Ann Wilson says Jimmy Page and Robert Plant told her they “really liked” Heart’s “Stairway to Heaven” at the 2012 Kennedy Center Honors, and that the compliment mattered because, in her words, Led Zeppelin “don’t enjoy being covered by people that don’t feel it.”
The Heart singer, now 76, told the story in an interview published this week ahead of her authorized documentary, In My Voice, which is due out in November. The piece asked her to look back on the guitarists who shaped her, and Page got the longest answer.
“Starting out as a guitar player, I’d sit at Jimmy Page’s knee and learn everything I could from the Zeppelin records,” she said. “The thing about Jimmy is that method or scales don’t even figure in his repertoire. It’s just so crazy and dissonant: I guess it’s right-brain stuff.”
A rubber chicken dinner with Page and Plant
Wilson said Heart crossed paths with Zeppelin over the years but kept their distance: “those guys always walked around with a serious gravitas. You didn’t feel like going up because they had their own atmosphere.”
That changed in Washington, D.C. “Nancy and I played Stairway To Heaven for the Led Zeppelin tribute [at the Kennedy Center in 2012] and after the show, they sat us all down and gave us, y’know, a rubber chicken dinner,” she said.
“We met Page and Plant, and they were very happy and said they really liked our performance. That was a big deal because so many bands have tried to cover Zeppelin, and they don’t enjoy being covered by people that don’t feel it.”
Her favorite Page moments, she added, are not the obvious ones but later album cuts such as “The Crunge” and “No Quarter.”
The Badiyaa timeline: how 2012 built up to that night
The Kennedy Center performance landed at the end of the busiest stretch of Heart’s late career. Here is the run-up, drawn from the band’s documented history:
- September 18, 2012: Ann and Nancy Wilson publish their memoir, Kicking and Dreaming, co-written with Charles R. Cross.
- September 25, 2012: The sisters receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
- October 2, 2012: Heart release Fanatic, their 14th studio album, which peaks at No. 24 on the US albums chart.
- December 2012: The surviving members of Led Zeppelin are among the Kennedy Center honorees. Heart perform “Stairway to Heaven” with an orchestra, two choirs arranged by Rob Mathes, guitarist Shane Fontayne and drummer Jason Bonham, son of the late John Bonham. The crowd stands; Plant is seen in tears.
- December 26, 2012: The ceremony is televised. Within five days the clip passes four million views on YouTube.
- Late December 2012 to January 2013: The Kennedy Center puts out a limited-edition iTunes single of the performance for two weeks. It goes straight to No. 1 on the iTunes rock singles chart and reaches No. 20 on the US rock songs chart.
- April 18, 2013: Heart’s original lineup reunites on stage for the first time in 34 years at the band’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.
In other words, the tribute that Wilson now describes as a “big deal” came 10 weeks after Heart’s own Walk of Fame star and four months before their Hall of Fame induction. The Zeppelin sign-off arrived in the middle of the band’s most decorated year.
Why “feel it” is the whole point
Wilson’s remark echoes something the sisters have said before about that night: they were terrified and chose to play through it. The performance was not a note-for-note copy. It added a full orchestra, massed voices and Bonham on drums, which is why the clip traveled so far so fast.
The interview also fills in the rest of Wilson’s guitar family tree. She credits her sister Nancy, who “went sailing past” her on guitar as a child, Brian May as “such a gentleman” on Heart’s 1982 tour with Queen, and Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell, who became a friend after an all-night jam at Nancy’s farm in Woodinville, Washington.
What comes next for Heart
Wilson’s current band, Tripsitter, released the album Consecrated Ground last month. In August, Nancy Wilson said Heart were finishing a new studio album, with a documentary, a world tour and a biopic also in the works.
The documentary, In My Voice, with contributors including Cantrell and Kiss’s Paul Stanley, is scheduled for release in November.
Further reading
Image: John Mathew Smith & celebrity-photos.com, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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