Heart

One of my favorite concert experiences was seeing the 1970s/80s band Heart – with lead singer Ann Wilson and lead guitarist Howard Leese but sans Ann’s sister – singer and guitarist Nancy Wilson – some dozen years ago at a club – the Newport – across High Street from the Ohio State campus. It’s a small venue, and Stephanie and I stood near the stage during most of the show, which began with Leese playing the opening guitar chords from the band’s first hit, “Magic Man,” which I own as a 45 (which - in hindsight - as with many products of the 1970s - is probably partly a celebration of what we'd now see as sexuality and license gone wrong). As with one of my other all-time favorite shows, the Producers at Crazy Horse Saloon (or Pastime or whatever it was called them), across Tennessee Street from the Florida State campus – it was absolutely baking in the Newport – the same place where the band had – in 1976, when it was called the Agora – played the same song when the song was new.

Last Friday Stephanie and I had a second opportunity to see Heart – this time with Nancy Wilson instead of Howard Leese – at another casino gig. You’ll recall that a month ago we went to see Eddie Money at the Belterra, an hour-away Indiana casino where we essentially saw Money in a big lounge. Though technically much closer, it was harder to get to this casino (the Horseshoe), because there turned out to be big traffic jams to get in and out of there. We had never seen real-live traffic jams in the New Albany (Indiana) area. But there we were Friday night careening around on hilly, curvy back roads in western Floyd County and Harrison County, an Indiana country that extends west and south of New Albany’s Floyd County (since the Ohio River turns radically south just downstream from New Albany).

It took us a while to find our way through the casino campus to what was essentially a more conventional concert venue: an outdoor venue – albeit surrounded by trees – off from the hotel and casino – with probably 5,000 seats. Since we’d gotten there after the concert was supposed to start – but there turned out be an opening act – and there was old-fashioned festival seating – we were lucky to find seats together.

Nancy Wilson and Heart – and then Ann Wilson – didn’t come on until around 9 p.m. Without old-timer Leese, the band played more of their 1980s hits (“Never,” “These Dreams,” “Alone”) than it did in the Newport show. They also surprised with a couple of obscure 1970s album tracks (“Mistral Wind”). They played no new songs that I detected and – as in the mid-1990s show – several covers, the most popular of which was “The Immigrant Song,” from “Led Zeppelin 4.” I missed Howard Leese, but we enjoyed hearing Nancy Wilson and energetic new keyboardist Debbie Shair, and this time “Magic Man” was the final encore, instead of the opening song.

Afterwards – before stopping by to dance to the casino’s 1970s retro disco band and then getting into another traffic jam – this time on the two-lane road along the road heading back to New Albany – we talked with a couple of women concert-goers, one of whom (pictured below on the left) said she’d been to more than half a dozen Heart shows – including one in Louisville and one in Tallahassee. She reminisced about being a hard-partying enlisted person at Panama City’s Tyndall Air Force Base in the 1980s. She also told us that singer Ann Wilson – whose piercing vocals easily outshown her sister’s – had a birthday coming this week and would be 59 years old. Rock on, Ann and Nancy!

-- Perry