On Sunday, May 11, 1969, Ann and Nancy Wilson attended a Led Zeppelin concert at the Green Lake Aqua Theater in Seattle. The sisters, 19 and 15, respectively, at the time, were not ready for what would unfold.
“We were in a little folk band at the time,' Nancy Wilson recalled in a 2025 interview with Premier Guitars' 100 Guitarists Podcast. "We were from the suburbs. So we were kind of square, square little hippie chicks to be unenlightened, let’s just say. And so, we were like, Oh, they’re so loud. They’re just being so suggestive and loud."
The younger Wilson sister remembered Zeppelin's 20-year-old frontman Robert Plant being particularly disturbing to her teenage mind... so much so that she and her big sister walked out of the show early as they were so shocked by what they were witnessing.
"He’s got his shirt wide open, he’s got his bare chest, and his jeans were really low riders," she recalled. "He was moving in this way that was super-suggestive and we were kind of shocked. We’re like, Oh, my God. Then, he sang 'Squeeze My Lemon' [The Lemon Song], and we’re like, Oh, we must leave, we must leave the premises, because we were just shocked. We actually walked out… We were scandalised, and we walked away."
Fast forward to March 1975, and led Zeppelin are in Vancouver to play two nights at the city's 17,500-capacity Pacific Coliseum. By now the Wilson sisters are full paid up fans of the English band - "Zeppelin were one of the bands that saved my life in high school" Nancy Wilson once told me - but have prior commitments, as their band Heart has a gig at a prestigious Vancouver club called Oil Can Harry’s. Ironically, given that the sisters once walked out on Led Zeppelin, this time around, Led Zeppelin will walk in on them.
"The part of our show that first gained us fans in Vancouver was our thirty-minute set of Led Zeppelin covers," Ann Wilson recalled in Heart biography Kicking & Dreaming. "The interplay between Roger Fisher’s guitar and my voice mimicked the dynamics of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant on songs like Stairway To Heaven and Whole Lotta Love. Roger even learned to use a bow on his guitar, so he could play Dazed and Confused like Page. Our skill at doing Zeppelin became our calling card and earned us most of our first bookings."
Heart were onstage doing their Led Zeppelin covers set when some of the crowd from Zeppelin's Pacific Coliseum show drifted into Oil Can Harry’s. So too did Led Zeppelin themselves.
"To my shock, as I was singing Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin walked into the club," Wilson recalled. "To me, this seemed like the ultimate kismet, but this probably happened to Zeppelin all the time, and they never registered that we were playing their signature song. They immediately retreated to the club’s private pool table room. During our set break, [Heart bassist and guitarist] Steve Fossen and Howard Leese talked to John Bonham and Robert Plant. Jimmy Page didn’t talk to anyone because he was being seen to by “his doctor” and was passed out in a booth."
This, of course, would not be the only time that the members of Led Zeppelin would see the Wilson sisters cover Stairway To Heaven.
On December 2, 2012, Ann and Nancy (together with Jason Bonham on drums), performed for Robert Plant, jimmy Page and John Paul Jones at a gala event at the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington, D.C. Their version of Stairway To Heaven moved Robert Plant to tears.
"I knew we did a lot of damage to people's brains and ear drums, and I knew we wrote some great songs, but it was a very humbling experience," Plant told LA Weekly. "When I saw Heart perform Stairway To Heaven, I just couldn't believe that song had anything to do with this 64-year old man that was sitting next to John Paul Jones. I thought to myself, 'This is me... How did this happen?'"
