More on Mushroom

An e-mailer asks if I lost money when Mushroom Records collapsed -- if not, why do I still seem to have it in for Ann and Nancy Wilson after all these years?

The answer is that no, I wasn't an investor, but I care because of the way that their selfishness affected the Canadian group Chilliwack. Let me explain...

Heart was a struggling Seattle, Washington band that moved to Vancouver to make a record. Heart ended up recording at Can-Base Studios in Vancouver, where head engineer Mike Flicker produced their debut album, "Dreamboat Annie". Another group recording at Can-Base was Chilliwack, a Vancouver-based group that had been on the verge of success for years, having released seven prior albums, two as the Collectors and five as Chilliwack, on four different U.S. labels (WB 2, Parrot 1, A&M 2 and Sire 2). But this time, Chilliwack came up with a winner: "Dreams Dreams Dreams". Both albums were released by an upstart Vancouver label, Mushroom Records, which was also affiliated with Can-Base ... and Can-Base changed its name to Mushroom Studios.

"Dreamboat Annie" was a smash success. "Dreams Dreams Dreams" was a modest hit, although it produced four singles. A young record-store manager in Columbus, Ohio pushed the heck out of "Dreams, Dreams, Dreams", and we managed to make it into a solid hit in Columbus, although still spotty elsewhere in the US.

But then came the dark side of the music business. Heart wanted its royalties raised, now that it had had a major hit. Mushroom refused. Word of the problems got to CBS Records, which found out (to its surprise) that Flicker, despite his affiliation with Can-Base/Mushroom Studios, actually had no affiliation with Mushroom Records. So CBS hired him, although he was in the middle of recording Heart's second album, "Magazine."

Here's where things get murky. Ann Wilson claims, in his effort to keep Heart from breaching its contract, that the head of Mushroom Records (Shelly Siegel) started a "whisper campaign" that Ann and her sister Nancy were lesbian lovers. Unlikely as this seems, one thing that is certain is that Heart did indeed breach their contract and sign with Flicker and CBS -- where they got their much-higher royalty rate, leaving Mushroom, still a start-up label, completely in the lurch.

Ann and Nancy wrote the song "Barracuda" about Siegel, including the lyric (related to the supposed "whisper campaign"): "If the real thing don't do the trick, you better make up something quick."

In the flurry of lawsuits that followed, the courts ended up permitting Heart to ditch Mushroom in pursuit of more money, although Mushroom was permitted to release "Magazine" -- but only after Flicker and the Wilsons finished it to their hearts' content -- meaning that Mushroom had to scrap about a half-million copies of the album that it had finished and shipped. Mushroom then had to hire guards to prevent the Wilsons and their bandmates from erasing the master tapes during recording, which the Wilsons had threatened to do if they actually had to live up to their contract.

Meanwhile, Chilliwack recorded another great album, "Lights from the Valley", but it didn't do as well in the US, because Mushroom was spending all its promotion money in the court fights with Heart. Then Chilliwack started on "Road to Paradise", but it ended up coming out as "Breakdown in Paradise" because Mushroom head Siegel died of a stroke ... at age 32, in January 1979.

Capitol Records bought the rights to the two Heart albums on Mushroom during the bankruptcy of the label. But the Chilliwack records on Mushroom are unavailable to this day, and have been unavailable for almost 30 years. All because Heart lived up to the motto of the Democratic Party: "We want ours; screw you."