Martin Popoff - Satisfaction: 10 Albums That Changed My Life

From The Beatles to Bob Dylan, Nancy Wilsons music influences led to her stardom with Heart and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

PHOTO BY KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES

Our family moved to Seattle the year of the Seattle Worlds Fair during the time the Space Needle was still under construction.

Everything was just so wonderfully Space Agey in the early 60s. It was all about the fabulous and futuristic machines and gadgets coming to modernize us and to change our lives for the better forever. Exciting stuff!

Flying cars, automatic no-cook/no-clean kitchens and friendly push button robots, who could auto-immaculate your house with absolutely no fuss, no muss and no mood swings!

There were programmable ovens that could dispense a gourmet family dinner by just selecting a meal and miraculously, it would arrive in mere moments.

And then there were other mysterious contraptions. By simply talking into a microphone on the beverage dispenser you could instantly enjoy your favorite icy cold or hot beverage in the blink of an electric eye.

Just add water and stir the freeze-dried Tang powder and enjoy the odd orange taste. We had all seen our hero astronauts drinking Tang in space, images of which were beamed down into the new color TV!

The Worlds Fair in Seattle was all about Futurama. We were little kids watching the Jetsons while living in the Boeing Jet City way before Microsoft.

Pre-Seattle, my family was stationed in the California desert at Camp Pendleton Marine Corp base for many years. Those days predated any kind of standardized air conditioning and there were heat waves that would shut down the schools for days: The opposite of Snow Days.

So, when we were to be stationed in Seattle for a year, we piled in and drove the station wagon north, climbing out of the punishing heat of the desert, with a cooler filled with ice, Cokes and washcloths to fight off the sweltering sun.

As we got farther and farther north there were majestic cathedrals of fir trees and pines and then the snow-crowned godly mountains appeared beyond.

Then, whoosh, the rains and sparkling lush greens of The Great Pacific Northwest ... such a revelation! It felt like the soul quenching blue green cool baptism of forgiveness.

I wrote The Rain Song as a love letter to the rain when I was 12.

My sister Ann and I were already fledgling songwriters in a number of baby bands wed started with friends, mainly girls from school. We played with school friends and family around beach fires, fireplaces and all kinds of rooms especially echoing bathrooms and stairwells that made us sound cooler. We sang in backyards, churches, schools, parks, inside cars and on top of cars, in the flatbeds of pickup trucks and once even at a drive-in theater before the movie!

Our set list then was a lot of Simon and Garfunkel songs (harmonies!), some Dylan and a wide variety of genres plus Top 40 radio pop. And we loved the many novelty hits we learned off the radio: Ahab the Arab, Theyre Coming To Take Me Away and Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport.

We also learned more songs, the deep cuts, from our increasing collection of vinyl albums. You could switch the turntable to half speed for easier slower absorption in the same key.

We were Beatles fanatics although playing the Beatles songs seemed almost sacrilegious to us because changing the gender around for any song lyrics (her to him or she to he) was simply WRONG.

And I Love Him? Never.

We only played Beatles songs privately at home, never at a gig.

So we played any kind of gigs we could get and doggedly aimed our sights on becoming singer-songwriters. We were unstoppable Marine Corp brats complete with swagger and we were never going to take no for an answer. I guess that sort of worked out.

Seattle. What a great town. Seattle has always been a deeply rooted music town like so many great seaport towns. Ray Charles, The Wailers, The Sonics, Hendrix, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Marilee and the Turnabouts were some of the many other Pacific Northwest hit makers.

Another huge wave of hit makers washed ashore when Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains and Soundgarden among other great local bands forged a whole new formidable rock force like no other.

There was this other unusual band from Seattle fronted and led by two sisters. And Im lucky enough to be one of them.

The rainy weather of the northwest winter encourages you to go inward, to light the fireplace and stare introspectively into the flames. To read the tea leaves of the embers. To write a confessional song. To put on headphones and take a magical ride through your favorite albums.

FLIRT WITH THE MUSE.

Nancy Wilson

The Rain Song

Lyrics by Nancy Wilson

Watching out the window

Let your thoughts go draining

I cant walk on now I know

Listen it is raining.

The world is full of people

With worried rush and running

I love to sleep by the rain

And listen to it humming.

Drops of water tiny

Wet and warm and welcome

Paint grey street black and shiny

A better song than Ive sung.

Nancy Wilson and her sister Ann are the creative soul of Heart, a hard-driving, hit-making band that rocketed out of the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1970s, propelled by rock anthems such as Magic Man, Crazy on You and Barracuda. Heart experienced even bigger mainstream success in the mid-1980s with These Dreams, Never and What About Love. Heart were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.