Kicking and Dreaming

Sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson better known as the faces and voices of Heart â?? look back on the personal and professional struggles and triumphs that define their legacy as one of rock's pioneering female-fronted, creatively autonomous acts.

Start me up: Ann reveals that "the first nude man" she ever saw was guitarist Roger Fisher a colleague in one of her earlier bands, Hocus Pocus, and later in Heart walking unabashedly around a motel room. (Roger later became Nancy's boyfriend, while Ann had a long relationship with his older brother, Michael, Heart's sound man, who inspired the hits Magic Man and Crazy On You.)

Stayin' alive: Both sisters describe their challenges in trying to have children. Ann wound up adopting two babies as a single mom, while Nancy grappled with infertility for years before she and then-husband Cameron Crowe had twin sons through a surrogate in 2000. Nancy recalls in one entry that "most of 1997 was consumed, as was every year that decade, by trying to get pregnant," and that she "spent more than a hundred thousand dollars" on doctors and fertility treatments.

It's only rock 'n' roll: Nancy remembers attending Elton John's swank 33rd birthday party in West Hollywood, where John's songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin, "repeatedly pulled me into the bathroom" and offered her cocaine. "Bernie was convinced that getting me high was the key to seducing me."

The name game: Nancy recalls meeting Eddie and Alex Van Halen at a hotel, where the brothers had a "Kamikaze-drinking contest, followed by a cocaine-snorting fest." They also expressed interest in sleeping with both Wilsons, and "wanted us in one bed. It wasn't the first time we had that offer, and as with every other request, we turned it down."

Rockin' my life away: Ann initially "hated" the Mutt Lange-pennedAll I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You, a No. 2 hit for Heart in 1990. "She did sing it, and we begrudgingly turned it into a Heart song," Nancy writes. "It ended up being one of our most controversial songs, even getting banned in Ireland and a few other countries."