Review: Ann Wilson’s voice continues to propel Heart to performance heights

The key to healthy attendance for Heart’s Royal Flush Tour 2024 is the reunion of founding members Ann and Nancy Wilson following the sisters’ half-decade of estrangement.

“We just decided that was ridiculous,” Ann announced between songs during the band’s concert Thursday at Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints Arena. “The time is now. Let’s just do it.”

Just as intriguing to longtime fans was whether Ann could belt out vocals like she did during Heart’s 1970s-’80s heyday, given her septuagenarian status.

As the band — these days, it’s the Wilsons plus musicians from Ann’s side project, Tripsitter — launched into the title track from the 1977 album “Little Queen,” the answer proved to be positive. The elder sister hit high notes as if it were 47 years ago, especially shining in the rocker’s slowed-down bridge.

She repeated the feat song after song, through metallic anthems and power ballads, demonstrating to a nearly full house (again with the card allusions) that yesterday’s icons still have plenty to offer today.

The opening act and fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Cheap Trick, delivered pretty much along the same lines, although the sound tended to come through on the muddy side for much of the band’s tidy hourlong set. Such can be the case for the first group to hit the stage.

Most of the night’s repertoire hearkened back to a time when good old rock ’n’ roll was losing ground to the fad that produced disco, leaving fans of harder-edged, less-formulaic music looking for a continuation of what they knew and loved in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Heart came on the scene first with the release of “Dreamboat Annie” in 1975, spawning a trio of hits that enraptured the audience when performed at PPG. First was “Crazy On You,” with Nancy flawlessly executing the famed guitar intro that served as a revelation back in the day:

A woman is playing that? She sure can.

The performance of “Dreamboat Annie,” the song — actually, three versions appear on the album — came during a portion of the show featuring acoustic instruments, also featuring a pristine cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California.”

Closing the set was “Magic Man,” in a more muscular arrangement than the single version that reached the Top 10. For example, rather than drown the instrumental bridge in synthesizer, the electric guitars were front and center.

For an encore, the Wilsons again paid tribute to their main influence with Zeppelin’s “The Ocean,” followed by a brief guitar interlude before Nancy strummed the chords to “Barracuda,” another foray into Top-10 territory for Heart.

Of course, the band did even better on the charts in the ’80s, hitting the top spot with “These Dreams,” with Nancy taking the lead vocal, and “Alone.” Both made appearances at PPG, with the latter segueing into “What About Love,” which reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.

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Some of the show’s highlights came via “Dog and Butterfly,” the 1978 album that in retrospect may be Heart’s most underrated. “Straight On” showcased the Wilsons in a distinctive vocal duet before the band broke into what seemed like a slightly superfluous snippet of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.”

But any homage to the Thin White Duke is a good one.

Another “Dog and Butterfly” tune, “Mistral Wind,” featured a transition from a soft-rock start to full-blown jamming, with Ann’s voice soaring over a wall of sound before the song eased back into easy-listening mode.

The concert featured two Wilson solo selections: “This Is Now,” from Ann and Tripsitter’s “Another Door” (2023), and Nancy’s instrumental “4 Edward.” And drummer Sean T. Lane was given a solo on which he played a bicycle he had transformed into a percussion instrument.

As for Cheap Trick, the audience got a taste of what Tokyo teens were screaming about during the taping of the triple-platinum “At Budokan” album back in 1978.

The band broke out favorites like “Dream Police,” “I Want You to Want Me” and “Surrender,” along with its own No. 1 MTV-era power-ballad single, “The Flame.” And the cover of Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew’s “Ain’t That a Shame” showed why Cheap Trick, like Heart, is perfectly capable of wowing audiences well into the 21st century.

Just like in the ’70s.