|
Post by the Scribe on Jun 19, 2021 18:37:53 GMT
5 Things You Didn’t Know about Linda Ronstadt | Children | Daughter | Net Worth || TEEN STAR
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jul 18, 2021 7:19:59 GMT
Soulful 'Ronstadt' hits the right notes www.timesunion.com/living/article/Soulful-Ronstadt-hits-the-right-notes-14444228.php Joel Selvin , Hearst Newspapers Sep. 16, 2019 Updated: Sep. 16, 2019 4:38 p.m.
The career of singer Linda Ronstadt is given an affectionate appraisal in the documentary "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice." MUST CREDIT: Greenwich Entertainment
If a camera can be said to love a face, the microphone has always loved Linda Ronstadt's voice.
Her big, luminous voice turned songwriters' best songs into epics beyond their imaginations. Her relentless artistic drive led her far past the five consecutive platinum albums as a rock singer to daring choices like performing Gilbert and Sullivan on Broadway, recording an album of traditional Mexican folk songs, and singing pop standards with Sinatra's arranger, Nelson Riddle.
When she announced in 2013 that Parkinson's disease had robbed her of the ability to sing, even in the shower, a nation of music fans grieved the loss.
The irony of such a beautiful voice being stilled floats over the entire 90 minutes of the new documentary "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice," where none of the procession of associates and other commentators make the case for her greatness better than Ronstadt herself, captured in vintage clip after vintage clip, singing the hell out of everything she does.
Filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman lay out a dizzying cavalcade of incredible vocal performances, woven into a tapestry of her associates telling her story.
Ronstadt herself is captured in her full chatty, self-effacing candor in archival interviews, voiceover and a touching finale singing a Mexican folk song with her nephew and cousin.
After watching her belt, blast and harmonize with power and precision through wildly diverse styles of music like an Amazon heroine, to see her weakly struggle her way through this short piece is the kind of heart-string moment documentary filmmakers can only hope to catch.
Like Aretha Franklin, Linda Ronstadt was born to sing.
Epstein and Freidman skillfully trace the roots of her art in her family and early life in Tucson, Ariz. After moving to Hollywood to sing and hitting the charts with a stunning debut hit, "Different Drum," as lead vocalist of a folky trio, the Stone Poneys, Ronstadt quickly found herself stripped of the sidemen and marketed as a solo vocalist, a rock chick who posed for sexy album covers, but made deeply felt, richly musical albums.
Her association with producer Peter Asher brought the breakthrough 1974 album, "Heart Like a Wheel," and the hit record that established her, a cover of a 1963 R&B record by Betty Everett, "You're No Good." A blistering montage of Ronstadt scorching the song opens the film.
The cast of interview subjects testifies to the esteem in which her colleagues hold her; Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, record company presidents David Geffen and Joe Smith. Her personal life is touched upon, but it is her robust artistic life that is the documentary's true subject. Her friends reflect on her nagging self-doubts, unshakable insecurities and constant striving for perfection and Ronstadt chimes in: "I'm never really satisfied with what I do."
But a staggering onslaught of breathtaking vocal performances tumble through this film — Ronstadt singing the aching "Long, Long Time," the ebullient "When Will I Be Loved," the soulful "Blue Bayou." She nails the soprano part in "Pirates of Penzance," takes ownership of the Sinatra standard "What's New," and practically makes love to New Orleans R&B crooner Aaron Neville on "Don't Know Much."
For the film's final statement on the magnitude of Ronstadt's legacy, they go to the final credits with a clip from the induction ceremony for her entrance to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. It takes five women to stand in for Ronstadt — Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Nicks, Sheryl Crow and Carrie Underwood — and they still don't sound as good as Ronstadt.
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jul 30, 2021 14:00:29 GMT
Friday, October 11, 2019 'Linda Ronstadt' is fantabulous
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is an excellent concert on film from beginning to end, and the music is more than mere snippets of her songs. Many music docs often tease and frustrate fans with vastly shortened versions of the hits we know so well. www.imdb.com/title/tt10011448/?ref_=ttmi_ql
Not Linda.
Her big ones are all here: "You're No Good," "Different Drum," "Blue Bayou," among many, presented by archives and video.
Hearing them anew made me want to rush out and buy a couple of her albums which number more than 30. She has won 10 Grammys and received 26 Grammy nominations.
From Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
In the film, members of Linda's music family (her agents, producers, publicists, band members, boyfriends - wish Jerry Brown had consented to inclusion) are interviewed with the big stars who remain dear friends: Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris (who tears up at the end), Bonnie Raitt, Aaron Neville, to name a few.
Their conversations, thankfully, last more than a few seconds. "Teasers," not.
The interviewees expound on the goodness of Linda, her singing ability, her personality (which never seems to waver in the show from her childhood to present day).
Chats with the star of the show bookend the film and show her charm, intact sense of humor, and great looks.
Deterred by disease? Not.
Her last live concert was in 2009 before problems with her voice were diagnosed as Parkinson's disease in 2012, leaving her unable to sing. She is 73. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Ronstadt
"When Will I Be Loved" contradicts the embrace her fans, friends, and family extend to the woman with the sparkling, distinctive voice like none other.
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman directed.
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Aug 26, 2021 22:21:39 GMT
Outstanding Arts and Culture Documentarytheemmys.tv/news-42nd-nominations/
CNN Films CNN Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool PBS
Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado Netflix
POV PBS Our Time Machine
The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show Peacock
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Sept 11, 2021 22:17:09 GMT
An Exclusive Clip From 'Linda Ronstadt: The Sound Of My Voice' | Stereogum
Stereogum This clip from the new documentary 'Linda Ronstadt: The Sound Of My Voice' looks at the making of Ronstadt's #1 hit "You're No Good."
The movie opens Friday, Sept. 6. Get info and tickets here: www.lindaronstadtmovie.com/
Read Stereogum's The Number Ones column on "You're No Good": gum.to/TpqKAx
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Oct 12, 2021 10:03:34 GMT
The POP UP at OGT! - Coming Up Next (Week of Sept. 20th)archive.org/details/gbatvmd-The_POP_UP_at_OGT_-_Coming_Up_Next_Week_of_Sept._20th by GATe
Publication date 2019-09-20 Topics Maryland, Greenbelt, Greenbelt Access Television, Public Access TV, Community Media, PEG, Youtube, greenbelt, The POP UP at OGT, 2019 Language English Find out what's happening at the Pop Up at Old Greenbelt Theatre starting Friday, September 20th. This week: Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, storytime on screen, and a special announcement about the upcoming Downton Abbey film! Addeddate 2020-03-26 05:07:21 Duration 210 Identifier gbatvmd-The_POP_UP_at_OGT_-_Coming_Up_Next_Week_of_Sept._20th Run time 00:03:30 Scanner Internet Archive Python library 1.9.2 Series The POP UP at OGT Year 2019 Youtube-height 720 Youtube-id cuDCneZQkeM Youtube-n-entries 423 Youtube-playlist Uploads from Greenbelt Access Television Youtube-playlist-index 305
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Dec 18, 2021 19:47:12 GMT
National Review The Magnificent Linda Ronstadt news.yahoo.com/magnificent-linda-ronstadt-163345796.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall Kyle Smith September 5, 2019 In this article:
Linda Ronstadt American singer
At her concerts, Linda Ronstadt used to imagine that audience members were whispering to one another about what a terrible singer she was. She was an unusual rock star in several ways. Few others were as careful about keeping their distance from the insanity, and fewer turned away from arena adulation and the pop charts to do standards, operetta, and Mexican folk songs.
Ronstadt was the most spectacular female singer of the rock era, her voice a thing of astonishing clarity and power and color. Due respect is here, in the documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. What she did with a song like “Hurt So Bad” or “How Do I Make You” could blast you backwards into a reverse somersault, like a Peanuts character. Yet she was near her peak when she walked away from rock. Today she’s 73 and can’t sing, at least not in public: Parkinson’s.
Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, this restrained and respectful film tells the story the way Ronstadt evidently wants it told (no mention of famous boyfriends Jim Carrey or George Lucas, to whom she was engaged, and no mention that she never married). Ronstadt looks back on her upbringing just north of the border in Tucson, where her German-Mexican dad sang Spanish songs to her in a lovely baritone. As a kid, she thought Spanish was for singing and English was for speaking; at the time, Mexican-American kids were often discouraged from speaking Spanish. When a Tucson friend moved to L.A. when she was a teen, she joined up with him and another musician to form the Stone Poneys. A folky song they did in clubs, “Different Drum,” was reworked and heavily produced in the studios of Capitol Records to showcase her voice, and the single launched her career in 1967, when she was 21.
As she racked up platinum albums, Ronstadt never fully bought into the rock ethos. She hated the heels she was told to sing in, and kicked them off onstage. She couldn’t figure out what to wear, and settled on a Cub Scout outfit. Since she wasn’t a songwriter, some of the pressure was off her, but because she didn’t write the anthems of her generation, she never confused herself with a deity. All around her were people convinced that they were specially chosen, and they were all men. (Two of her backup musicians, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, got to like each other in the $12 motel rooms they stayed in while touring with her, and decided to form their own band.)
Seen in a 1977 interview in Malibu, Ronstadt offers an insightful tour d’horizon of the rock scene from a quizzical distance: “Rock and roll stars tend to end up isolating themselves more and more and more, thereby increasing their own feelings of alienation and anxiety,” she says. So they turn to drugs “and destroy themselves. It’s just very silly . . . they lose the ability to focus on themselves as a person, rather than as an image, and that’s very dangerous.” Yet everyone around them considers it their job to indulge every whim, which “weakens them as people and eventually it weakens them as musicians.” Five years after sharing these thoughts, she released her last rock album, Get Closer. “The nature of being a pop star,” she said, “is that you get these things that are successful and you have to sing them over and over and over again until they start sounding like your washing machine.”
By hiring Nelson Riddle to do lush orchestrations for What’s New (1983), her album of standards associated with the generation of Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney, Ronstadt would blaze a trail for other artists who ditched commercial formats to venture into different genres: The following year Robert Plant and Jimmy Page released the orchestral ballad “Sea of Love” under the name the Honeydrippers, and the year after that Sting turned from Police-work to jazz fusion. Ronstadt also starred on Broadway in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, then recorded the best-selling non-English-language album in U.S. history, Canciones de Mi Padre. All of this was very much against the advice of her handlers, and it took considerable will to ignore them.
Ronstadt is reticent about her private life, and the film doesn’t pry. She met her longtime boyfriend J. D. Souther when he stopped her at the folk-rock club The Troubadour and told her she should make him dinner. At her house she made him a peanut-butter sandwich, he says, and they moved in together the following day. Later she began dating Jerry Brown, then the governor of California, after being seated next to him at a Mexican restaurant in L.A. She doesn’t have much to say about him or anyone else she had relationships with.
The work is enough to fill a movie, though. Hers was a gutsy, label-defying career defined by a love of all kinds of music. She hasn’t sung publicly since 2009 and today she is disabled, beyond the reach of treatment. She rarely listens to her old records, but we still have them; my favorites are in this Spotify playlist. Her friend Emmylou Harris notes, “There’s just no one on the planet that ever had, or ever will have, a voice like Linda’s.”
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jan 20, 2022 12:05:09 GMT
"Linda Ronstadt: The Sound Of My Voice" discussion w/ director Jeffrey Friedman 13,926 viewsStreamed live on Aug 23, 2019
Paste Magazine 419K subscribers Director Jeffrey Friedman discusses the documentary with host Brad Wagner at Paste Studio NYC. Trailer, tickets and more at www.lindaronstadtmovie.com/
More sessions and interviews here: www.pastemagazine.com/studio
Audio: Bob Mallory Video: Brad WagnerThe Case for Linda Ronstadt Who’s the Queen? www.meer.com/en/61464-the-case-for-linda-ronstadt 7 MARCH 2020, NICOLAS OSTIS
Linda Ronstadt
Joni, Aretha, Janis, Etta, Barbra Stevie, Mavis, Bonnie, Dolly, Amy, Sade: Special voices all, supremely talented and unforgettable. Who’s the Queen? The incisive and thoroughly entertaining documentary Linda Ronstadt: Sound of My Voice, in my mind, begs the question: Is it this down-to-earth, focused Euro-Mexican from a small Arizona border town who wears the crown?
If you consider the dizzying, diverse path of her six-decade singing career and the unimpeachable successes she scored, then Yes. A resounding Yes. Barely 20, she charted with The Stone Poneys, her first band, with the song Different Drum. Future Eagles Don Henley, Glen Frey, Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon comprised her next touring band before she blessed them farewell and good fortune, not to mention having a big hit with their future touching ballad Desperado.
In the ensuing years she achieved the unprecedented (for a female vocalist) with four consecutive platinum-selling records and sold-out stadium world tours. Wedded to her personal vision, she hatched eclectic projects which her cash-conscious record label boss warned might derail her career. However, her hunch, her passion, her vision proved her right every time.
Whether it was portraying Mabel in "Pirates of Penzance" on Broadway, recording lush albums of "The Great American Songbook" with legendary conductor Nelson Riddle (who she had to confirm was alive), Trio, her celebrated collaboration with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton and the circle-completing Canciones De Mi Padre, a collection of the songs she grew up hearing her dad sing in her home - a stunning quartet of achievements - she shone. And, for the company, brought home the big dollars.
The documentary, more importantly, paints Ronstadt to be kind and generous, thoughtful and intelligent, humble and honest. Her comments and opinions on being a woman in rock ‘n roll, being uncompromising with career choices, being a partner with an equally famous personality, defying the South Africa performing embargo and the importance of family are revealing and refreshing.
Her response to questions about her relationship with California governor Jerry Brown, once a source of never-ending appeal to the media, reveal a strong, centered and confident woman, hardly the pushover or snowflake the interviewer seemed to be expecting.
The concert footage in the film - from her first bar dates in L.A. to concert halls, arenas and stadiums around the world, to recording studios and the Broadway stage - are often thrilling. There are so many moments in this film you tap your feet and want to get up and dance.
How in demand was Miss Ronstadt? Carson and Cavett hosted her, as did Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell on their shows. She was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine six times and Newsweek and Time once each, sometimes clashing with photographers over the image of how they wanted to portray her.
When you listen to the glowing accolades from her family, friends and contemporaries - some of them teary-eyed because she has had Parkinson’s for a decade - you feel their heartfelt awe for, not only her talent, but also her character. Don Henley, J.D. Souther, Jackson Browne, Karla Bonoff, Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, David Geffen, Joe Smith, Peter Asher and others deliver warm vignettes about their lives and times with her.
It’s not a controversial tell-all film with backbiting and regrets, but more a love-fest.
For half a century or more, Linda Ronstadt had a sterling, diverse career unlike any other. In a scene late in the film at her induction to the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame, Stevie Nicks, Sheryl Crow, Carrie Underwood, Bonnie Raitt, Emilylou Harris and Glenn Frey constitute a stellar vocal line-up to honor her in song. It is a serious goose bump moment.
Yet, who did she, with her powerful multi-octave voice, admire? Opera singer Maria Callas, of whom she said: “She’s the greatest chick singer ever.”
In the closing moments of the film, seated on her sofa in Arizona, she sings, however limited, with her nephew and another relative, one of those seminal Mexican songs from her youth. At its conclusion, she sighs: “I’m hungry.”
It was that hunger with her God-given vocal pipes that motivated her to flight, to exploration, to stratospheric success in every venture she invested her inimitable voice in.
Nicolas Ostis For the last 45 years or so, I have been traveling around the planet, growing as a citizen of the world and as an artist. I have devoted myself to travel, my motto: Keep smiling and talking to strangers. The rewards for my curiosity are never ending.
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jun 3, 2022 17:48:06 GMT
Linda Ronstadt on the sound of her life www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2019-09-04/linda-ronstadt-documentary-the-sound-of-her-life
Linda Ronstadt
BY AMY KAUFMANSENIOR ENTERTAINMENT WRITER SEPT. 5, 2019 7 AM PT
SAN FRANCISCO — Linda Ronstadt did not want a movie to be made about her life. She expressed that very clearly to any filmmaker who approached her, seeking permission to spotlight her music career. “I’m bored to delirium talking about the past,” she replied to one such email inquiry in 2015. “Surely, you can find more worthy subjects.”
The singer, now 73, frequently insists that she didn’t know how to sing for the first decade of her career — a period during which she released the hit singles “You’re No Good,” “Blue Bayou” and “Heat Wave.” All she hears in those songs is a young woman who “did everything wrong,” belting her way up the scale instead of switching into her head voice past B flat.
Mountain Goats
“I sounded like a goat,” she says.
So a documentary about her life, no doubt filled with concert footage of her 1970s bleating? Pass.
But Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman were persistent. After her initial rejection letter (see above) she eventually agreed to have lunch with the directors. She thought their emails had been especially literate, and she was a fan of Epstein’s “The Times of Harvey Milk,” which won the feature documentary Oscar in 1985.
Over lunch, she acquiesced. But there were stipulations. She did not want to participate in a sit-down interview. (“The self-consciousness of it! Me, me me,” she groans.) And she did not want the film to focus on her progressive supranuclear palsy, a variant of Parkinson’s disease that has robbed her of her singing voice since its diagnosis in 2013.
“I think she didn’t want it to be ‘Let’s feel sorry for Linda’ and make a movie about a poor creature,” says James Keach, who produced “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” which opens nationwide next weekend and will play on CNN in early 2020. “She doesn’t want to dwell on it. She says, ‘You know, I’m 73 years old. This is gravy.’”
Ronstadt, at home in San Francisco, was reluctant to participate in a new documentary about her life. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Though she revealed her illness to the public five years ago — shortly after she sang her last concert in 2009 — Ronstadt does not like the idea of being a “Parkinson’s person.” She jokes that she has to talk about her condition with those they meet, lest they think she’s drunk when she walks.
“There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s going to get worse every day. That’s the way it is,” she says. “I feel frustrated with it. It’s hard to brush my teeth now and lift up jars, and I drop things all the time. Sometimes I fall down. But that’s the new normal. I just have to accept it. I had a long turn at the trough.”
Ronstadt is mostly housebound, spending her days inside the Sea Cliff home she bought 10 years ago. Her 27-year-old son, Carlos, works at Apple and lives on the third floor.
She likes the cottage, which is so close to the ocean that she can hear the waves at night. She moved to the Bay Area in 2005 after decades in Southern California, bouncing among Laurel Canyon, Malibu and Brentwood. She had grown tired of the “L.A. conversation,” like talking about where she bought her shoes, and wanted to be able to see the San Francisco ballet and symphony orchestra regularly.
She can no longer go to those performances because she cannot sit upright in a theater seat. Instead, she spends most of her time on a cushy white chaise, reading or talking to her friends on the phone. From this vantage, she can enjoy the view of her garden, where her cat, Tucker, roams among the hydrangea bushes.
Ronstadt, who suffers from a variant of Parkinson’s disease, spends most of her time at home.(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
In her living room, she is also surrounded by a wall of bookshelves piled high with stacks of diverse reads: “War and Peace,” biographies of Neil Young and Dolly Parton, a Deepak Chopra self-help guide on DNA, rows of the Encyclopedia Britannica. An original drawing from 1937’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” rests on the fireplace mantel. Her knickknacks are confined to a small tin at the center of her coffee table that houses some eye drops, a flashlight, a bottle of Advil and an amethyst crystal.
There is a piano in the room, but otherwise no evidence of her musical life. She keeps the National Medal of Arts she received in 2016 from President Obama under her bed. And her 10 Grammys? Gone. She has no idea where they are. For a long time, her manager kept the trophies in his office, and then she moved them to a storage unit. Somewhere along the way, they vanished.
“Even if I had the space, I wouldn’t give it to the Grammys. I’d hang a nice painting,” she says. “I’m happy that I got them. But it’s just a thing.”
Friedman, one of the film’s directors, admits he was initially taken aback by Ronstadt’s aversion to attention.
“It’s surprising in many ways that a performer of her stature, who had such success, remained completely unspoiled by it,” he says. “I think it’s hard to understand today, when there’s so much emphasis on celebrity and it’s all about followers and friends and influencers.”
Ronstadt was reportedly one of the highest-paid musicians of the 1970s.(Greenwich Entertainment)
After he and Epstein screened the documentary for Ronstadt, she told them they’d done a “good job” and said she had “no notes.” But in the privacy of her home, she describes watching the documentary as “excruciating.” Noticing how anxious she looked in front of early crowds, she says she kept thinking to herself: “Give that girl a Valium. She’s a nervous wreck.”
She even finds it difficult to appreciate her fashion sense, which has since been copycatted by many a Free People-loving millennial.
“I was just a geek standing around in Levi shorts trying to get as close to the music as I could,” she says with a shrug. “There was plenty of pressure to look sexy, but there wasn’t pressure to be dressed and styled. I never wore makeup until I was about 25. I wore a little bit of eyeliner and some mascara. But face makeup and blush and shading and everything like that? I didn’t know how to do any of that. I didn’t own any of that stuff.”
She says modeled her style off of the waitresses at the Sunset Strip club the Troubadour, particularly that iconic Betsey Johnson minidress that she wore to all her big performances. She kept the purple striped dress in her purse, washing it in the sink at night until it became so short that she gave it away to Goodwill.
An early picture of Ronstadt as seen in the documentary “Linda Ronstadt: Sound of My Voice” by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.(Greenwich Entertainment)
But even now she maintains a bit of an edge. Although there are no more flowers pushed behind her ears, she has dyed her hair a barely noticeable shade of purple. She pushes some of her wispy bangs out of her eyes and tries to explain why she found watching the film so uncomfortable.
“It’s like your whole musical life goes by in a flash. It’s very disorienting,” she says. “I’m relieved that it isn’t something that made me look stupid. I do a good enough job of that myself.”
The movie is filled with glowing testimonials from her friends and collaborators, including Dolly Parton, Cameron Crowe, Bonnie Raitt and Peter Asher. She was most surprised that Ry Cooder — who is “like a God to all of us musicians” — agreed to be a talking head in the film because “he’s such a curmudgeon, bless his heart.”
Keach, who also produced this year’s “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” acknowledges it was far easier to find people willing to sing Ronstadt’s praises than Crosby’s. www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-david-crosby-remember-my-name-review-20190712-story.html
“Doing the Crosby doc, a lot of his contemporaries felt like the experience he put them through was very rough on their relationships, so ultimately those folks didn’t really want to talk about how they felt,” Keach says. “Whereas with Linda, anyone you wanted to remotely interview was, like, ‘Sign me up!’” www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-mn-david-crosby-documentary-20190711-story.html
Emmylou Harris, left, Ronstadt, Dolly Parton and Neil Portnow, chief executive of the Recording Academy, at an event this year.(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
That Ronstadt has maintained such goodwill in the music industry likely also has to do with the fact that she explored so many genres. Though she’s largely recognized as a pioneering female rock ’n’ roll star — she was often referred to as the highest-paid woman in rock, reportedly making $12 million in 1978 alone — she also found success as a Latin, country and opera singer.
Growing up in Tucson, she listened to a range of music: Her mother would sing Gilbert and Sullivan on the piano; her Mexican father played the music of his ancestors; her grandmother loved opera; and her sister was obsessed with Hank Williams. As a schoolgirl, she spent her days dreaming of rushing home and playing the records she’d stacked in order of preference.
“I never tried to do anything I hadn’t heard by the age of 10. I wouldn’t be able to do it authentically,” she says of her career choices. “It’s not a great idea, really, if you establish yourself singing one way and people like it and then you say I’m not going to sing anything like that now — not even in the same language. But it was interesting to me. The cliché about me is: She reinvented myself. I didn’t invent myself to start with. My parents invented me.”
Ronstadt’s childhood was formative, particularly because the Arizona community she was raised in was so close to the U.S.-Mexico border. Back then, she says, driving between the two countries was “as easy as driving to the [San Fernando] Valley — except it was easier, because there wasn’t so much traffic.”
“People came over all the time — we went to baptisms and birthday parties,” she recalls. “They were all customers of my dad, who had a big hardware business that sold pumps and farm equipment to the ranchers and farmers down there. It wasn’t hard to get across the border at all. It’s an outrage, what’s happening now. The Sonoran Desert, where I was born, goes on both sides of the border and there’s this damn fence through it now. But it doesn’t change the culture at all.”
Ronstadt — who has a red Trump-style hat that reads “Make America Mexico Again” in her entryway — feels a strong tie to her Mexican roots. She is a longtime supporter of a cultural arts program that teaches young people about traditional Mexican music and dance, and traveled to Mexico in March with Jackson Browne to support the group.
Bay Area students join dancers from Banámichi, Mexico, in traditional Mexican folk dancing MUSIC
Linda Ronstadt leads kids to the intersection of arts and understanding across the border March 8, 2019 www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-linda-ronstadt-los-cenzontles-mexico-music-dance-20190308-story.html
The singer, who famously dated former California Gov. Jerry Brown for years, has always been outspoken about her political beliefs. Her early views were shaped by the musicians she was fans of — Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary, who she watched sing on TV during the civil rights march. When she became a celebrity, she used her platform to speak out against issues like nuclear power plants.
“I figured if people were that unenlightened, they didn’t need to buy the record,” she says when asked if she worried that her opinions might affect her popularity. “But we weren’t as polarized then. It was straights against hippies. I think it’s important for [musicians] to speak up. I don’t think anybody should, but I’m very happy when they do. I’m glad Taylor Swift is speaking up. I understand [why she was initially hesitant to]. When I’m watching somebody’s music and I really like it, and they start talking about Trump — it would spoil their music for me. I think we have a duty to protect that sacred thing. But this is too desperate.”
Ronstadt, seen in 1980, dated former California Gov. Jerry Brown and was always interested in politics.(Jose Galvez / Los Angeles Times)
She gets her news from PBS and the BBC and subscribes to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. She relies on the New Yorker for new music recommendations, and if a review intrigues her, she’ll look up the artist on YouTube.
“That’s my total involvement with mainstream music,” she says with a laugh. “I listen to a lot of opera on YouTube, recently this Czech soprano named Edita Adlerová. ... I like most of the mainstream female vocalists. I like Sia. They’re all good — Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, they have plenty of talent and they can perform. And I like that little group called First Aid Kit.”
Ronstadt keeps in touch with many of her musical peers. Randy Newman and Paul Simon each paid her a visit recently. She loves having music in her home, often inviting her nephews to rehearse in her living room and singing along with them in her head. That’s what she misses most about not singing — harmonizing. “It’s like being able to see the city view through the eyes of an eagle,” she says.
Ronstadt and Smokey Robinson perform “Ooh Baby Baby” at the Forum in Inglewood in 1978.(George Rose)
If anything, that’s what she hopes people take away from the documentary — not to be afraid to sing, even if you’re not a professional.
“For me, there’s public music, private music and secret music. And secret music is what you do when you’re all by yourself, and everybody has it,” she says. “You should sing in the shower. You should sing in the car. You should sing at the dinner table.”
As for her self-criticism of her voice, Ronstadt insists she isn’t hard on herself — “just accurate.”
“I know there are some things I did that I’m pretty happy about,” she says. “I had a lot of formidable competition. Joni Mitchell and Carole King — I felt like the freshman class and they were the senior class. Fortunately, I’ve never felt that music is a competition, so it doesn’t matter if Joni Mitchell can sing better than I can, or Bonnie Raitt, who can sing rings around me anytime. I just did what I did and tried the best that I could.”
MOVIESMUSIC Newsletter The complete guide to home viewing
Get Screen Gab for weekly recommendations, analysis, interviews and irreverent discussion of the TV and streaming movies everyone’s talking about.
Enter email address Enter email address SIGN ME UP You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
Amy Kaufman Senior entertainment writer Amy Kaufman covers film, celebrity and pop culture at the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure.”
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Aug 30, 2022 0:56:02 GMT
PRESS PLAY WITH MADELEINE BRAND Linda Ronstadt, from arena rock to operetta and Mexican folk www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/post-thanksgiving-special-musical-icons/linda-ronstadt-from-arena-rock-to-operetta-and-mexican-folk Nov. 29, 2019 ENTERTAINMENT
15 minute interview: above link
Linda Ronstadt with a guitar in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice." Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.
Linda Ronstadt sang rock, folk, Mexican mariachi and operetta. She won 10 Grammys, and was the only female artist with five platinum-selling albums in a row. But she hasn’t sung in public for 10 years after losing her ability to sing because of Parkinson’s disease. A new documentary looks at her career. It's called “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice."
Linda Ronstadt in Mexican mariachi attire in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice." Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.
Credits Guests: Rob Epstein - director Jeffrey Friedman - director Host: Madeleine Brand Producers: Sarah Sweeney, Michell Eloy, Alexandra Sif Tryggvadottir, Rosalie Atkinson, Brian Hardzinski
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Sept 22, 2022 11:09:34 GMT
Interview: Directors of the Powerful Doc ‘Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice’ www.cinephiled.com/interview-directors-powerful-doc-linda-ronstadt-sound-voice/ by Danny Miller | Interviews, What's Hot
Since bursting onto the music scene in 1967, Linda Ronstadt has been an icon for more than half a century. Her extraordinary vocal range created iconic songs across rock, pop, country, folk ballads, American standards, classic Mexican music, and soul. As the most popular female recording artist of the 1970s, Ronstadt filled huge arenas and produced an astounding 11 Platinum albums. Ronstadt was the first artist to top the Pop, Country, and R&B charts at the same time. She won 10 Grammy Awards on 26 nominations and attained a level of stardom the Tucson native never could have imagined.
In Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, Ronstadt guides us through her early years of singing Mexican canciones with her family, her folk days with the Stone Poneys, and her reign as the Queen of Rock throughout the 70s and early 80s. She was a pioneer for women in the male-dominated music industry and a passionate advocate for human rights. Even more attention was heaped upon her when she had a long-term and high-profile romance with California Governor Jerry Brown. In recent years, her incredible voice has been lost to Parkinson’s disease, something she accepts with a dignity and grace that is inspiring, but her music and influence remain as timeless as ever. With incredible performance footage and heartwarming appearances by friends and collaborators such as Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, and Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice celebrates an artist whose desire to share the music she loved made generations of fans fall in love with her.
It was a thrill for me to sit down with the award-winning directors of this film, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Times of Harvey Milk, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, The Celluloid Closet) and producer James Keach (Walk the Line, Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, David Crosby: Remember My Name) to discuss this deeply moving and joyously entertaining film.
Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman
Danny Miller: Your previous documentaries are legendary. Did you feel this film was a natural progression from the kinds of things you were doing?
Jeffrey Friedman: I think so. This is ultimately a story about a woman’s empowerment, and that’s thematically not very far from other themes that we’ve taken on.
Did it take a while to earn Linda Ronstadt’s trust before she agreed to do the film?
Oh God, yes. It took about a year to convince her to let us do it!
Yeah, she doesn’t seem like someone who would necessarily be down for a film about herself.
Rob Epstein: Fortunately, she had just seen my film The Times of Harvey Milk and really liked it, so the timing of that was fortuitous. But as Jeffrey said, she was very reluctant and it took a long time to get her to come around. She basically told us that she thought we were deluded and that nobody would want to see the film and if they did, they’d be bored to tears.
Oh, Linda, Linda. That’s totally insane!
Jeffrey Friedman: But after a while, a couple of things conspired to change her mind. The people who were still working with her were rooting for us — her longtime assistant and good friend Janet Stark and her manager John Boylan were encouraging us behind the scenes to keep going. We told Linda that we wanted to use her wonderful book as source material but we wanted to amplify it by having an audience actually experience the music that’s only described in the book. She finally started to allow herself to imagine that.
Did she have any ground rules about what she didn’t want you to put in the film?
Rob Epstein: Linda is a very private person and she didn’t want us to get into her personal relationships which we totally understood.
With the exception of Jerry Brown?
Jeffrey Friedman: Yes, well, that’s in her book and anything she talked about in the book was fair game. Linda and Governor Brown are still friends.
Rob Epstein: We really just wanted to help make her musical journey come alive in the film. But she also said she wouldn’t be interviewed for the film.
Are you saying that all of her voiceovers in the film are taken from other interviews?
We did use dozens of different sources but in the end she finally agreed to sit down for an interview.
Jeffrey Friedman: But that one was only an audio interview, we didn’t film it.
And yet she does appear on camera at the end of the film, and it’s such a beautiful, poignant scene. Was it always the plan that we wouldn’t see her until the end?
Rob Epstein: It was always our intention to somehow bring it to the present tense. We were very frank with her about that, we told her that the audience would want to see her today. We talked about the possibility of having her come into a recording studio and read passages from her book but she thought that was just too artificial. And then all of a sudden, she had this trip planned to Mexico with her family and she invited us. But that happened way at the end.
Jeffrey Friedman: By that time we had interviewed so many people that she was very close to and they were like her spies telling her everything that happened — they all assured her that we were doing a very respectful portrait.
I found the entire film so incredibly moving. I could tell you that I cried at points but it’s more like tears were pouring down my face during every single song. I can’t even fully understand why it affected me so much. Something about the purity of her voice and the purity of her relationship to her music and the way she navigated through her superstardom without ever getting sucked into the negative aspects of that.
Rob Epstein: I think it was surprising to all of us how humble she is and self-deprecating. She never had much interest in being a celebrity and she managed to maintain her authentic personhood throughout all of the different iterations of her fame and career. She certainly never tried to create any persona around “Linda Ronstadt,” she was always just herself, the same person that she is to this day.
Jeffrey Friedman: Yeah, she’s very real, no bullshit. I think that’s part of what makes watching her sing so touching, because it’s really just her and the music coming through her. It was never about showmanship or flash and dazzle, just an authentic artistic expression. I think that’s why audiences have responded to her with such enthusiasm and emotion throughout her career.
James Keach
James Keach: But I’m not sure she was never “sucked into” the fame part, I think she was sucked into it many times. The difference was that she always pushed back. She would get pulled into things like those big arena concerts and then come realize that it wasn’t what she wanted to do. But I would speculate that your emotional reaction to the film might also be because those were better days for a lot of us in many ways. I feel like they were better days in my life, a lot more simple and fun! They were certainly the best days of my life in terms of music. I also tear up now when I hear Linda sing and some of the other performers from back then because it brings back that different part of my life even though so much time has gone by. I find it very touching.
Right. And yet Linda herself was going through a lot of insecurities at the time and trying to figure out what she wanted. I remember going to see her in The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway in the 1980s and wondering how they “let” one of the most famous singers in the country do that. I so admired her determination to branch out in areas that were hardly as lucrative as what she could’ve kept doing for the rest of her life.
Rob Epstein: There was an article I read about her from that time where she was speculating on whether she would ever be happy. The truth is she just wanted to sing. For her it wasn’t about being a huge rock star or the girlfriend of George Lucas or Jerry Brown, she just wanted to be in the living room with her friends singing. But she also knew there were dues she had to pay in order to be Linda Ronstadt.
I love all the interviews in the film. Was it challenging to get all of those amazing, busy people to be in the film?
Jeffrey Friedman: Well, Linda is very loved so it wasn’t that hard to get people to say yes. And James was a great producer along with his partner Michele Farinola, and they just never gave up until we got all the people we wanted.
I was especially glad to see Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton in the film, their collaborations with Linda were pure magic.
Did you consider trying to get Jerry Brown to appear in the film?
James Keach: I think he would have done it but Linda resisted, she didn’t want him to be interviewed even though they are very close friends today. She was a little nervous about all of the people we approached, to be honest, because she didn’t want them to feel obligated to do it and say nice things about her. She’s so humble she didn’t think anyone would be interested in a film about her life and career.
Jeffrey Friedman: She knows that there are young people who have never heard of her, which is kind of astonishing. That was one of the reasons we wanted to make the film, to make sure that her legacy wasn’t lost. But she’s not someone who lives in the past and just thinks about her own career. She listens to all types of music.
Rob Epstein: Yeah, she was just telling us the other day about some Korean pop group that she wanted us to check out, that’s what she’s interested in right now.
Was it hard to figure out how to navigate through the topic of her Parkinson’s disease?
Jeffrey Friedman: She definitely didn’t want to be seen only through that lens, but on the other hand, she’s been very upfront and open about her current condition.
I think the loss of her voice is one of the great tragedies of our lifetime. I felt the same way when Julie Andrews lost hers. Do you think it’s painful for Linda to listen to her own old songs from when her voice was so powerful?
Rob Epstein: No, I don’t think so, she does listen to herself when she needs to, certainly in the context of putting this film together. She has always been very careful about making sure that the sound was just right. One of her big concerns with the film was that somehow we might include a bad performance but honestly, we never found one in all of our research!
Getting to hear her sing at the end was so exquisite even though she says that wasn’t really singing. How did that come about?
James Keach: That was when we went with her to Mexico. We wanted to go to her grandfather’s hometown and at one point we were having lunch at this little mom and pop place on the way down there. Some of her family members started playing music for everybody. Jackson Browne was there and he started singing and then I could hear Linda humming and she started singing along with the rest of them. I was sitting next to her and I thought, wow, that’s really good and I said, “Linda, I thought you said you couldn’t sing, I think it sounds great!” The next day at lunch she said that when we interviewed her that night she would try it again but nobody else could be in the room in case she screwed up. So she did it, and talk about tears! Everyone was crying and we couldn’t believe she was doing it because she had stopped singing years ago. We all just choked up.
It is so inspiring to see how she is dealing with the challenges of her disease without a shred of self-pity. It’s really made me look at certain things in my own life in new ways.
Rob Epstein: She sees it as just a circumstance of her life and she’s adjusted accordingly. She’s still completely engaged with the world.
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is currently playing in various cities around the country.
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Nov 24, 2022 10:30:13 GMT
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jan 19, 2023 6:52:46 GMT
Writing by Yvonne Watterson ~ considering the lilies & lessons from the field ©
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of her Voice www.yvonnewatterson.com/the-sound-of-her-voice/
01 Wednesday Jan 2020
I never thought I would hear Linda Ronstadt sing again, but there she is on my television screen, singing a traditional Mexican cancione with a nephew and cousin. It is, she explains, a family thing that she doesn’t want them doing without her. She stops to find a note, they resume, and when the song finishes, she looks at the camera – right at me – and says, with a no-bullshit candor: www.ronstadt-linda.com/
This isn’t really singing. Believe me. It’s a few notes sketched in. But it’s not really singing.
And, I am in tears. I bet I’m not alone.
I’ve been cheated.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1Xns0DOVTy
On Monday, work will take me back to Tucson, Linda Ronstadt’s hometown. At some point, I’ll notice the Ronstadt Street sign, and I will think about her and her beautiful voice and her political statements, including a recent – and right on – jab at Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo at a reception celebrating her and the other 2019 Kennedy Center honorees. www.cbs.com/shows/kennedy_center_honors/
Reportedly, when he invoked one of her most famous songs to ask when he would be loved, she decided to answer him: ” I’d like to say to Mr. Pompeo, who wonders when he’ll be loved, it’s when he stops enabling Donald Trump.”
“They said it was rude for me to insert politics into the ceremony, but I think it’s rude to put little children in cages.”
It is.
Watching the documentary about her life, The Sound of my Voice, I am simultaneously rewinding the tapes in my head to find her on The Old Grey Whistle Test belting out “When Will I be Loved?” I am a teenager and bored, wishing I was in America, wishing I was just like Linda Ronstadt. She was my girl crush. www.cnn.com/shows/linda-ronstadt-cnn-film
She was everybody’s crush, and they are all here to testify. Dolly Parton. Emmylou Harris. Glenn Frey. Don Henley. Aaron Neville. JD Souther. Jackson Browne.
Like her, they know she can’t sing like that anymore, and – like her – they also know it is unlikely that anyone will ever sing like that again.
I first found out that she had Parkinson’s disease in an interview with AARP magazine, blog.aarp.org/2013/08/23/linda-ronstadt-discloses-her-battle-with-parkinsons-disease/
No one can sing with Parkinson’s disease. No matter how hard you try. www.mayoclinic.com/health/parkinsons-disease/DS00295
In her memoir, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir, Ronstadt writes that “people sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day.” This was why Linda Ronstadt sang. www.amazon.com/Simple-Dreams-A-Musical-Memoir/dp/1451668724
Past tense.
When Linda Ronstadt released the Prisoner in Disguise album I was 12 years old and living in Antrim, Northern Ireland. . By the time I moved out to go to college in Belfast, I knew by heart the lyrics of every song she covered. When that voice rang out from Downtown Radio, I sang along, deluding myself that I was within her range. She covered the best of everything – Motown, soul, country, folk, rock – and she exposed me to the musicians who would score the soundtrack of my life. I think I bought all Little Feat’s albums because she covered their songs, and I only liked the Eagles because they were her backing vocalists. The Eagles were her backing vocalists. And even though they worked for her, she lacked confidence in a way that will be familiar to many women: www.eaglesband.com/
I got tougher being on the road with the Eagles. I walked differently, I became more foulmouthed. I swore so much I sounded like a truck driver. But that’s the way it was. I was the only girl on the road so the boys always kind of took charge. They were working for me, and yet it always seemed like I was working for them.
Listening to her records, I would never have imagined the woman behind that glorious voice could know vulnerability or inadequacy. I should know better. Moving through the world to the beat of a different drum is not always easy. And, before the Silence Breakers were featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2017, helping galvanize the #MeToo movement, Linda Ronstadt had already spoken out, sharing the story of what happened when one of the producers on the Johnny Cash show called her to share notes about her performance. When he offered to come to her hotel room, she turned him down, but then she relented, believing he just loved her work and wanted to help her.
I should have followed my first instinct . . . because as soon as he entered my room and closed the door, he removed every stitch of clothing he was wearing.
When she threatened to call security, “he said no one would believe me because of the way I looked and dressed (jeans, long, straight hair, and no bra in the panty-girdle, big-hair South).”
No one would believe her. Of course no one would believe her. #MeToo
I loved everything I knew about her. Mostly her voice. As far as I was concerned, she was all-American, and I wanted to be an American girl. I imitated her accent (the way everyone not from America can sing in an American accent), singing along as she covered, with gusto, Neil Young’s Love is a Rose, Little Feat’s “Roll um Easy,” or – what would eventually become a kind of anthem for my own life, Different Drum. Linda Ronstadt was the reason for my big hoop earrings, the perm I didn’t need, the shirts tied at the waist, off the shoulder peasant blouses, and the occasional flower in my hair. I wanted to stride onstage in a mini-skirt with a tambourine and belt out Poor, Poor Pitiful Me, leaving the Eagles gobsmacked. Or maybe it would be Lowell George’s “Willin” on The Old Grey Whistle Test, the song that still plays in my head every time I see truck drivers pulling into the weigh station this side of the California border:
When I traded Northern Ireland for America and settled in Arizona, I remember feeling a tiny thrill that I had landed in the state where Linda Ronstadt lived, but I never got to see her perform. After suffering those early symptoms of Parkinson’s, she performed her final concert in 2009. Still, our paths almost crossed. And, it had nothing to do with music but everything to do with America. www.biography.com/people/linda-ronstadt-189146
On the morning of January 16, 2010, more than twenty thousand of us gathered in Phoenix to march from Falcon Park to Sheriff Joe Arpaio‘s Tent City. We were there, in peace, to raise our voices against the Maricopa County Sheriff Office’s immigration tactics, and the indiscriminate attacks and raids against undocumented immigrants living in Maricopa County. True to form, “America’s toughest sheriff” was unfazed and announced that, from inside his jail, officials would play Ronstadt’s music over the PA system to drown out our noise. maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.4277777778,-112.123888889&spn=0.01,0.01&q=33.4277777778,-112.123888889%20(Joe%20Arpaio)&t=h www.mcso.org/JailInformation/TentCity.aspx maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.5138888889,-112.475833333&spn=1.0,1.0&q=33.5138888889,-112.475833333%20(Maricopa%20County%2C%20Arizona)&t=h
People arrived from all over these United States, from as far away as New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. carrying signs bearing simple messages of humanity: “We are Human” “and “Stop the Hate.”
Leading us in that march, among others, was heroic United Farm Workers union leader and activist for the rights of farm workers and women, Dolores Huerta, who made an impassioned plea for the removal of officials like Sheriff Arpaio, and as she spoke to the growing yet quietening crowd, I noticed a group of students from Brophy Prep, a local Catholic boy’s school. Bent in prayer, in support of their immigrant peers, they lifted my heart. www.makers.com/dolores-huerta
And by her side, was Linda Ronstadt. She led us all the way to Tent City, urging everyone to be peaceful. And we were. peoplesworld.org/20-000-march-to-protest-anti-immigrant-sheriff/
I’m here because I’m an Arizonan. I was born in Arizona. My father was born in Arizona. My grandmother was born in Arizona. I love Arizona, and Sheriff Arpaio is bad for Arizona. He’s making Arizona look bad because he’s profiling and he’s applying the law in an uneven and unjust way, and that weakens the law for all of us.
More than a decade later, our immigration policies are still in shambles, and Ronstadt is still an ally for the most vulnerable immigrants among us, encouraging her fans to join her in supporting the work of No More Deaths – No Más Muertes an advocacy group committed to ending the deaths of undocumented immigrants crossing the desert near the USA-Mexico border. As temperatures soar above 100 degrees on the hottest days of the year, Ronstadt asks that we give generously to help provide food, water, and aid to migrants facing the most treacherous of desert conditions. An avid supporter of all humanitarian aid activists along the US-Mexico border and a member of Green Valley Samaritans, she knows and understands the brutal conditions of the desert and the plight of migrants who try to cross it. She also knows what America should do to help them. www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2019/06/17/linda-ronstadt-every-individual-has-right-give-humanitarian-aid-no-more-deaths-in-arizona/1480812001/ forms.nomoredeaths.org/en/ www.democraticunderground.com/100212194986
Earlier this year, she wrote:
I can think of no more compelling crisis than that now facing the borderlands and my view is this: Every individual has the right to receive and the right to give humanitarian aid, in order to prevent suffering and death – no matter what one’s legal status. To criminalize human kindness is a dangerous precedent.
Speaking truth to power – as she has always done.
Thank you, Linda Ronstadt. For all of it.
In peace, love, and solidarity – un abrazo fuerte.
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Mar 27, 2024 6:19:47 GMT
‘Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice’ Pays Tribute to Pioneering ’70s Songbird www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/linda-ronstadt-doc-movie-review-879987/ Documentary on the powerful, versatile vocalist may be a little impersonal — but as a reminder of Ronstadt's talent, it hits all the right notes
BY DAVID BROWNE
SEPTEMBER 6, 2019
Linda Ronstadt, the subject of the documentary 'Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice.' COURTESY OF GREENWICH ENTERTAINMENT
ONE OF THE many reminders of the often discounted greatness of Linda Ronstadt arrives about 30 minutes into Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. We see the biggest female rock star of the time (1976) in a studio with her band, filming what’s essentially an early music video. The song — Karla Bonoff’s sad-sack ballad of epic proportions, “Lose Again” — builds in gale-force winds with each verse and chorus. The band appears to be instrument-synching with the track, but Ronstadt, standing behind a microphone, is clearly singing it live. And by the time she reaches the last line — “I love you and lose again” — she ramps up the word love into a roar of throaty desperation, like a bubbling pressure cooker that suddenly erupts. Over four decades later, that vocal jolt still sends a shudder down one’s spine.
During her heyday, which spanned most of the Seventies and a bit into the following decade, moments like that were quintessential Ronstadt. Hardly a flashy performer despite her earthy, denim-Seventies-girl allure, she rarely talked or even moved much onstage, except to turn around and face a drummer during an instrumental break. A Ronstadt concert was all about her voice and the songs, which makes the subtitle of the first-ever doc on her all the more appropriate. Of contemporary acts who comingle pop, country and rock in a similar way, only Kacey Musgraves comes to mind when it comes to downplaying showmanship and focusing on, well, music.
For those who don’t know much about Ronstadt, which at this point likely means most the population under the age of 40, The Sound of My Voice will be a useful primer. She wasn’t the first female rock star — Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, among others, preceded her in the arenas and on the pop charts. The fact that Ronstadt didn’t write her own material (a no-no during the singer-songwriter era) was one of several marks against her back in the day; it also didn’t help that she was friends with the Eagles, whose records were always better than reviewers claimed but who were still hardly the most critically revered band of their era.
But before she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease six years ago, by which time she’d already lost her ability to sing, Ronstadt was arguably the biggest female pop solo star before Whitney Houston. The film trots out multiple magazine covers (including Time, which rarely hyped rock stars), footage of her Grammy wins and her rendition of the National Anthem at a 1977 World series game. Should you not be convinced, it then slips in clips of her performing her hits, from 1967’s chamber-pop sparkler “Different Drum” (with her first band the Stone Poneys) to her 1989 duet with Aaron Neville, “Don’t Know Much.” In each one, her voice is both tender, lusty, a giant musical teardrop that conveyed both broken-heart vulnerability and, thanks to her lung power, an undeniable sense that she could overcome anything in her way. Even if AutoTune had existed back then, she wouldn’t have needed it.
As Jackson Browne recalls in the movie, Ronstadt was, from the start, a “fully developed vocal stylist,” and although her rock covers could be a tad wooden (see: her tale on the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice”) , she tackled every song as if she had written it. Watching as she rips into Betty Everett’s “You’re No Good” or melts into Hank Williams’ “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love With You,” you forget that others attempted those songs before her. Like many of our finest interpretive singers, Ronstadt swallowed the songs whole and made them her own. And her approach in “Lose Again” — holding off on the firepower until the end, making it count all the more — was also something of a trademark, also utilized in her cover of Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou” and her country weeper classic, “Long Long Time.” Thankfully, melisma overkill was not in her vocabulary.
As a piece of filmmaking, The Sound of My Voice is perfectly functional and proficient, taking the standard bio-doc approach but never quite transcending it. Browne is one of many talking heads who testify to her importance and relay mostly harmless anecdotes; others include Don Henley, David Geffen, producer John Boylan, and songwriter and former lover JD Souther, whose memories are particularly insightful and wistful in light of her current health issues. Ronstadt herself is heard (but rarely seen) narrating parts of her life story. Given the discreet nature of her 2013 memoir Simple Dreams, it’s no surprise that her personal life is played down. The filmmakers clearly couldn’t avoid touching on her most high-profile relationship, with former California governor Jerry Brown, who, tellingly, was not interviewed in the movie. But other romances (with the likes of George Lucas and Jim Carrey) aren’t mentioned, nor are her adopted children. When the impact of the Seventies rock touring lifestyle comes up, Geffen mentions her use of diet pills; Ronstadt herself, however, doesn’t comment on that story or how it affected her. In some ways, she remains a mystery in her own documentary. But the film nonetheless makes its case that Ronstadt, who balanced sexy coquettishness with a tough, independent streak that helped her survive in the male rock world, was more than just a chart-hogging pop singer. During an era in which sexism was rampant, she had her own version of a squad, and used her success to bolster other women in the business. Longtime friend Emmylou Harris sounds nearly on the verge of tears as she recalls the way Ronstadt helped raise her profile in the years after Harris’ musical partner Gram Parsons died. Her musical sisterhood with the likes of Bonnie Raitt is apparent; she was also an unwavering champion of female songwriters who may have otherwise remained cult figures. Yes, Ronstadt deleted an especially bleak, near-suicidal verse from Kate McGarrigle’s “Heart Like a Wheel.” She also made it the title track of her breakthrough album.
In retrospect, Ronstadt’s move away from rock and into operetta, Sinatra-era standards and south-of-the-border pop in the Eighties (compete with role-playing costumes) was of a piece with her willfulness and love of musical adventure. But they also now seem like smart career moves in the best possible way. Mad Love, the 1980 album that gave her a shorter, punkier hairdo and friskier songs, injected some desperately needed oomph into her music after 1978’s waxy Living in the USA, where the formula she and producer Peter Asher had devised for her previous albums began wearing thin. Still, along with other L.A. rock types, she wasn’t born to pogo. And her shift away from mainstream rock saved her from the desperation that befell so many of her peers as they tried, mostly in vain, to fit in with MTV.
Ronstadt’s later music and life, starting in the Nineties, are barely mentioned in the doc, which is unfortunate, since it shortchanges other non-rock genres Ronstadt explored even as she gingerly returned to country rock. (Check out Adieu False Heart, her 2006 collaboration with French Cajun singer Ann Savoy.) It’s also too bad the film doesn’t chronicle the uproar she caused in 2004 when she called Michael Moore “a great American patriot” during a Las Vegas show. Dozens of concertgoers left, trashing her posters on the way out, and Ronstadt was ejected from the casino hotel. There were few better, non-musical examples of the way she didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of her decisions and just barreled along.
The Sound of My Voice ends with a very different voice, as we see Ronstadt, filmed this year, attempting to sing a Mexican folk song with a cousin and nephew. Parkinson’s has clearly weakened her, but she still watches her relatives attentively and opens her mouth to verbalize along with them as much as possible. “This isn’t really singing,” she says afterwards, with enough humility and glimmer of humor to make you tear up. Rock stars of her generation also known for their vocal firepower are grappling with how to roar while preserving their voices. Those closing scenes remind you that Ronstadt will never again come even remotely close hitting that “Lose Again” note. Rarely has a twist of fate seemed so cruel.
|
|