sake remember to floss!

🦷,

Keith & Chris