Heart
These Dreams: Heart's Greatest Hits (Capitol 53376)

I don't care what anyone says, Heart rocks my ass back to Bement. This greatest hits, released in 1997, suffers from trying not to duplicate the earlier Greatest Hits/Live, which was released before Heart's 80s resurgence and which featured several tacked-on live cuts to fill out the album.

Now, after twenty years of mostly good records, Heart could easily fill two discs of worthwhile material (see The Essential Heart), but this one-disc overview hedges a lot, using live tracks in some cases where the admittedly overplayed studio versions would be more definitive, and omitting some favorite album tracks. Wait, does Heart have any albums that aren't greatest-hits?

The great thing about Heart is, even when they're doing a song as idiotic as "All I Wanna Do is Make Love to You," Ann Wilson's voice is such a thing of majesty that you can't help but be sucked in by it.

"I am the flower, you are the sea/we walked in the garden, we planted a tree" … what a shit line that is. But what a song!

Heart is one of the few 70s rock bands that was able to gracefully make the transition to 80s power-ballad machine and have it seem continuous. (Can't say the same for Starship or Cheap Trick.)

The programming here seems like it's trying to prove this point: the disc opens with "Crazy On You," then brings on "All I Wanna Do is Make Love to You" as track #2, then flashes back to "If Looks Could Kill," one of their more honestly hard-rockin' 80s hits. "Never" follows, then "Alone," showcasing Heart's unique cheese-power.

The songs have held up pretty well, actually. Sure, they're contrived. Sure, Ann & Nancy pretty much stopped writing Heart's songs in the 80s. No one can put this shit material across quite so effectively, though: all the synths are in pace, all the arena drums you could ever want are there to rock your headbangin' ass.

"Straight On," "Dog & Butterfly," and "Barracuda" are represented by new live/acoustic versions, which are fine but don't hold up to repeated listenings. "Dog & Butterfly" is the best of the three, with Ann's voice sounding better than ever. "What About Love," "These Dreams," and "Nothin' at All" are here, alongside the likes of "Dreamboat Annie," "Heartless," and "Magic Man," a song I thought I'd never like to hear again, until its use in The Virgin Suicides rocked my hairy ass once again.

"Will You Be There (In the Morning)" is included, presumably to include something from Desire Walks On (estimated sales: 50 copies?), while "I Want You So Bad" (probably their best 80s song, from Bad Animals) is not. Oh well, I'm not going to cry any more about that.

I suppose there's no graceful way to anthologize bands such as Heart. If you look at Pat Benatar and Blondie, the problems are the same: one-disc best-ofs which don't hit all the right bases and/or hedge all their bets, and two-disc anthologies that hit too many of the wrong bases while trying to present a "complete picture."

The fact of the matter is, these bands made a lot of bad music, and someone needs to do a completely revisionist perspective on them, collecting all the good moments and none of the crap. These were rock bands led by women, which is already something most labels don't know how to deal with, but the real problem is that the bands themselves were predominently male, which doesn't help.

Imagine Heart (or Blondie, or Joan Jett, or Pat Benatar) without the annoying rock bands backing them up … now that would be something. Or maybe it would just be the Go-Go's, and that wouldn't do any good for anybody.

On the other hand, for the most part, these are some of the most distinctive and lasting bands from the 70s and 80s. I mean, who would you generally rather listen to nowadays, the Romantics and Loverboy or Blondie and Heart? The choice is clear, I think. In either case there's plenty of empty wankin', but it's just more fun where the girls are.

Loud Bassoon rating scale

Review by Leopoldo Mahoney