Post by the Scribe on Mar 22, 2020 12:07:47 GMT
RONSTADT FAMILY TIES
SUZY HORTON RONSTADT
I Remember Radio Ep: 5 - Suzy (Horton) Ronstadt
Suzy Ronstadt
ihearvoicessinging.com/SuzyPage.html
Suzy (Horton) Ronstadt grew up in Southern California and was in dance class from the time she was 3 years old until the present. As a child, she enjoyed singing and dancing in musicals and dance recitals. In her teens she got involved with San Bernardino Civic Light Opera and Melodyland Theatre in Anaheim, California where she performed in musicals including Music Man, Bells Are Ringing, Pajama Game, Guys & Dolls and Bye Bye Birdie with George Gobel.
She met songwriter, Jimmy Webb, in their senior year at Colton High School. Jimmy wrote a musical for their senior class and Suzy did the choreography.
In Junior College, Jimmy formed a girls group with Suzy and 3 other 5’4" blondes and called the group "The Contessas". People thought the four girls were quadruplets. They recorded a 45 record with two of Jimmy’s songs and moved to Hollywood to pursue a music career.
The Contessas performed on several Band Stand type TV shows - Shebang, Shivaree, Lloyd Thaxton and Ninth Street West. They were about to sign with Motown Records when the group broke up. (See "The Contessas" Shivaree performance on You Tube here: The Contessas.) Jimmy Webb went on to receive 7 Grammies by the time he was 21.
Suzy moved to Lake Tahoe and became a Moro-Landis dancer at Harrah’s for two years and spent one year on the road with the "Tickle Your Fancy Revue" before returning to Southern California to work with Jimmy Webb again.
After singing background vocals on two Jimmy Webb albums ("And So On" and "Words & Music") with Jimmy’s sister Suzan Webb, Suzy became inspired to write her own words & music. Her original song book continues to grow.
Bobby and Suzy Ronstadt
She moved to Tucson with Bobby Ronstadt in 1994, and began singing with Bobby and other local musicians and vocal groups including Four Way Traffic, Wild Angels, Michael Dues, Tom Cloney and Annie English at the Tucson Folk Festival, Fund Raisers, Memorials, and other venues in Tucson.
In 2012, Bobby Kimmel and Kathy Harris invited Bobby and Suzy Ronstadt to form a new vocal quartet, I Hear Voices! This collaboration has resulted in their debut CD in the Spring of 2013, and a wonderful new musical chapter of her life.
At almost every rehearsal someone says "I love this band!" and they all do.
ihearvoicessinging.com/index.html
Muse for Jimmy Webb’s ‘MacArthur Park’ treasures those days
Suzy Horton Ronstadt outside her home outside Tucson.(Randy Lewis / Los Angeles Times)
By RANDY LEWIS www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-xpm-2013-jul-20-la-et-ms-suzy-ronstadt-20130720-story.html
JULY 20, 2013 12 AM
TUCSON —Sitting on a swivel bar stool near the kitchen of her home outside Tucson, Suzy Horton Ronstadt listened to the familiar words of songwriter Jimmy Webb’s pop-rock classic “MacArthur Park.” Ronstadt smiled at first, then had to blink as her blue eyes welled up at the line “After all the loves of my life, you’ll still be the one.”
But unlike countless listeners who’ve shed a tear or two over the anguished romanticism of that sentiment since actor-singer Richard Harris took it to the top of the pop charts in 1968, Ronstadt has a special attachment to the song.
She’s the reason Webb wrote it.
Ronstadt — then Suzy Horton — was the flesh-and-blood muse Webb immortalized for “the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave on the ground around your knees” that she wore one afternoon while the couple ate lunch in L.A.'s MacArthur Park.
“I don’t know who gets worse killed by this stuff — you or me,” said her husband of nearly two decades, Bobby Ronstadt, dabbing away some tears of his own as he listened to the song one more time with his wife. “I asked her when we first got to know each other, ‘How could you not see what this guy’s got for you?’ And she’d answer, ‘Well, I liked his songs.’”
Even as a teenager Jimmy Webb had written many songs before and after his family moved from Oklahoma to Southern California in the early 1960s. But it was his romance with Horton, which bloomed when both were high school students in Colton, Calif., that resulted in many of Webb’s most important hits: not only “MacArthur Park” but also “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Where’s the Playground, Suzie,” “Didn’t We” and “The Worst That Could Happen,” among them.
Richard Harris - Macarthur Park - By Jimmy Webb
Glen Campbell - By The Time I Get To Phoenix
Suzy Ronstadt — who became a relative of Linda Ronstadt after marrying Linda’s cousin, Bobby, in 1993 — looks back on the on-again, off-again love affair with Webb during the 1960s and early 1970s with sweetness and humility for all the widely cherished music that came out of it.
She’s also happy to point out, “I’ve written several answer songs with my side of the story, and hope to make an album of my own someday” — songs that have never attained the widespread exposure of Webb’s contemporary pop classics.
She also holds the distinction of being the first singer to record any of Webb’s songs — well before he first hit the jackpot with “Up, Up and Away” for the Fifth Dimension in 1967. She and three friends from the San Bernardino Valley College Choir formed a female vocal group called the Contessas, and with Webb along for the ride, took their shot at being discovered by recording a single with two of her then-boyfriend’s songs, “This Is Where I Came In,” and “Keep on Keepin’ On.”
But Webb was more smitten with her at the time than she with him. “It was unrequited love,” said the woman who once held the title of Miss Colton — and who today sings in a pop-folk vocal quartet I Hear Voices!, which brings her back to Southern California for a performance Sunday at McCabe’s in Santa Monica.
After high school, she and a girlfriend landed jobs working for Aetna Life Insurance, which had an office adjacent to MacArthur Park. Webb, then a struggling songwriter who lived nearby in Silver Lake, would meet Horton for lunch there regularly.
Both longing for lives in show business, Webb scored a low-paying job for Jobete Publishing, an offshoot of Motown Records, while Horton became a dancer and moved to Lake Tahoe to work in the casino showrooms.
There she met and married her first husband, and when word reached Webb, one result was the song “The Worst That Could Happen,” the 1969 hit for the Brooklyn Bridge that begins, “Girl, I heard you’re getting married, heard you’re getting married…. maybe it’s the best thing for you, but it’s the worst that could happen — to me.”
That marriage was short-lived, and Horton returned to Los Angeles and reconnected with Webb, who had been riding high on hit after hit and traveling in rarefied circles and subsequently fell in love with Rosemarie Frankland, a model and actress who once held the title of Miss World.
Horton later wrote “Miss Small Town,” in which she sings “I was Miss Small Town, but she was Miss World,” about trying to compete for a man’s affections with someone she perceived as out of her league.
“Jimmy’s songs have followed me my whole life and we are still friends to this day,” said Ronstadt, her wavy golden blond hair flowing just past her shoulders. “Jimmy has a lovely wife and I have a wonderful husband. They have both had to deal with our histories. I mean no disrespect to anyone but I have to say, I have loved Jimmy for 50 years and I always will.”
She noted that Webb called her recently to help him reconstruct events during their time together for the autobiography he’s working on. The version of “MacArthur Park” she listened to was his own, from his forthcoming solo album “Still Within the Sound of My Voice,” in a new recording for which longtime Webb admirer Brian Wilson created vocal accompaniment.
Suzy and Bobby Ronstadt, a keyboardist and songwriter who also spent nearly two decades in Southern California fitfully pursuing a career in music, moved to the outskirts of Tucson in 1996 following the Northridge earthquake that literally and figuratively rattled them both. (Their first date, as it happens, was a Linda Ronstadt concert at the Universal Amphitheatre, on a tour in which she was featuring several songs written by Jimmy Webb.)
About 18 months ago, to land themselves a slot at the annual Tucson Folk Festival, they started I Hear Voices! with friends Bobby Kimmel, who was a member of the Stone Poneys band that launched Linda Ronstadt’s celebrated career, and singer Kathy Harris.
For the McCabe’s gig they’ll be singing originals and some choice cover songs on the bill they share with L.A. area singer-songwriter Tracy Newman. It’s something of a homecoming for Kimmel, who started the series of live performances at McCabe’s in the late ‘60s, a tradition that continues today.
So does the emotion Ronstadt experiences hearing Webb’s music, despite Ronstadt’s complete absence of the slightest hint of regret or rancor about the love affair that couldn’t survive.
“Everything we went through then,” said Ronstadt, who now works with her husband in a local hospice facility, “has just prepared us for the lives we live now.”
Listening to Webb’s new version of “Where’s the Playground, Suzie” with country singer-guitarist Keith Urban, Ronstadt smiles and proclaims, “That’s the best version I’ve ever heard.”
A moment later, she has no words for “MacArthur Park,” a song that appears destined to outlive them all. As Webb sings, “There will be another song for me, for I will sing it/There will another dream for me, someone will bring it,” Ronstadt pulls her hands to her heart, closes her eyes and smiles knowingly.
randy.lewis@latimes.com
Twitter: @randylewis2
--
I Hear Voices!
With Tracy Newman & the Reinforcements
When: 8 p.m. Sunday
Where: McCabe’s Guitar Shop, 3101 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica
Cost: $16
Information: (323) 828-4497 or www.mccabes.com
In The Stardust By Suzy Ronstadt for Jimmy Webb ORIGINAL Debbie Vicari
Debbie Vicari
276 subscribers
In The Stardust By Suzy Ronstadt for Jimmy Webb ORIGINAL Debbie Vicari
You know all the famous songs by Jimmy Webb? Where's the playground Suzy, Girl you're gettng married, By the time I get to Phoenix she'll be rising? The sappy ones and of course the ever popular Macarthur park? Well Suzy was MUCH of his inspiration. He wrote song after song with her in mind and if you met her you would understand why. She played a lot of them for me and then I knew who Jimmy Webb, the amazing songwriter was. Anyway, when I met Suzy she got her songs that she wrote 20 years back out of a file and asked me what I thought them. This song and a couple of others I thought were incredibly amazing and there are so many I have not heard. She told me she was too intimidated by Jimmy's talent to show them to him or others when they were together. (I happened to run into Lenny Waronker, one of the producers that produced a song of his, "Where's the Playground Suzy" and he said it's easy to see why she was intimidated with Jimmy's talent. Oh and he and Richard Perry, a wonderful person, friend and producer, really liked Suzy's song too by the way!). Either way,. the love Jimmy and Suzy wrote about was one that most of us have sung about without knowing who and what it was about and made man of us wish we loved like that, thanks to Jimmy's many famous songs. But Jimmy wasn't the only one writing and feeling that intensity. Suzy just kept it to herself. But I say no more.. this is my favorite song of hers and I can feel the longing when singing it. She is happily married to a wonderful man, Bobby Ronstadt, who btw does the background vocals on this and another of my songs (the other with suzy - great harmoney team!) In fact I believe they are all friends. But nobody forgets a love that makes you feel like this.. When you listen keep the story in mind. Love to hear what you think. I'll have a well produced version in the near future but for now.. I just thought it shoud be shared. Time for Jimmy to hear a song about him for a change
In a good way of course. Feelings once felt like this should not be kept back. I sure hope I find someone I long for this intensely. Maybe I will get lucky. Thanks for reading and listening.
#129: Lovely Linda
Posted on July 12, 2013 by stolf
relatedhowagain.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/129-lovely-linda/
129.7 Dear Stolf: On an oldies station I listen to, a DJ said Jimmy Webb wrote “MacArthur Park” about his girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt’s cousin. Is this true? …Wichita Linebacker, Topanga Canyon
129.8 Dear WL: In a word, no…with an explanation. Mind you, once I give you the explanation, the answer is still no, but at least you’ll know why you sometimes hear what you heard. Jimmy Webb was born and raised in Oklahoma…his family moved to the Los Angeles area when he was a teenager. He graduated from Colton, CA High School class of 1965…oddly enough, one year after Jim Messina. But while still in high school, he met and fell head over heels for an aspiring singer, a classmate named Suzy Horton.
129.9 That summer, he helped her and three friends form a singing group called the Contessas. They recorded an album on Motown, with songs written by you-know-who, and appeared on several TV shows, including Shivaree (see it here.) Suzy’s day job was with an insurance agency, and she would meet Jimmy for lunch in MacArthur Park in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. She also inspired “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Where’s the Playground Suzie,” and probably others. But the group’s career fizzled, as did the budding romance…and the Contessas soon went their separate ways. Suzy Horton continued working as a singer and dancer, and is still active in the music business today.
129.10 In the early 1990s she met and married Bobby Ronstadt, Linda’s 1st cousin, son of Linda’s father Gilbert’s younger brother Edward. Today she is indeed known as Suzy Ronstadt, but her relation to Linda is cousin-in-law at best, and at any rate, she was decades away from being a Ronstadt when she knew Jimmy. Informally, your cousin’s wife can be your cousin…just as your father’s uncle can be your uncle, as we saw last week with Anna Boiardi…but not really…sorry.
129.11 Now in Chart 449, I’ve included far more Ronstadt relatives than are relevant to the case at hand, but once you get going, its kind of hard to stop, you know? And as long as your tree is intelligible, feel free try different things, as I have here. I generally color males blue and females red, but here I have grouped siblings together as gray. Also, with Gilbert’s uncles and aunts, I positioned their spouses and their children horizontally rather than vertically, as space required…I did want to include that Grampa Frederick and his brother Pepe married sisters.
Posted on July 12, 2013 by stolf
relatedhowagain.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/129-lovely-linda/
129.7 Dear Stolf: On an oldies station I listen to, a DJ said Jimmy Webb wrote “MacArthur Park” about his girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt’s cousin. Is this true? …Wichita Linebacker, Topanga Canyon
129.8 Dear WL: In a word, no…with an explanation. Mind you, once I give you the explanation, the answer is still no, but at least you’ll know why you sometimes hear what you heard. Jimmy Webb was born and raised in Oklahoma…his family moved to the Los Angeles area when he was a teenager. He graduated from Colton, CA High School class of 1965…oddly enough, one year after Jim Messina. But while still in high school, he met and fell head over heels for an aspiring singer, a classmate named Suzy Horton.
129.9 That summer, he helped her and three friends form a singing group called the Contessas. They recorded an album on Motown, with songs written by you-know-who, and appeared on several TV shows, including Shivaree (see it here.) Suzy’s day job was with an insurance agency, and she would meet Jimmy for lunch in MacArthur Park in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. She also inspired “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Where’s the Playground Suzie,” and probably others. But the group’s career fizzled, as did the budding romance…and the Contessas soon went their separate ways. Suzy Horton continued working as a singer and dancer, and is still active in the music business today.
129.10 In the early 1990s she met and married Bobby Ronstadt, Linda’s 1st cousin, son of Linda’s father Gilbert’s younger brother Edward. Today she is indeed known as Suzy Ronstadt, but her relation to Linda is cousin-in-law at best, and at any rate, she was decades away from being a Ronstadt when she knew Jimmy. Informally, your cousin’s wife can be your cousin…just as your father’s uncle can be your uncle, as we saw last week with Anna Boiardi…but not really…sorry.
129.11 Now in Chart 449, I’ve included far more Ronstadt relatives than are relevant to the case at hand, but once you get going, its kind of hard to stop, you know? And as long as your tree is intelligible, feel free try different things, as I have here. I generally color males blue and females red, but here I have grouped siblings together as gray. Also, with Gilbert’s uncles and aunts, I positioned their spouses and their children horizontally rather than vertically, as space required…I did want to include that Grampa Frederick and his brother Pepe married sisters.
SUZY HORTON RONSTADT
I Remember Radio Ep: 5 - Suzy (Horton) Ronstadt
Suzy Ronstadt
ihearvoicessinging.com/SuzyPage.html
Suzy (Horton) Ronstadt grew up in Southern California and was in dance class from the time she was 3 years old until the present. As a child, she enjoyed singing and dancing in musicals and dance recitals. In her teens she got involved with San Bernardino Civic Light Opera and Melodyland Theatre in Anaheim, California where she performed in musicals including Music Man, Bells Are Ringing, Pajama Game, Guys & Dolls and Bye Bye Birdie with George Gobel.
She met songwriter, Jimmy Webb, in their senior year at Colton High School. Jimmy wrote a musical for their senior class and Suzy did the choreography.
In Junior College, Jimmy formed a girls group with Suzy and 3 other 5’4" blondes and called the group "The Contessas". People thought the four girls were quadruplets. They recorded a 45 record with two of Jimmy’s songs and moved to Hollywood to pursue a music career.
The Contessas performed on several Band Stand type TV shows - Shebang, Shivaree, Lloyd Thaxton and Ninth Street West. They were about to sign with Motown Records when the group broke up. (See "The Contessas" Shivaree performance on You Tube here: The Contessas.) Jimmy Webb went on to receive 7 Grammies by the time he was 21.
Suzy moved to Lake Tahoe and became a Moro-Landis dancer at Harrah’s for two years and spent one year on the road with the "Tickle Your Fancy Revue" before returning to Southern California to work with Jimmy Webb again.
After singing background vocals on two Jimmy Webb albums ("And So On" and "Words & Music") with Jimmy’s sister Suzan Webb, Suzy became inspired to write her own words & music. Her original song book continues to grow.
Bobby and Suzy Ronstadt
She moved to Tucson with Bobby Ronstadt in 1994, and began singing with Bobby and other local musicians and vocal groups including Four Way Traffic, Wild Angels, Michael Dues, Tom Cloney and Annie English at the Tucson Folk Festival, Fund Raisers, Memorials, and other venues in Tucson.
In 2012, Bobby Kimmel and Kathy Harris invited Bobby and Suzy Ronstadt to form a new vocal quartet, I Hear Voices! This collaboration has resulted in their debut CD in the Spring of 2013, and a wonderful new musical chapter of her life.
At almost every rehearsal someone says "I love this band!" and they all do.
ihearvoicessinging.com/index.html
Muse for Jimmy Webb’s ‘MacArthur Park’ treasures those days
Suzy Horton Ronstadt outside her home outside Tucson.(Randy Lewis / Los Angeles Times)
By RANDY LEWIS www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-xpm-2013-jul-20-la-et-ms-suzy-ronstadt-20130720-story.html
JULY 20, 2013 12 AM
TUCSON —Sitting on a swivel bar stool near the kitchen of her home outside Tucson, Suzy Horton Ronstadt listened to the familiar words of songwriter Jimmy Webb’s pop-rock classic “MacArthur Park.” Ronstadt smiled at first, then had to blink as her blue eyes welled up at the line “After all the loves of my life, you’ll still be the one.”
But unlike countless listeners who’ve shed a tear or two over the anguished romanticism of that sentiment since actor-singer Richard Harris took it to the top of the pop charts in 1968, Ronstadt has a special attachment to the song.
She’s the reason Webb wrote it.
Ronstadt — then Suzy Horton — was the flesh-and-blood muse Webb immortalized for “the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave on the ground around your knees” that she wore one afternoon while the couple ate lunch in L.A.'s MacArthur Park.
“I don’t know who gets worse killed by this stuff — you or me,” said her husband of nearly two decades, Bobby Ronstadt, dabbing away some tears of his own as he listened to the song one more time with his wife. “I asked her when we first got to know each other, ‘How could you not see what this guy’s got for you?’ And she’d answer, ‘Well, I liked his songs.’”
Even as a teenager Jimmy Webb had written many songs before and after his family moved from Oklahoma to Southern California in the early 1960s. But it was his romance with Horton, which bloomed when both were high school students in Colton, Calif., that resulted in many of Webb’s most important hits: not only “MacArthur Park” but also “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Where’s the Playground, Suzie,” “Didn’t We” and “The Worst That Could Happen,” among them.
Richard Harris - Macarthur Park - By Jimmy Webb
Glen Campbell - By The Time I Get To Phoenix
Suzy Ronstadt — who became a relative of Linda Ronstadt after marrying Linda’s cousin, Bobby, in 1993 — looks back on the on-again, off-again love affair with Webb during the 1960s and early 1970s with sweetness and humility for all the widely cherished music that came out of it.
She’s also happy to point out, “I’ve written several answer songs with my side of the story, and hope to make an album of my own someday” — songs that have never attained the widespread exposure of Webb’s contemporary pop classics.
She also holds the distinction of being the first singer to record any of Webb’s songs — well before he first hit the jackpot with “Up, Up and Away” for the Fifth Dimension in 1967. She and three friends from the San Bernardino Valley College Choir formed a female vocal group called the Contessas, and with Webb along for the ride, took their shot at being discovered by recording a single with two of her then-boyfriend’s songs, “This Is Where I Came In,” and “Keep on Keepin’ On.”
But Webb was more smitten with her at the time than she with him. “It was unrequited love,” said the woman who once held the title of Miss Colton — and who today sings in a pop-folk vocal quartet I Hear Voices!, which brings her back to Southern California for a performance Sunday at McCabe’s in Santa Monica.
After high school, she and a girlfriend landed jobs working for Aetna Life Insurance, which had an office adjacent to MacArthur Park. Webb, then a struggling songwriter who lived nearby in Silver Lake, would meet Horton for lunch there regularly.
Both longing for lives in show business, Webb scored a low-paying job for Jobete Publishing, an offshoot of Motown Records, while Horton became a dancer and moved to Lake Tahoe to work in the casino showrooms.
There she met and married her first husband, and when word reached Webb, one result was the song “The Worst That Could Happen,” the 1969 hit for the Brooklyn Bridge that begins, “Girl, I heard you’re getting married, heard you’re getting married…. maybe it’s the best thing for you, but it’s the worst that could happen — to me.”
That marriage was short-lived, and Horton returned to Los Angeles and reconnected with Webb, who had been riding high on hit after hit and traveling in rarefied circles and subsequently fell in love with Rosemarie Frankland, a model and actress who once held the title of Miss World.
Horton later wrote “Miss Small Town,” in which she sings “I was Miss Small Town, but she was Miss World,” about trying to compete for a man’s affections with someone she perceived as out of her league.
“Jimmy’s songs have followed me my whole life and we are still friends to this day,” said Ronstadt, her wavy golden blond hair flowing just past her shoulders. “Jimmy has a lovely wife and I have a wonderful husband. They have both had to deal with our histories. I mean no disrespect to anyone but I have to say, I have loved Jimmy for 50 years and I always will.”
She noted that Webb called her recently to help him reconstruct events during their time together for the autobiography he’s working on. The version of “MacArthur Park” she listened to was his own, from his forthcoming solo album “Still Within the Sound of My Voice,” in a new recording for which longtime Webb admirer Brian Wilson created vocal accompaniment.
Suzy and Bobby Ronstadt, a keyboardist and songwriter who also spent nearly two decades in Southern California fitfully pursuing a career in music, moved to the outskirts of Tucson in 1996 following the Northridge earthquake that literally and figuratively rattled them both. (Their first date, as it happens, was a Linda Ronstadt concert at the Universal Amphitheatre, on a tour in which she was featuring several songs written by Jimmy Webb.)
About 18 months ago, to land themselves a slot at the annual Tucson Folk Festival, they started I Hear Voices! with friends Bobby Kimmel, who was a member of the Stone Poneys band that launched Linda Ronstadt’s celebrated career, and singer Kathy Harris.
For the McCabe’s gig they’ll be singing originals and some choice cover songs on the bill they share with L.A. area singer-songwriter Tracy Newman. It’s something of a homecoming for Kimmel, who started the series of live performances at McCabe’s in the late ‘60s, a tradition that continues today.
So does the emotion Ronstadt experiences hearing Webb’s music, despite Ronstadt’s complete absence of the slightest hint of regret or rancor about the love affair that couldn’t survive.
“Everything we went through then,” said Ronstadt, who now works with her husband in a local hospice facility, “has just prepared us for the lives we live now.”
Listening to Webb’s new version of “Where’s the Playground, Suzie” with country singer-guitarist Keith Urban, Ronstadt smiles and proclaims, “That’s the best version I’ve ever heard.”
A moment later, she has no words for “MacArthur Park,” a song that appears destined to outlive them all. As Webb sings, “There will be another song for me, for I will sing it/There will another dream for me, someone will bring it,” Ronstadt pulls her hands to her heart, closes her eyes and smiles knowingly.
randy.lewis@latimes.com
Twitter: @randylewis2
--
I Hear Voices!
With Tracy Newman & the Reinforcements
When: 8 p.m. Sunday
Where: McCabe’s Guitar Shop, 3101 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica
Cost: $16
Information: (323) 828-4497 or www.mccabes.com
In The Stardust By Suzy Ronstadt for Jimmy Webb ORIGINAL Debbie Vicari
Debbie Vicari
276 subscribers
In The Stardust By Suzy Ronstadt for Jimmy Webb ORIGINAL Debbie Vicari
You know all the famous songs by Jimmy Webb? Where's the playground Suzy, Girl you're gettng married, By the time I get to Phoenix she'll be rising? The sappy ones and of course the ever popular Macarthur park? Well Suzy was MUCH of his inspiration. He wrote song after song with her in mind and if you met her you would understand why. She played a lot of them for me and then I knew who Jimmy Webb, the amazing songwriter was. Anyway, when I met Suzy she got her songs that she wrote 20 years back out of a file and asked me what I thought them. This song and a couple of others I thought were incredibly amazing and there are so many I have not heard. She told me she was too intimidated by Jimmy's talent to show them to him or others when they were together. (I happened to run into Lenny Waronker, one of the producers that produced a song of his, "Where's the Playground Suzy" and he said it's easy to see why she was intimidated with Jimmy's talent. Oh and he and Richard Perry, a wonderful person, friend and producer, really liked Suzy's song too by the way!). Either way,. the love Jimmy and Suzy wrote about was one that most of us have sung about without knowing who and what it was about and made man of us wish we loved like that, thanks to Jimmy's many famous songs. But Jimmy wasn't the only one writing and feeling that intensity. Suzy just kept it to herself. But I say no more.. this is my favorite song of hers and I can feel the longing when singing it. She is happily married to a wonderful man, Bobby Ronstadt, who btw does the background vocals on this and another of my songs (the other with suzy - great harmoney team!) In fact I believe they are all friends. But nobody forgets a love that makes you feel like this.. When you listen keep the story in mind. Love to hear what you think. I'll have a well produced version in the near future but for now.. I just thought it shoud be shared. Time for Jimmy to hear a song about him for a change
In a good way of course. Feelings once felt like this should not be kept back. I sure hope I find someone I long for this intensely. Maybe I will get lucky. Thanks for reading and listening.
