(Credits: John Matthew Smith)
Thu 25 December 2025 21:00, UK
Given that Dreamboat Annie, the 1975 debut from Heart, was such a storming triumph, it made sense that the powers that be would want to follow things up quite quickly.
The only trouble was, they decided to take a rather illegitimate route to achieving this, and it left Heart in a position of possibly squandering their potential before they had even really had the chance to get started. It was an unfair situation at best, an illegal one at worst, and so their only option was to fight back.
That was the path to how the band’s 1977 sophomore record Magazine came to be in the world, albeit under two separate versions after the subsequent legal dramas that ensued. The eye of the hurricane emerged after a series of business issues between the sisters and their label, Mushroom Records, but instead of settling down at the delegation table, Mushroom decided to take matters into their own hands.
“[Our label Mushroom] took the few tracks that were nearly done and completed them without our involvement, using our rough vocals,” Ann and Nancy Wilson explained in their 2012 memoirs, “To that, they added a few outtakes and live tracks, and rushed the album into stores.”
Unsurprisingly enough, the sisters took more than a little umbrage at this turn of events, and a legal injunction served to the record company meant that Magazine, take one, was released in April 1977 and swiftly killed again, leading the Wilsons to rightly have the power back within their own grasp. However, the slight sting in the tail was that, as part of their settlement with Mushroom, they had to release a further album under their guise, so, in essence, they had two choices: either start completely from scratch or make the best out of a bad situation.
“We decided to make Magazine that album [we gave Mushroom],” Ann Wilson later recalled in 2018, “But we insisted we finish the vocals and mixes”. Who’d have thought that taking the time to polish some scrappy vocals and unkempt demos would have actually resulted in a better product?
Thus, the Heart sisters’ superior version of Magazine arrived almost a year to the day after the original red herring initially appeared on the shelves, in April 1978. Coming as no real surprise to anyone, their more refined version of the eight tracks served as a far more popular offering than the rushed sham, and it went on to gain the success it had always been destined to have.
In this sense, the less said about Mushroom Records, the better, and the sisters soon understandably parted ways with the label after they had managed to get the labour of Magazine over the line, and swiftly moved on to Little Queen while they were remastering the second version of the former album.
Moving forward, they were signed to the newly formed Portrait Records as a fresh start, but it was hardly a case of sailing off into the sunset, as the band still endured its fair share of hardship over the years and decades that followed. Regardless, with their record label skirmishes firmly ironed out, one thing was definitely more than clear: no one was messing with the sisters from Heart.
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