Original Heart bassist Steve Fossen, who entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the band, turns 70 today (November 15th). Here is another song inspired by the “dance” feel of Miss You by the Rolling Stones. The song “Straight On” on the album Dog and Butterfly was written in a suite at San Francisco’s tony Mark Hopkins Hotel. The song peaked at number-15 on the Billboard Hot 100
Ann and Nancy Wilson say that “Straight On” came out of an extremely fertile writing period, where the two of them were going out of town to work on songs with a friend of theirs. Ann tells the story, with a little help from Nancy.
Ann: “It was in a period when Nancy and I were going down to San Francisco to visit our friend Sue Ennis a lot, who was in grad school at Berkeley. We’d go and we’d rent this suite at a Mark Hopkins and we’d just stay in there for the whole time. It was really cool, y’know. I think that the people who brought the room service and stuff were going, ‘What are they doing in there?’ And so we kind of got this groove going, y’know.”
Nancy: “We wanted to get a feel for that song that was a little like ‘Miss You’ by the Stones, which was out before that.”
Ann: “Yeah, a combination of ‘Heard It Through the Grapevine’ or ‘Miss You.’”
