Song of the Day 6/5: Heart, “Barracuda”

Lots of rock musicians have careers that read like soap operas, but few bands have had more bad luck than Heart.

Ann and Nancy Wilson had to overcome industry misogyny, record company lawsuits and broken love affairs – and that was just in Heart’s first few years together in the ’70s. The band has broken up repeatedly and the sisters have been through several rosters of backing musicians. It looked like they were done for good after a family fracas in 2016, when Ann’s husband attacked Nancy’s twin 16-year-old sons; they had barely patched that up when Ann, now 75, was diagnosed with cancer.

Given that snakebitten history, their latest brush with the headlines seems totally in character. Before the band kicked off the latest leg of their tour in Atlantic City last Saturday, somebody stole two valuable instruments – Nancy Wilson’s custom Telecaster guitar and a 1966 Gibson mandolin that band member Paul Moak owned for the past 25 years. Police have arrested a man for the thefts but have not located the instruments, so the band went public in hopes of finding them.

All that adversity has led to some of Heart’s best songs. “Barracuda” was written and recorded in a matter of days after Heart’s record company took out a trade-magazine ad congratulating them on the success of their debut LP, “Dreamboat Annie.” The ad used the same photo of the bare-shouldered sisters as the album cover, along with the tagline, “It was only our first time.” If it took a dirty mind to read an incestuous affair into it, well, the recording and radio industries had the personnel for the job.

As Nancy told the story years later,

“There was this one sleazy guy at a record company or promoter — I can’t even remember where from, exactly. You know that type; there’s a lot of those kinds of guys in this business. And he was like, because of our album cover where we had bare shoulders touching … ‘So, Ann, how’s your lover?’ And she goes, ‘Oh, yeah, Mike’s [Fisher, the band’s manager] great!’ And he goes, ‘No, no, I mean your sister, haha!’ So Ann went and fired off those words and we finished it maybe that night or the next day.”

The song appeared on their 1977 album “Little Queen.” The single reached No. 11 on the Hot 100.