Written by On February 9, 1964, 13-year-old Ann Wilson and her 9-year-old sister Nancy were at their grandmother ‘Maudie’ Wilson’s house in La Jolla, California, when The Beatles made their US television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show for an audience of approximately 73 million Americans.
Long before the Liverpool band finished their five-song appearance – performing All My Loving, Till There Was You, She Loves You, I Saw Her Standing There and I Want to Hold Your Hand – the lives of the Wilson sisters were changed forever.
“We didn’t want to be Beatle girlfriends,” Nancy recalled in the sisters’ autobiography Kicking and Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock and Roll. “We wanted to be Beatles.”
Ten years on, the Wilson sisters were playing together in Heart.
But as Ann Wilson recalls in a new interview with Rolling Stone, men in the hard rock community weren’t always supportive of the sisters’ dreams.
“This phenomenon would happen where you would build yourself up and do something really great, and you’d feel really good about it,” she recalls. “Then you could get put down and squashed down very easily by the rest of the men. They could make you feel like you were really silly for even trying. We were lucky enough to have great people around us, but I know other women who were starting up close to our time that had to rebel as hard as they could to get anything happening at all.”
A new documentary about the singer, Ann Wilson – In My Voice, premiered last night, May 11, in Seattle.
The film, which is narrated by Wilson, traces her journey from childhood to stardom with Heart, and draws from her archive of home movies, photographs and journals as well as previously unseen footage from her years with the band.
“This film is my story in my own words, told the way I’ve always wanted to tell it,” says Wilson. “It’s about finding my voice, keeping it alive, and sharing the journey with the people who’ve been part of it all along.”
Wilson has now started a short North American tour to support the film’s release.
Ann Wilson: In My Voice Q&A Screenings
May 12: Vancouver Rio Theatre, BC
May 17: Chicago City Winery, IL
May 18: Cleveland Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, OH
May 20: Nashville City Winery, TN
May 27: New York City Winery, NY
May 29: Bethel Bethel Woods Events Center, NY
May 30: Toronto The Opera House, ON
Jun 01: Boston City Winery, MA
