Post by the Scribe on Sept 28, 2022 20:55:18 GMT
BOOKS
Linda Ronstadt on Her New Memoir, Feels Like Home, and Her Mexican American Heritage
BY ABBY AGUIRRE
www.vogue.com/article/linda-ronstadt-feels-like-home-interview
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On a beautiful summer day in late August, Linda Ronstadt is standing in the living room of her house in San Francisco, tapping on the keys of her black grand piano. The upper keys, specifically. A piano tuner has just visited, and Ronstadt is inspecting his work. “That sounds pinky,” she says after a while. She tests a few of the neighboring keys. “They’re all pinky.” Asked what she means by “pinky,” Ronstadt explains that the errant keys sound as if they are speaking the word “pink”—that the sound they make is shorter and more abrupt than it should be. This is in contrast to the lower keys, which produce a longer, more accurate sound.
For readers too young to know: Linda Ronstadt was the first female solo superstar of our time. The first to pack arenas. The first to have five platinum albums in a row. The highest-paid woman in music. The Queen of Rock. When her album Heart Like a Wheel went to No. 1 on the pop charts, in 1974, it did so by overtaking Led Zeppelin and Elton John. When she won her second American Music Award for favorite female pop artist, in 1979, she beat Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand. She had unusual range and crossover appeal, and she was iconoclastic in her own way. In her 1977 cover of the Rolling Stones song “Tumbling Dice,” Ronstadt changed the original opening lines—“Women think I’m tasty / But they’re always tryin’ to waste me”—to the following: “People try to rape me / Always think I’m crazy.”
She rose to prominence in the analogue era, when charisma couldn’t be feigned with art-directed Instagram feeds and pitch problems couldn’t be solved with Auto-Tune. Her very distinct voice came out of the Sonoran borderlands, steeped in the ranchera music of her Mexican American upbringing. This is partly why, when she decided to try opera, she could hold her own as Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance. And it’s definitely why her first album of Mexican folk songs, Canciones de Mi Padre, is the biggest-selling non-English album in American history. Her musicianship is legendary even among her fellow legends. In the 2019 documentary about Ronstadt’s life and art, The Sound of My Voice, Dolly Parton describes what it was like to record the Trio collaborations with Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. “Linda is such a perfectionist,” Parton says. “She’s a pain in the ass sometimes because she is such a perfectionist. She will not have it unless it’s perfect. She used to make me sing those harmonies over and over and over.” I thought of this moment as I sat in Ronstadt’s living room, listening to her perform a diagnostic evaluation on her piano: These are ears so astute they required Dolly Parton to redo tracks.
Ronstadt, now 76, can’t play music on her piano anymore. The disease that took her singing voice in the aughts, a parkinsonism called PSP—short for Progressive Supranuclear Palsy—has since taken her fine motor skills. “My fingers won’t do anything like that,” she tells me. But other people can play her piano, so the piano still gets tuned. (It also gets vacuumed because Ronstadt’s cats deposit fur under the strings.)
I’d come to interview Ronstadt about her new book. Feels Like Home, which will be published on October 4 by Heyday Books, is most easily described as a memoir. It’s not about Ronstadt’s rise to fame or peak rock-star years, though. For that story you would have to read her other memoir, Simple Dreams. This one’s about Lindy, as Ronstadt is known to family—the girl from Tucson who, when the ground got too hot to walk on, would put on her “mud huaraches,” i.e., she’d dip her bare feet in water and dirt over and over until they were caked in clay.
In reality the book is many things at once. It’s a portrait of a place, the Sonoran Desert, and it’s a genealogy of sorts, an archival romp through Ronstadt’s family history. It’s about music: “How a singer is both born and made, learning by singing and being sung to,” in the words of her co-author, the journalist Lawrence Downes. But it’s also about food. Carne seca, for instance—the thin, wide strips of beef that are doused with lime and salt and dried in the sun, a staple of ranches that once had no refrigeration. Or the supersized cheese crisps you find in Tucson, made with extra-large, extra-flaky flour tortillas. Sonoran tortillas.
Feels Like Home includes a bunch of recipes, and our plan is to cook some of them. The next morning I meet Downes, whom I’ve known for more than a decade, at Ronstadt’s place. Her living room is grand and bright, with doors that open onto a garden. Floor-to-ceiling shelves line one side of the room. They’re filled with books and old photos, including one of Ronstadt in a white sundress and what looks to be a vintage chiffon wedding hat, taken by the writer Eve Babitz. “Eve brought the hat,” Ronstadt says. Downes does most of the cooking: Tunapeños, a favorite appetizer of Ronstadt’s, made by hollowing out fresh jalapeños and stuffing them with tuna. (Ronstadt prefers solid white albacore in olive oil.) Machaca—carne seca that’s been pounded or blended into a fibrous fluff, then rehydrated—scrambled with eggs and onion. Tepary beans, a rich, nutty bean that thrives in dry heat and has been cultivated in Arizona since antiquity. And cheese crisps made with real Sonoran tortillas, procured in Tucson by Ronstadt and kept in a freezer out back. (The tortillas must be made with lard.) After lunch, Ronstadt moves to a recliner where she often holds court, and we page through a copy of Feels Like Home.
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Much of what she knew about her early family history had come from the writings of her grandfather Fred, published posthumously as a memoir, Borderman. That book gives a detailed account of the life of her great-grandfather Friedrich Augustus Ronstadt. How he immigrated to Mexico from Hanover, Germany, in the 1840s. How he served in the Mexican army. How he settled in the Sonoran pueblo of Banámachi. Borderman provides less detail about Ronstadt’s great-grandmother Margarita Redondo and the other women in her family. It became an inexplicit goal of Feels Like Home to fill in these blanks, Downes says—“to elevate and lift out the women in this story.”
To Ronstadt, Margarita had always been a solemn face gazing silently out of old black-and-white photos. Born on the Sonoran frontier, Margarita was 17 when she married Friedrich, a 50-year-old widower with four children. She had seven more children and lost three of them. One baby, Joe, died of a respiratory infection. A five-year-old son, Rodolfo, died of diphtheria. Three-year-old Armando died after he pulled a pot of scalding-hot milk onto himself. Ronstadt had heard that Margarita wrote letters and that some of her letters might have survived. Downes found them in a collection of Ronstadt family papers at the Arizona History Museum. “Her heart practically leaps off these sheets of lined paper,” Ronstadt writes. In one letter sent after Armando died, Margarita relays her torment to her son Fred. “Death would be for me the best possible relief,” she writes. “It takes a piece of my heart that I made the clumsy mistake of leaving the milk where he could reach for it.”
Music was already omnipresent. Even in remote parts of the frontier, Margarita and Friedrich managed to hire piano teachers for their children. “My father was a lover of music and wanted me to start learning it as early as possible,” Fred writes in Borderman. The girls got a musical education too. “All the women in the family were taught to play piano, and they knew operatic arias,” Ronstadt says. “They didn’t sing them like opera singers. They sang them like humans.” Fred was the first Ronstadt to move to Tucson, in 1882. He started the F. Ronstadt Company, a carriage shop that would grow into a hardware store and city landmark. He also cofounded and led Tucson’s first civic orchestra, Club Filarmónico Tucsonense. The military-style brass band played regular concerts downtown and, in 1896, even toured Southern California. Fred played flute and clarinet.
Ronstadt knew both her grandfather Fred and her grandmother Lupe well. She learned a lot more about them when Downes unearthed their early letters. Fred was a 35-year-old widower with four children when he was courting Lupe, then a handsome 21-year-old bookkeeper at his shop. He poured his heart out to her on company stationery. She shut him down. “It seems hardly possible that I should come to think of you in that way,” Lupe wrote, also on F. Ronstadt stationery. Fred composed more love letters and at least one poem. Lupe held firm: “I cannot change my heart. It seems I have no control over it—God alone can do this—I cannot.” They ultimately married, on Valentine’s Day in 1904, but Ronstadt still isn’t sure what caused her grandma’s change of heart. “I’d love to know,” she says. “There’s a photo of her at a picnic with Fred before they were married. She has that look on her face—just twitterpated.”
Ronstadt says her father, Gilbert, could have sung professionally. He had a lovely baritone and performed at the Fox Tucson Theatre in the 1930s as Gil Ronstadt and His Star-Spangled Megaphone. Instead, he helped run the family business. Gilbert always played music, though—“for love, not money,” Ronstadt writes. (He was serenading a girl at the Delta Gamma sorority house, near the University of Arizona campus, when Ronstadt’s mother, Ruth Mary, who also lived at the sorority, first noticed him.) He sang haunting lullabies to Ronstadt and her three siblings, such as “Canto de Cuña,” about a coyote in the sky with silver eyes and feet of mercury.
Ronstadt grew up “saturated in song,” as she puts it. Lalo Guerrero, the father of Chicano music, was a friend of Gilbert’s. Lalo and Gilbert serenaded Ronstadt on her third birthday, “in the Mexican way,” at 2 a.m. She requested “La Burrita,” a song about a little donkey going to the market. Sometimes Ronstadt’s aunt Luisa would come visit. Luisa was a singer and dancer who studied the regional folk music of Spain—“a Mexican Alan Lomax,” Ronstadt writes—and later toured Europe and the U.S. with her show, “Song Pictures of Spain.” She appeared as a Spanish dancer in a 1935 Marlene Dietrich movie, The Devil Is a Woman. In 1946, the year Ronstadt was born, Luisa published a book called Canciones de Mi Padre: Spanish Folksongs from Southern Arizona. Ronstadt never got to see her aunt perform onstage, but when Luisa came to visit, little Linda was enthralled. “She was just enchanting,” Ronstadt says. “She had the most beautiful hands.”
To hear Ronstadt tell it, she and her siblings were basically a free-range, barefoot barbershop quartet. Her older brother, Peter, had an uncanny ear for four-part harmonies. He made sure the other three—Linda, plus her older sister, Suzy, and younger brother, Mike—fell in line. They sang weird songs they learned from their mother. They sang Mexican songs they learned from their father. They sang doo-wop. They sang soap commercials. Linda, Peter, and Suzy even had a folk trio for a while, the New Union Ramblers. But only Linda moved to Los Angeles. Her father was devastated, perhaps because he knew a little about the music business. “If my daughter was going to go into the music business, I’d probably lock her in the closet,” Ronstadt says. “It’s such a hard business. So few people get to have the ride, and the ride is enough to make you crazy.” Gilbert owned a Martin guitar that had been in their family since 1898, given to him decades earlier by his father, Fred. “Now that you own a guitar, you will never be hungry,” Fred told Gilbert at the time. When Linda left home for L.A., in 1965, Gilbert gave the Martin to her.
Ronstadt’s first hit was “Different Drum,” recorded and released in 1967 with her folk band at the time, the Stone Poneys. You’ve heard the song and the irreverent, roller-coastery way Ronstadt belts out the bridge: “Don’t get me wrong / It’s not that I knock it / It’s just that I am not in the market / For a boy who wants to love only me.” The first time her father heard it on the radio, in Tucson, he was shocked. “He thought it was pretty funny,” Ronstadt says. “He used to say, ‘It’s not that I mock it. It’s just that I’m not in the market.’”
Gilbert was more impressed with the Mexican record she made two decades later. By then, Ronstadt was tired of packed arenas, tired of relentless touring, tired of her own hits. She was eager to try something new and dreaming about Mexican music at night. “I just wasn’t getting songs that were as good as the songs I learned as a child,” she says. “I thought they were better songs. They were better constructed. Nicer poetry.” Her label didn’t see dollar signs in archaic music from the ranches of Mexico—“They thought I’d completely lost my mind,” she tells me—but it got behind it anyway.
Before she would record and perform traditional Mexican music, she needed to study its intricacies. Huapangos in particular were formidable, with complicated rhythms and lots of falsetto. She apprenticed with Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano, a well-known group in L.A. The guys in the band were surprised Ronstadt wanted to sing mariachi songs. Nobody was doing that on the world stage, and historically mariachi music was an all-male tradition. “They could have been real defensive and real schmucky, but they were completely willing to help,” she recalls. Los Camperos played on the record, as did Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, widely considered the best mariachi in the world. To the studio sessions Ronstadt wore a peach-colored rebozo given to her by the Mexican singer Lola Beltrán, a.k.a. Lola la Grande (Lola the Great). Ronstadt borrowed the album title, Canciones de Mi Padre, from her aunt Luisa’s 1946 songbook.
Some white critics regarded Canciones as a radical departure for Ronstadt, seemingly unable to comprehend that she had Mexican roots. “I’d say it in interviews all the time—‘I’m Mexican’—and it was just ignored. Like, ‘You can’t be Mexican. You have a German surname and you’re white as a lily.’” Ronstadt had to explain yet again that Mexico was a melting pot. That one branch of her family tree had been in Mexico since the 1700s. That she didn’t speak Spanish because the pressure to assimilate had led her relatives to drop their native tongue. That she grew up in a place that used to be Mexico, and pretty recently too.
But never mind all that. Canciones was immediately certified double platinum. Planning the tour, Ronstadt again drew inspiration from Luisa and structured her show as a series of vignettes representing different regions in Mexico. Costumes were designed by Manuel Cuevas, the Mexico-born Rhinestone Rembrandt and former lead tailor for Nudie Cohn. Cuevas had made Johnny Cash’s black suits, Elvis’s gold lamé suit, the uniforms worn by the Beatles on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Dwight Yoakam’s bedazzled bolero jacket, and a long list of other iconic looks for Hank Williams, Gene Autry, Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, and just about everyone in between. For Ronstadt he designed ornate cowgirl jackets, long woolen calvary twill skirts, and custom-stitched boots. Nearly everything was embroidered using Swarovski crystals and shiny thread that, when twisted, caught the light onstage. “He has a jeweler’s eye,” Ronstadt says of Cuevas. “He just glittered like mad.”
Ticket sales were worrisome at first. “We would go to Dallas, say, and think, No one’s coming to this arena,” Ronstadt says. Then the place would be jam-packed with three generations. (The Canciones audience didn’t buy tickets in advance, it turned out.) Ronstadt was thrilled when people showed up with their grandmothers. “We went to the same venues where we played rock and roll, and we had a completely different audience. And they knew the songs. They knew where to yell and scream and where to stay out of your way.”
Downes gets up from a couch next to Ronstadt’s recliner and disappears into the kitchen. He returns with three glasses of homemade agua de tamarindo, one of her favorite drinks. Then we listen to some music. Or try to, at least. The bar is high when Ronstadt is in the room.
Downes puts on “Barrio Viejo,” Lalo Guerrero’s tribute to his old neighborhood in Tucson, a melancholy song about urban renewal and bulldozers and getting old. “Beautiful were the serenades at three o’clock in the morning,” Guerrero sings. Ronstadt sits quietly until it’s over. “The vocal is good, but it’s overwhelmed by the band,” she says at last.
Next we listen to a 2010 recording of Ronstadt singing “A la Orilla de un Palmar” with the Chieftains. Not her favorite vocal performance, it turns out. “This is when I knew I should never go into the studio again,” she says as Downes loads the CD. It sounds great to me. “It’s out of tune,” Ronstadt says. And alone I come and go, like the waves of the sea, she sings toward the end. “Pretty song,” she says. “I didn’t sing it well.”
There is a CD lying around that Ronstadt hasn’t heard yet. It’s an album of new Ronstadt duets made with old tracks—Ronstadt singing in Spanish alongside artists she never recorded with, produced after she sold her catalog. Downes puts on one of the duets, “Quiéreme Mucho.” Initially Ronstadt is singing alone. Then a male voice starts harmonizing with her. “The mix is bad,” Ronstadt says. “Why?!” Downes asks, now laughing. “’Cause it sucks!” she says. She listens a little more. “I can’t bear it.”
Downes turns it off.
“That sounds like it came out of a Cracker Jack box,” she adds.
Downes starts to play her original “Quiéreme Mucho,” the one off her 1992 album Frenesí. But it is an MP3, and that won’t do. “Don’t play that,” she says. “That sounds even worse.” Ronstadt can’t listen to MP3s. They’re too compressed. “You just get a very narrow range of dynamics.”
Ronstadt goes on to say that the problem with the new duet is that the vocals sound as if they are in the back. “They should be right there in your ear,” she says. “Just sitting on your ear, singing to you.”